Choosing the perfect house color (update)

We've lived in our house for nearly 4 1/2 years and one of the many great things about our HOA is that they paint the houses every five on a rotating schedule. So we bought the house, despite not being crazy about the color, knowing that we could change it when the time came (without having to pay to do it ourselves, which we are much too practical to even consider). We didn't realize the house had just been painted when we bought it, so we've patiently waited and the time is finally here. Yay!

One of the not so lovely things about our HOA is that they dictate the colors that you have to choose from to paint your house. Weird, right? But given the options, we figured we could come up with something.

Our subdivision is comprised of single family and town homes all in what I've discovered is a "mountain style," like this... (NB: this is not our house)



Cedar siding with brick accents and natural/neutral colors. Since my go-to style is cape cottage, this was not a natural fit for me, but I bit the bullet since the layout, location, etc. was what we wanted. One of my main criteria was no vinyl siding, which may sound strange, but I have a sort of allergy (design wise, of course) to it, so that ruled out most of the houses in the areas we were considering given when they were developed. Any who, back to colors.

Our house is currently "beige gray" (Ben Moore solid siding stain, all color representations from here)



With trim in "cocoa"


And when we replaced our old brown leaky aluminum (ick!) windows a few years back with Pella's Impervia fiberglass super energy efficient ones, we got them in brown.



We spent a lot of time thinking about this, since we knew we wanted to change the house color as soon as we could, but after we discovered the brown sliding glass doors on the front of the house (yes, you heard that right) were of a non-std. size (of course), they would have cost a fortune to replace. So we just upgraded the glass and went with brown windows so that everything would continue to match. Since we figured a house with non-matching windows = really bad.

I also thought the trim should probably continue to match the windows, so it all blends well. Also if we were to change the trim color we'd have to prime and then repaint the fence.

We also redid the roof, and those shingles look like this...
(CertainTeed architectural in "mission brown")

So everytime we go to buy stain @ Ben Moore, I look at the color options. I found this one, called "stone hedge," awhile back...


(it's really a sort of blue gray)

But then when we went recently for fence paint (we have to do this ourselves, ugh!), S thought we might be able to pull off this with the brown trim. It's called "cape cod gray" What a tease (the husband and the color), right?



So we got some of the cape gray to try out on the back of the house to see how it would look like w/the trim. And sadly, it didn't do it for me. So I went back and got the stone blue. They look almost identical on the house, but somehow the stone hedge looks better. So now we get to "apply" to the HOA for a color change and hope they approve. I knew I should have run for the board. Wish us luck! :)

Update: I was overruled and we applied for the Cape Cod Gray. More to come...