Stuck in a Swirl

We are stuck in a planning rut in the world of color. Being a graphic designer, color is a focus for me on a day-to-day-basis. You'd think this would make it easier to choose color for a house, but I think it is harder because I see every flaw in my choices. My friend and interior designer Margaret Fisher and I had an initial discussion on color. We agreed on cool tones of grays on the exterior (seconded by Josh the architect), and a decorator's white on the interior (to Margaret's point, the clean white will let our art shine and not be overtaken by heavy colored walls). But somehow the world of grays and whites is proving to be hard to navigate through. We have nothing to show but some bad tests on the side of the house — so back to color square 1 we go...

Sunday consisted of deciding on a roof color. See aforementioned note on struggling with the house color, of course of which is in direct relation to the roof. I would have just taken my time with this except we have the new exposed hip roof construction in the front, it's scheduled to rain tomorrow, and my Dad is starting to yell at us to get moving. So Mike asked our roofers to send us the addresses of roofs in the area that were in the colors we were considering.

Skip to us driving around for 2 hours stalking people's roofs with our paint chips in hand...

We were horrified to see this second house's people in their yard, but they were very friendly. Considering we'd driven 20 miles to get there, we just had to come clean instead of pretending we were just circling around the block.

The story ends with us going with roof #2 - "Pewter".... hard to see from my crappy drive-by photos but it's basically a charcoal gray. Let me say this is a far second visually from the cool metal roof we were hoping for, but just didn't fit in the budget - um, at all :)

What did, however, were the speakers Mike ordered through his job at a deep discount. It will be fun to have them throughout the house and outside. Since our house is still a wrecking site, the speaker boxes are currently being used by our cat Engine as a playground (i.e. bed) in the temporary apartment we are "waiting" in.

Oh and we did figure out what front door we'd like to do, see below. Unfortunately this one is custom made in Europe. Currently working on a local manufacturer to give us the same idea — not only for less, but less of a pain to get!

Really quick and bad Photoshop job on what the door would look like on the house.
Currently considering more of a walnut finish, but very open to change...

If anyone knows of someone we should talk that makes doors, let me know!