don't paint it, stain it. I bought expensive super special fantastic (but it's not) sherwin williams paint and after 1 year it's peeling off.

agreed do not paint........stain it. You can use an opaque stain if necessary

After speaking with several wood/paint/stain experts I have no other option than to use this type of paint. I can't stain it...I wish I could.

Why you cannot stain it?

Hi hmschlink!

I would recommend that you stain your deck the same color as your garage door. The color of the garage door is appealing, and those with a keen eye will notice the matching colors.

Please reach out if there is anything else we can help you with!

1) There is already a solid stain on the deck so I would have to sand the entire deck (and it's very large)...not that this isn't do-able, but it's also going to be very time consuming...time I don't have. We could also apply a paint stripper but that doesn't sound any fun either. 2)The boards on the side of the house are in rough shape. We've replaced the worst ones but just putting some stain on the bad ones (even after sanding) will (IMHO) look bad.

^ yep. We learned this the hard way. The paint looks beautiful for a few months, but then it starts to bubble and peel. Just be prepared to touch up often. If I could do it all over, I would put the work in (or hire someone) to sand and stain.

As far as color is concerned, I like the brown (to match the garage door), although I would consider painting the front door a different color.

Yep...I'm aware. I'm prepared to paint it regularly until we are able to replace all the wood with new. I'm just curious what everyone's thoughts are on the color I should use.

It's not just the painting, it's the scraping. Here is a glider I purchased that had been painted. I scraped off as much paint as I could, then sanded, then applied an opaque stain from Olympic. 5 years later it looks the same, and Olympic can tint your opaque stain to whatever color you select.

What about the darker of the siding colors?

I like the darker color overall, but I think a shade lighter would look better...same tone, just a tad lighter. The deck at our old house was quite dark (lighter than your swatch but fairly similar) and it was great but the downside was seeing LOTS of footprints and other dirt. I ended up hosing it off weekly because it looked so dirty all of the time.

Whence we did our deck we just used a solid stain, though...it had already been solid/semi-solid stained before and we sanded the loose parts down but it still had stain on it and we were able to go right over it with a solid stain, just made sure we went quite a bit darker than the previous color. It looked great (aside from picking a color that was too reddish brown).