I tried to hold back, but just couldn’t… gotta w…
I tried to hold back, but just couldn’t… gotta whinge about my neighbors’ new paint job. Um, on their house, that is. They have what I call 70’s stucco - kinda squishy textured, but then smoothed over with the trowel so that you get that “nooks-and-crannies” effect. It was painted a neutral off-white, but their original windows were all replaced by generic, white metal-stripped, double-glazed windows a few years back, so the beige and the white were not so nice together. They decided to patch all the little cracks in the stucco and repaint. Yay for them. Well, the color they chose is somewhere between pumpkin and burnt peach, with a vanilla yellow for trim, so the overall effect is peaches-and-cream. Ack. But tolerable. A few days after it’s finished, I come home to see a couple of plastic yellow whirl-a-gig daisies planted in a neat row like little garden center soldiers in formation along the front of their house. At first glance, I figure they have two little kids and one of them must have seen a “flower” at Osh or Home Depot and demanded to “plant” it in the yard. Then I realize that no, the flowers are arrayed all around their house (the parts we can see from the street). And they’ve put a wicker basket full of bright orange and yellow-dyed floral plumes on the front porch, ostensibly to add color to this train-wreck of a home improvement project. The neighbors to the other side of us have a pale apricot stucco finished in a relatively smooth coat like the original finish on the houses in our area. It’s nice and fits the California bungalow style of the neighborhood. So we’re caught between a spastic peach and a bleached apricot. Goody. Oh, and to add insult to retinal injury, I came home yesterday to find that they’d painted their old cement driveway and porch maroon. If they’d kept everything a pale cream and painted all the trim maroon, it would at least have given the impression of being jaunty, instead of peaches-and-cream on the flip side. Why do I care? Because we’re refinishing the stucco on our house - it was a cold gray with huge blobs randomly tacked on as what must have been some demented contractor’s idea of texture - fine in a warm color on a giant adobe in the desert, but no good for a teeny little Cali bungalow… plus it has a bad attitude (attacked the hubby a few months back - I’m too lazy to link directly to that archived post). So the groovy contractor dudes are scraping and sanding and adding a nice new smooth coat of stucco on top, as well as patching and filling along the way. And we get to pick a color. Any color. Whee!!!! White trim is easiest and cleanest, and will look best with the style of the house and the fence we intend to put in at some point. I’d love to go with a pale yellow for the walls, but our roof is gray and I want something that will look a little warmer - like a medium biscuit, or a pale goose-egg green… hmm. Decisions, decisions. We want it to have a warm tone, but not fade out between our fruity neighbors, or clash and upset passers-by. Hey all three of you who read my blog, comment and tell me what color you think I should choose - I’m the one who painted her office the same shade as Barney’s inner thigh, remember?