Guidlines for exterior paint color

Hello all,

I am currently serving on the board of directors for our HOA. We are trying to adopt a "earth tones" color scheme for exterior paint. Does anyone have any refferences I could use or obtain for the use of our bylaws to enforce exterior paint restrictions? I would greatly appreciate it. Currently our bylaws state that the homeowners need approval from the architectual committe, (which I am on) however I have no documentation to follow on what paint colors are allowed and what are not. Thank you for your time.

Sincerely,

Jason

Jason,

Mary gives an excellent starting point.

Also, this topic has been discussed a few times here from various POVs. Using the HOATalk Search, type in Exterior Paint

Jason,
I wrote the ARC guideline manual for our new HOA in Florida. We had a covenant restriction that said "earth tones". That was a huge arguement on what that meant.

I went to Sherwin Williams paint stores and purchased for $10.00. one of their big color sticks which has all of their color samples. Once we had that, we took a black majic marker and crossed off every color that got below a certain hue, meaning a certain color debth which would be too dark or not in earth colors. I looked up earth tones on Google and the description of earth tones was helpful in the verbage of what was allowed or not.

We don't have such restrictions in our HOA, however, based on what I've seen talked about on here, you might want to make sure that the paint color information can be updated periodically to allow for new color schemes.

I say that because what were "popular" and "attractive" colors in, oh, say, the 1970s, are sort of out of fashion now.