We gave the house a haircut!

Hi everybody!

Once again, Emilio and I have been super-busy on a project that probably makes our neighbors wonder if we've lost our minds.  

You may remember the exterior of the house looking something like this:

You can almost see the house through the bushes if you squint.  Now, I'm not going to say that all bushes like these are terrible, horrible, no good, very bad blights on our suburban landscapes but I am going to say that I have been plotting their destruction since the first time I saw the house.  

The biggest problem is their size; the shrubs are huge and completely out of proportion to the house and lawn.  We have a tiny front yard to begin with so these kiddos needed to go.  On this, we agreed.  It's funny how two people can have completely different versions of how an afternoon was spent but my version is that I just wanted to remove the vine near the back door and Emilio got all blood-thirsty for landscape obliteration.  His version... well, that's not really relevant to this blog post.  Let's just say that we began and couldn't stop.

When you look through these, please note how dead and hollow the plants were.  There is no saving shrubs this far gone.  I'm sorry, they really had to go.  By ridding ourselves of this scourge we are also doing the prep work for removing the siding and assessing things like window wells for the basement.  I know some of you think we are plant-murderers.  Please forgive us.

Here are the action shots:

The house looks so naked!  We still have to remove stumps and all that jazz, but it's already radically changing the look of the home.  Now that you can see it- what color do you think would look good?  What kind of siding?  Any ideas for de-emphasizing the screens under the porch?