Over the last few years, we have replaced all of the windows in our house with metal clad, fir windows (that’s metal on the exterior, wood on the interior). To save on costs, we opted for windows made with mixed grain fir, instead of the super sexy vertical grain (aka “VG”) fir that we’ve used in other parts of the house. For windows, this isn’t typically an issue because the frames are constructed of various smaller pieces of wood so you never really have a piece wide enough to notice. Unfortunately, our kitchen window was an exception.
The photo above shows the mixed grain fir of the window unit next to the VG fir sill that we installed after the window was in place. Truthfully, it wouldn’t have been that big of a deal except it’s the biggest window in the house and the one we look at every day while washing dishes or checking to see if Bailey did his business in the backyard.
So, we painted it!
I’ve been obsessing over mustard yellow for a good year now and we finally had a place to try it out. (The color is BM’s “luminous days”.)
First we cleaned the window and then masked the glass with Frog Tape, running a putty knife along the edge to ensure that the tape was fully adhered.
Next, Kyle used a small foam roller to apply the paint which produced a crisp, clean line at the outside edge.
Then he used a small foam brush to get into any nooks and crannies. For this particular color we were advised to use a tinted primer but we figured since we were starting with darker wood it would be ok to skip that step (we did end up doing 3 coats just to be safe).
The end result is subtle, but I like it. We think the color might be a little too “French’s” and not enough “dijon”, but we’re going to live with it for a while and see what we think. (We started out with a dozen yellow paint chips from three different companies and were surprised how only one or two came close to what we were looking for.)
We also like that the band of color emphasizes the framed view to the backyard. Unfortunately, the backyard is not really worth looking at right now. Hopefully that will change this summer…