Here we have my lovely new home as I first viewed it with the Realtor in Nov. of 1987. The non period plastic shutters and all. You can't fully appreciate the peeling paint that is the shade of the inside of a baby's diaper. We're talking both 1 & 2 here.

A work in progress. July 1991. The painters power washed and scraped and sanded all the old paint off. As you can see there isn't much paint left. And after removing the shutters the house was originally white. My neighbor told me the original owners painted it white with green trim. Probably accounts for the lovely green roof shingles. And yep.....they'll eventually go as well. Although looking up in the attic there is evidence the house originally had a cedar shake roof.

And here they are hard at work. You can now see the size of the house as compared to the size of the painters. The guy on the ladder is six feet. They are spraying the primer on after prepping the house for about four weeks. I don't really think the painter realized how big the house was or how long it would take him.

And here is the finished product. The painter had taken classes in New York on faux finishes before moving out here, so I had him do the pillars in faux marble. The whole time he kept fighting me on the colors and stuff. But after it was done we stood across the street and looked at it. And he said to me "you knew exactly what it would look like when we got done, didn't you." And I said "Yep. But it looks even better." Pedestrians in the neighborhood would stop and tell me how nice the house looked. Well, face it. Anything would have been an improvement.

And here it is with the new brick and ornamental iron fence I put in in 1996. Eventually I'll have ornamental plums growing in the easement out front. If the neighbors would stop running over them with their cars and the kids would stop tearing the branches off.

Here's a much better "before" shot.

And a much better "After" shot.

Here you can see the faux finish on the pillars much better. That's real gold leaf at the top. The painter fought me on these too. I told him to use the same colors as the house. He said marble doesn't came that color. I said they're wooden pillars. It's a faux finish. Who cares?

So when it was done he admitted that using all the colors on the pillars was really the last touch to tie the house together.