What colour should I paint my shed?

Posted By: Alexandra Campbell On: June 18th, 2017 In: Garden style & living, Sheds/sanctuaries

I have been debating the crucial issue of what colour to paint my shed.

Painting your shed transforms your garden. And if I paint my shed, it’ll also last longer. The wood is protected by the paint or stain.

I love Wenche Immink’s pale shed – she used just one coat of a pebble grey exterior paint. Wenche’s garden is open for Faversham Open Gardens & Garden Market Day, June 25th. It’s Garden 13.

Of course I also dream about a more dramatic transformation. I pored over the results of  the first ever Grand Shed Project at this year’s Grand Designs Live, which was sponsored by AXA Insurance.

This featured five inspirations for transforming garden sheds, including a Reading Snug, Sewing Shack, Miami South Beach Bar, Boutique Bedroom and an Outdoor Room. You can see them here, and AXA Insurance are also sponsoring this post.

I would adore a Reading Snug, but, for the time being, I am just going to paint my shed.

But what colour to choose?

Vintage-style blues, greys and greens must be the most loved shed colours at the moment. Who can resist a duck-egg blue shed with eaves and a window?

Lindsay’s shed is such a pretty blue and goes well with her planting.

Location, location, location…

The first thing to consider is where is your shed, and what is it for? Our new shed has been designed to merge with the fence. We want it to minimise its impact, not make it a focal point.

Greens and blues are wonderful garden colours, and blend into the landscape.

Green – especially dark green – helps a shed blend into its surroundings and is also attractive in its own right. This shed is seen on the Stonebridge Pond Allotments in Faversham (open for Faversham Open Gardens & Garden Market Day).

But if your shed is a focal point for the garden, your colour decision may be different.

Choose a pale romantic shade for your shed…

If you’re thinking of a pale colour, then test it carefully to see how it behaves out of doors. If you’re using a specialist outdoor paint such as Ronseal or Cuprinol, the colours seem to come out fairly close to what you might expect.

Wenche’s shed is ‘romantic’, with its white rose climbers.

However if you use exterior or interior versions of paint ranges designed mainly for indoors, I have discovered that the shades look much paler outside under the sky.

For example, we previously painted our back gate in Farrow & Ball Hardwick White. This appears to be a mid grey inside but properly white outside.

This colour – Hardwick White – appears mid grey inside (in our house anyway).

When trying out pale paint shades for your shed, you may need to go two or three shades darker to get the effect you want.

Be bold and paint your shed a bright colour

I love Angie’s lime-painted shed with its contrasting purple bird feeder.

There are some more brightly-coloured sheds in Revamp your shed – a short and easy guide here.

A white shed?

White sheds can be stunning. You might worry about white getting dirty. However, we had the back door (above the photo of the lime green shed) painted in Hardwick White for about seven years without repainting it. It does look a little grubby in the photo, but nothing that the odd wash wouldn’t have remedied.

White sheds can be romantic, seaside or modernist.

This shed in a seaside-themed garden in Whitstable is painted white, as is the fence around it. It belongs to Janet Maxwell and Phil Smith, Clare Road, Whitstable, who have a room for rent via Airbnb.

Tie in your shed colour with your border scheme.

Rosie Turner’s bright pink shed has featured on this blog before, and it’s always very popular.

Rosie Turner’s pink shed is a backdrop for her ‘pink garden.’

She chose this shade (Sweet Sundae from Cuprinol) because she has a long thin town garden, with everything on view from the house. The theme of the garden is pink. She has crab apples, pink clematis, pink hebes, pink peonies and more. (Links to Amazon are affiliate links, which means I may get a small fee if you buy through them, but it won’t affect the price you pay.)

Rosie Turner’s shed echoes her planting.

If you’re wondering whether you need to re-paint bright colours on sheds more often than darker colours, Rosie’s shed was painted around five years ago. It first appeared in 8 really simple, cheap ways of transforming your shed in 2014. The photographs above were taken in 2017. She hasn’t re-painted in that time.

Go over to the dark side…

Award-winning garden designer Charlotte Rowe once told me that dark colours make a boundary recede. In 12 Creative Tips For an Urban Garden, she explained that she often uses dark shades for fencing.

I also think there’s a big move towards using chunks of dark colour in kitchens. (Put ‘contemporary kitchens’ or ‘kitchen decor’ into Pinterest if you don’t believe me.) We’re about to re-vamp the kitchen and I’d like to echo at least one paint shade both inside and outside the kitchen window.

