Thought you might be interested in seeing what finally ended up on our front verandah! It’s an odd mixture of items. The bench is new, but the tables are a ‘side of the road’ effort.
We have done a bit more painting since then and I’ve become more confident about deciding what I like and don’t like. I think that maybe when you start to renovate (or in our case, freshen up) you probably should start in a small and inconspicuous place, rather like when you iron a new garment for the first time and you’re not sure if it can actually be ironed. We started at the front of the house and my husband left the colour choices up to me because he said that no matter what colour I chose, I wouldn’t like it when it was done. He was right!
In my case, I wanted nice dove grey paintwork and it ended up being quite purple. It’s not what I intended at all, but I’m getting used to it. I didn’t check what was going into the tint (largely red) and if I had it would have been obvious that it was going to come out purple or blue. But hey, you live and learn.
One of the things I found out in the course of this little experiment is that it’s a largely a matter of trial and error before you get the result you really want. It doesn’t just magically come together without any effort and there will always be some mistakes along the way. I know this sounds really obvious, but I had expected that if I thought about it long enough, I would make perfect choices.
In retrospect I should have realised that when I’m designing a presentation or a brochure I make thousands of changes and tweaks before I’m happy with the result, so choosing colours for the house is no different, it’s just a bigger canvas.
I’m thinking of re-painting my study now. It’s a smaller space and I think it’s going to be fun.
Margaret Moon 
I really like how you decorated your verandah. The light blue wicker chair looks really nice next to the side table with the plant. What kind of material did you use to build your verandah? I would like to build one in front of my house, but I’m not sure if wood would be the right material to use.
Thank you for your kind comments. The verandah is actually made of brick and the floor is cement. The poles are steel but could easily be wood. We picked up the side tables on the die of the road and they are deteriorating in the weather a bit, but it doesn’t matter because they were free.