What colour will the curtains be? or will there be shutters?

Color expert that I am (ha ha) I would paint the door the same color as the siding. Oh, and you might add a nice front deck with a couple of potted shrubs to make it more welcoming. ; ) Just kidding. It's cute without being cutesy.

Ink - no curtains (assuming it doesn't get too messy in there...); no shutters. This is a utilitarian structure that I want to look nice but also just want to have fade into the background rather than stand out.

Catkim - I picked the range of colors after paying attention to what colors are where on large shrubs - e.g. light colors at leading edges/where the light strikes first; mid-tones for most of the 'body'; increasingly dark shades of green as you near the center, shading to almost black in the depths of the center. So I put the lightest green on the top and side trims, a mid-tone for most of the structure, darker green on the central trim (door and window trim) and was aiming for a green-black for the central door. Most of the green-black paints are on the blue side and I wanted a more olivey/yellow-green shade of black. The current door color was the best I could find on the Benjamin Moore paint chips, but as soon as it was painted I felt it was wrong. I decided to live with it for awhile... It still bugs me so the hunt is on for a better color for the door.

The door looks like a medium, muddy brown. I would go for a slightly (very slightly) lighter brown. Get rid of the blue/green in the brown to make it less muddy. Aim more for the color of the tree next to the shed.

Those conifers do a lot to help your shed blend in, and you could use some small green thing in the foreground, a deciduous shrub with green twigs maybe..
Would you like me to ship you some snow?
{{gwi:11494}}
(and this is how my freshly painted shed looks in winter)

timbu - you can keep your snow, thanks! While our garden would be happier with more snowcover, I'm quite happy with less! :-)

There's a tree on the right in front of the shed. It's small/young and I have decided to replace it with something better. There's a small bed beside it but I want to keep plantings there small. I like the idea of a green-twigged deciduous shrub though (Kerria comes to mind - too bad about the icky yellow flowers though... :-) The area in front of the shed is where multiple garden paths meet/intersect so there isn't a lot of room for planting and anything planted has to be small enough not to block the paths.

I really like your shed color (but I still think the trim should be a lighter shade of the main color... :-)

Ah Woody, perhaps you'll understand me when I say the trim is my way of fighting November gloom...

What I find odd about the concept of tarting up a shed is that it goes against the grain of accepted wisdom (I'll leave you to decide if I think this is a good thing or not). Usually a shed is placed at the back and to the side with something planted to hide it while it in turn hides the compost heap and wheelbarrow, a dead spot visually. Yet here we have a shed that, in spite of the new paint, stands out and now demands more visual attention than we would normally give a shed. What will happen next, will time make it recede into the background or move further forward when the door is painted red to match the rose that will scramble over the roof?

timbu - I certainly understand the November gloom issue! But I'm not a fan of beige/cream and I think a brighter trim would do more to lift the November gloom :-)

I'm rehearsing on the shed before I paint the house, Ink... it used to be white brick and stood out much more painfully than it does now, after it got wood siding!

Woody I love your shed and I really like the colors. I wouldn't change a thing! I think you could consider a few evergreen shrubs to soften the hard edges in winter if it bothers you - what about Rhodies?

Timbu I LOVE bold colors and your shed is great too. I have been thinking about how black and white it is outside right now - especially after 3 days of unpredicted snow fall (gotta love the weatherman.) I feel like I woke up into a black and white movie.

Its interesting to me that this topic came up. Its exactly what i have been thinking about in my own yard also. We have a small barn, currently painted gray, that sits on the side of our wide open back yard. When I say wide open, I mean beyond our yard we have an 11 acre field and we are lucky enough to have a panoramic view.

So I have been wishing since we moved here that I could MOVE the barn, but I finally decided this winter to embrace it. I am going to plant single stem birch along the side of it and paint it a darker gray to make them stand out against it.

