Need exterior color inspiration for your home? Try this! (Rainy Day in the City of Ten Thousand Colours)

This post was most recently updated on September 23rd, 2019

It seems everybody’s talking exterior home improvement right now (hello Spring!), so I thought I’d add some color inspiration to the mix.

“Ignore the rain, look for the rainbow” was the first thought I had when this photo came up in my FB newsfeed this morning.  It’s a photo of a rainy spring day in a historic neighbourhood of the city where I’m from. (If you follow me on Facebook, you might have already seen it too.)

“Rainy Day in the City of 10,000 Colours”

Photo was reproduced here with permission from, and credit to, Brian Carey Photography. Since I am not the copyright owner, please do not pin it from A Pop of Pretty. Thanks for understanding.

The photographer Brian Carey called it: “Rainy Day in the City of 10,000 Colours”.  I love this title because its so true.  Most Newfoundlanders are fearless when it comes to embracing exterior home colour/color.  In my post the other day, Mind the Step & Meet the Cottage, I mentioned that we get a lot of precipitation here because we live in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean right where two ocean currents meet (one warm, one cold).  Well, we all know that when your ‘walls’ are painted a shade of grey/gray, you need a pop of colour, right?

Well, you’ll see that I wasn’t kidding the other day when I said you’ll find houses here painted shades of bright purple, turquoise, orange, and pink – and many more. We even have a spot called “Jelly Bean Row”. And, with all these colours, you can’t help but smile on the foggiest days.

This Old House, which chose this area of the city as one of it ‘Best Old House Neighbourhoods” in Canada last year, said “You haven’t had this much fun with color since Crayola came into your life.”  Love that!

So would you be brave enough to paint your home one of these colours?  Which is your favorite?

Hope you have a rainbow-y kind of a day.

P.S.  I should clarify that this is not a sponsored post.  I am just always genuinely inspired by the place I call home, and its artists/photographers.  Oh, and re the spellings “colour” and “grey”, that’s how we spell those words here.  I’ve been using the American spellings on my blog for awhile now, but that’s mostly for technical reasons – eeek, sorry fellow Canadians.