Things grow. They grow until the house becomes invisible, as was the case March of last year, when you could stand in the driveway and not see the house at all. But termites got to the big shrub, and the wooden eaves needed to be exposed so they could be painted. So I hired the guy who nuked the pampas grass to delete the diseased and over-grown plants. The result is that the house is now visible for the first time YEARS. And I can see just how awful the decorative trim around the windows really is. Something will have to be done about that.

So I walked around the neighborhood looking for more houses like mine to see what had been done, if anything, about the decorative slat thingies next to the windows, and discovered that my house was the only one that still had them. They are really decrepit, so I decided they definitely had to go, and when I removed the first batch discovered that underneath was green stucco (that was the original house color).

I think the best solution is probably to just paint this stucco the same color as the rest of the stucco, and the rest of the trim the same as the eaves, which is the case with the second house pictured above. The house shown directly below mine has another, and pricer solution: remove all the crap, put in new windows, and restucco the whole thing. Finally we have the worst solution: remove the slats, paint everything the same color, and add fake shutters.

I've actually gotten all the slats removed, and the area formerly occupied by them repainted. The new paint is surprisingly close to the old color.

And here I've removed the tangled mess of vines, and the slats, but haven't decided about the wood.

And here's the front of the house. In the center foreground of the picture is the large pile of tangled vines removed from in front of the studio window. Next to that is the brown dirt path and the pile of stepping stones which will go there sometime soon, leading from the sidewalk into the yard. The slats have been removed from their spots next to the two windows, but the stucco is still green, and the woodwork hasn't been painted yet. Because I have so very much red paint I've decided NOT to paint the wood the same color as the stucco, as was done on the house I like best above, but to stick with the color of the rest of the trim. This will also give my house a distinctive look, as I'll have the only one with the original decorative choice for the color distribution in the front, where there is wood surrounding the windows and the area above and below them, and the wood is the same color as the eaves. I'm not sure if I'll like the effect of the rectangular shape matching the color of the rest of the stucco though. We'll see.