While it is at the side and back, it is never going to recede so I am going to tart it up new england style and stick it to the man. Anything to go against conventional wisdom I always say.

I was just looking at the picture you posted again and if you are determined to change the door color - I think you should aim for the color of the shaded side of the shed. Just as it appears in the picture. its about 3 tones darker than the siding color.

How are your classes going?

To paint the door the color of the shaded side of the shed is what I want. On the Benjamin Moore color strip that the main body and lighter trim color are on, there's only one color darker. I'll probably start with that, although I suspect it won't be dark enough.

Re your barn - Maybe a nice dark charcoal gray for the main volume of it, a black door, and a shade lighter than charcoal for trim would 'tart it up' without giving it center stage. Black is always good to minimize things. I think light-medium-dark for the color selection works very nicely.

Are you in New England somewhere? I'm originally from the east coast of Canada. I'm not sure about New England but, while the lighter gray weathered cedar shingle or barn-board is (was? - I haven't been 'home' in a long while...) common, an almost black stain was sometimes used instead of paint. I liked the look of that. On houses, it was usually combined with white trim, but white trim on the 'barn' would draw too much attention to it I think.

The CAD class is going fine - but it's a LOT of work! It's funny, when I took the LD1 class in winter '09, I kept saying 'it must be faster to do this with CAD'. Now that I'm taking the CAD course, I keep saying 'I could do this faster by hand'. :-) I think it's gardengal who has said several times that she does a lot of her stuff by hand. I sure understand that better now!

The software is pretty quirky (e.g.figures rotate couter-clockwise; lines rotate clockwise ?!) and drives me nuts at times. Do you use the software now?

I forgot to say... I'd love to have some rhodos, and have tried growing them there several times. You know that saying 'I won't believe I can't grow [whatever] until I've killed it three times'..? I have killed more than 3 rhodos! Too dry; not acid....

I used to use CAD, but I am too cheap to re up for the software. I do it all by hand now. I really, if I do say so myself, do nice hand drawings - so it was hard to match that with the CAD. CAD is a great skill to have though.

I am in New Hampshire - and the gray barn is standard. But charcoal gray with a black door - that would be outstanding. my house is taupe/grayish with off white trim and NOT changing color (we just painted it). Do you think the barn has to relate or match those colors? Actually even the gray barn has off white trim which is horrible in my opinion...

I think the shaded side of the shed color is PERFECT. I really love the colors you have chosen for the shed - even in winter. Too back about the rhodies - but how about viburnum - is that evergreen in your region? ( Here viburnum is having troubles with a beetle that destroys and kills the shrubs - we had a huge viburnum hedge- that actually HID THE BARN, but it was destroyed by the beetle!) but there are resistant varieties - I planted one and it has done well for several years.

It sounds like the barn would be a good thing to experiment with digitally - 'photoshop' a picture of it, trying out color possibilities. That's what I did when contemplating the shed colors. If you have a photo that has both the house and barn in it, that would give you a feel for how the colors would look together.

I have viburnums, but not evergreen ones - I don't think they are hardy here. And something 'did a number' on some of my viburnums the other year. They seemed to have bounced back but I fear the beetle is heading into this territory too.

I'm not too bothered by the 'bare' winter view. That picture doesn't capture the background - there are two large white pines on the right. You can see one branch in the picture. The neighbors behind us have a lot of evergreens so there's a substantial evergreen backdrop behind the shed.

Come to think of it, a red rose is just the thing that's missing from my yard... but what would be the right shade of red? Can you help me out, Ink?

The same shade as the door timbu, obviously!

Oops Woody, sorry for misbehaving on your thread!
Flowers are not always helpful in getting a message through, are they?

timbu - you're not misbehaving :-) Friendly banter is allowed on this thread....

timbu -- I like the colors of your shed fine, but you must do something about all that white stuff! Several shades of green would be nicer. ; )

I tried to sell the white stuff to Woody, but as you saw, she wouldn't have any of it...