My Wedding Was Cancelled—So Instead I Painted My Entire House
Part of my grand plans for a May, 2020 wedding included repainting my home’s stucco exterior from a 1990s tan to a timeless off-white, a look I felt would set a more appropriate tone for a midcentury home in Los Angeles (and re-coloring doors and beams to match). Despite the pandemic trend of moving nuptials from event venues to backyards, it had always been our plan to gather 85 friends and family in our home’s yard for our wedding.
At the outset, I expected to tap a professional to complete the job, while I focused on finalizing seating arrangements and table settings and decided whether or not to splurge on an acrylic dance floor covering the pool. But when bids began running as high as $35k alongside an already-ballooning wedding budget, my husband and I agreed to revisit painting at a later time. And then less than a month later, when the shutdown happened and our postponement went from June to ‘date unknown,’ we hit pause on everything.
Determined to make the most of it, we booked a drivable destination-elopement and began exploring the possibility of DIY exterior painting. After a few mood boards and a timely spray gun deal at Home Depot, my now-husband and I dove in. The process became a sort of stand-in for wedding planning: Instead of working with our caterer to select the cutest midnight snacks to be passed out to party-goers on the dance floor, we worked with the team behind the Behr counter to find the most amateur-friendly paint tools for our new plan.
We selected Behr’s Stucco Tan for the walls, Gladiator Gray for the French doors, and Potting Soil for fascia boards and wood detail, all in Behr’s Marquee Exterior in a flat finish. My husband, who majored in industrial design and spent a fair amount of his time in college spray painting models, mastered the spray gun—after a few false starts. I would back-roll alongside him.
We tried to be as by-the-book as the digital, DIY resources told us: Power-wash everything (using an inexpensive power washer as from Home Depot), then patiently tape and tarp. We moved wall by wall, starting with the least visible side of our house so that we could learn the paint-sprayer-ropes somewhere less impactful. Side one was surprisingly uneventful.
The backyard was where the challenge began: All in all, it took about three weeks—including one weekend off to elope—to paint four distinct walls, nine sets of French doors and a 12-foot tall overhang. A time and sanity-saving blog post detailing the magic of Liquid Masking Tape (during painting, we just called it the ‘gloop’) to prep French doors might have been the only reason we did not abandon ship.
Next was the front of the house, the most physical part of the project, which included learning how to use the paint sprayer and extender while balancing on a 10-foot ladder. Painting the nooks and crannies of the fascia board required one of us to lay flat on top of the tiled roof, hanging a paintbrush-wielding arm over the edge, and paint blind while the other person dictated where—quite the newlywed exercise in trust.
The fourth side was easy once we were five weeks in. Encouraged by this, my husband wanted to take on the bonus project of stripping and staining every single exterior wood beam (12 in the backyard and a 20-foot mega-beam in the front), a job that was once a $15k line-item on one of our bids. Instead, it cost us about 40 trips to Home Depot and a lot of trial and error. Over the course of three, sweaty summer weeks of wood working, we revealed beautiful wooden beams from underneath decades of tan shellack.
After eight weeks of work, the house turned out better than we could have expected. We spent less than $5k total on materials, made probably 5,000 trips to Home Depot, and got up close and personal with the house in ways I never expected. On the day of our original wedding date in May, we got up early and started painting, then opened a bottle of Champagne in the late morning and kept going.
We eloped in June, just the two of us with a friend to officiate and another to take pictures, and returned home to a half-painted backyard. This was the first time we’d worked together on a project of this magnitude. Starting it during the challenges of postponing and finishing it two weeks after we married made it feel like we built ourselves the most special of wedding gifts for one another.
And no, I still haven’t given up on the idea of having a big bash when it’s appropriate—especially now that the house is ready for its big night.
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