We wanted our new extension to look like it had always been there – here's how we did it
Matching the old brickwork, render and roof was only part of it
Committed home renovators David and Andrew Harrison-Colley (better known on Instagram as The Home Boys) are part of Ideal Home's new Open House contributors, sharing their thoughts on making a home together and living through the tricky parts. See the rest of their articles here.
A few articles back, when we first stepped outside to tackle the garden, we made a promise: to show you “the new face of the cottage now that the front has been re-rendered and the porch is in”. That was the piece that kicked off this whole outdoor chapter – the bricks, the wall, the patio, and now, finally, this. The front is in, and it feels like exactly the right project to close out the run.
Matching old and new, on purpose
The render is on the original part of the cottage only – a traditional, textured stone finish. We chose it quite deliberately to match the render on the cottage next door, which we also own and run as a holiday let. The two houses have always felt like siblings to us, and we wanted the front of ours to keep reading that way from the lane.
The new extension is a different material altogether: brick, not render. So tying the two together was never going to come from a shared finish – it had to come from matching what was already there below the render line instead. More on that shortly.
The paint that fought back
For the colour, we went with Valspar Premium Masonry in a soft, pale sage called Afternoon Nap – warm without tipping into green, and gentle enough to sit happily against the red brick. It’s a proper exterior-grade masonry paint: breathable, weather-resistant, and designed to shrug off UV and rain rather than crack or peel with age.
What we hadn’t bargained for was just how much a new stone-finish render drinks paint. The texture that gives the wall its lovely tactile finish also means every little crevice wants filling, and a standard roller just skates over the top of it. We ended up working it in by hand with a thick-pile brush, going right into every dip and pit, and even then it took three full coats to get proper, even coverage – not the one-and-done job we’d optimistically pencilled in for a weekend.
A garden arch doing a porch’s job
The porch is a Grange Valencia garden arch – which is to say, not strictly a porch at all. It’s sold as a garden arch, the kind of thing you’d expect to see wrapped in roses halfway down a path. We liked its proportions and its lattice sides enough to put it to work over the front door instead, and it’s done the job beautifully.
We painted it in a Valspar exterior garden paint in cream, matched carefully to the UPVC wood-grain cottage windows we had installed a couple of years back, so the new structure reads as though it’s always belonged rather than arriving last month. It’s a good reminder that the right piece doesn’t always come from the aisle you’d expect.
Where the old workshop used to stand
The new brick extension sits on the exact footprint of the old carpenter’s workshop we demolished right at the start of all this. Rather than let it read as an obviously new addition, we matched the brick colour to the existing brickwork visible below the render on the old cottage, and had it laid in the same Garden Wall Bond pattern as the original house.
Cottage-style windows and the same red pantile roof finish it off, so from the lane, the join between the old render and brand-new brick all but disappears.
It’s the same principle we’ve applied indoors from day one – old and new sitting together comfortably rather than competing – just written this time in brick and render instead of paint and vintage furniture.
If you’re matching old and new exteriors
- Look next door before you look at a colour chart. Matching a neighbouring or original finish does more for kerb appeal than any single paint colour will.
- Budget extra coats for textured render. A stone or pebbledash finish can drink far more paint than a smooth wall - plan for three coats, not one or two.
- Use a thick-pile brush for texture. A roller will skim the high points and miss the gaps. Working paint in by hand takes longer but gets full coverage.
- Don’t assume “porch” means the porch aisle. A garden arch, painted and positioned right, can do the job for a fraction of a bespoke joinery price.
- Match brick bond and colour, not just the bricks. The pattern the bricks are laid in matters just as much as their colour for a seamless join between old and new.
What’s still waiting (until after the summer)
We’d love to tell you the front is entirely finished, but you already know us better than that. The picket fence still needs repairing and repainting in a few places where it’s taken a battering. The lawn, which took the brunt of two years of building traffic, has given up being a lawn and is now mostly weeds with ambition. We’ve also got the boundary with next door’s fence to sort out, and – thanks to Suffolk’s new recycling rules that landed in June – we’re now the proud owners of four large bins and a food waste caddy that all need somewhere to hide.
All of it is on the list. None of it is happening until the summer’s AirBnB bookings ease off, because the front garden being a building site is one thing, but disrupting guests staying next door is quite another. So for now, we’re allowing ourselves to enjoy the render, the porch and the new brickwork exactly as they are – weeds, wonky fence and four wheelie bins included.
A year into writing this column, that feels about right. Not finished. Just further along, and glad you’ve been reading as we got here.