And when I wrote about the renovation of architect Tom Croft’s garden, I was really struck by how wonderful dark green doors looked.

This barn door is painted in Amsterdam Green (Sanderson paints). I love it, and strongly considered it for my shed.

In the end, I decided to paint my shed dark. That’s partly because the shed in question is practical. It’s not one of those sheds that serves as a pretty focal point. It has been designed to blend into the fencing line.

Farrow & Ball Black Blue on the new shed.

So the final choice is Farrow & Ball’s Exterior paint in Black Blue. The shed has ‘disappeared’, and people don’t seem to notice it all.

‘We’ve painted the shed since you were last here,’ I say, encouragingly, when people come round. They look somewhat bemused and seem unable to spot a shed at all.

The shed before painting. Don’t tell me you preferred it like this!

And the side view…

This was the previous shed in this position – sorry about the poor quality of the pic, but you get the idea.

Paint the shed door in a contrasting colour

Painting your shed door in a contrasting colour – or just painting the door and leaving the rest of the shed as plain wood or brick – can be remarkably effective.

This is a very attractive shed in Anna Turner’s garden in Deal.

A Plankbridge ‘shepherd’s hut’ with a contrasting door. Once again, the dark blue makes the hut almost fade into the background.

Jacqui and Richard Drew’s shed with a contrasting door. They are Garden 31 in Faversham Open Gardens on June 25th. Photo by Richard Drew.

And I didn’t just paint my shed…

We now have so many different elements on our terrace. There’s the shed, plus a bin store, log store, brown back door, white side gate and green water butt.

We decided that it would be calmer to paint everything the same colour.

The back gate, the bin store and the log store are all painted in Farrow & Ball Black Blue.

What the bin store and log store looked like before they were painted. The back gate was white, and our back door was brown. We bought the bin and log store from Wayfair and Wheelie Bin Storage Direct.

We even had the water butt painted. It was an old green plastic water butt. I researched online to find an attractive alternative.

We painted the water butt to match the shed. It was green before.

The nice water butts were quite expensive, though. It was much cheaper simply to use the same paint we used for the shed. It may not last long – although it’s been eight months now with no sign of it wearing off, in spite of some hard rains.

Wenche’s pale grey-white shed is a background for climbing roses. She’s painted the back gate the same colour. The bench and table in front of the shed are also painted in a harmonious wash.

Or do something dramatic…

I recently wrote about Jack and Carolyn Wahlberg’s charming low budget small garden. Jack has painted his shed and has also used CDs, which reflect in the sun.

Jack and Carolyn’s shed with its unusual treatment of CDs.

A shed at Sussex Prairie Gardens, covered in magazine covers. Possibly not the most long-lasting of treatments…but it’s fun.

The practicalities of painting your shed

When I decided to paint my shed, it was like doing a rain dance. The minute I bought the paint, the heavens opened.

We had booked a painter, and he had to cancel several times. You shouldn’t paint a wet shed. Or even a slightly damp shed. It must be properly dry, which means no rain for at least 48 hours.

If there’s any roughness, blistered paint or fungus, that needs treating first.

And there are counsels of perfection. Sand down the wood so that it is smoother. Use an undercoat. Use a spray paint for easier application (if you do, make sure the paint is suitable for use with a sprayer).

The log and bin store getting their primer (undercoat). They were both new so needed relatively little preparation.

You’ll need two coats, and it makes sense if one of those is a primer. But painting outside is much more forgiving than painting inside a house. It won’t matter so much if it isn’t quite perfect.

Wenche used just one coat of paint to get a washed or weathered effect.

We simply used some leftover Farrow & Ball interior emulsion paint on one of our sheds about 10 years ago and it’s lasted pretty well. It’s faded, but the effect is still much nicer than its original orangey-brown wood.

You can just see our standard brown wood shed at the end of this path.

The same shed, painted with a wash of leftover paint. Even in winter, I like it better. We did this ten years ago, so it’s worn well but the faded look is part of it.

For those of you planning to buy a new shed, there’s more advice on how to avoid buying the wrong garden shed here.

If you’d like to go further than just painting your shed, read about the Grand Design shed project sponsored by AXA here.

And let me know what colour you’ve painted your shed and how you chose it.

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