Does that one on the left have yellow tips at the end of its foliage?

Next planting season for you is end of September or October. IMO these have outgrown their spot and pruning them back is a near impossible task. BUT since you can't plant with high success rate now, ya may as well wait a week so u can read up on pruning techniques and see if u for some reason decide u like oversized entry way plants then go right ahead and prune.

Pruning in a week will accomplish two things. 1. Get rid of some plant waste now so u have less in the fall when u decide to remove them. 2. Maybe just maybe it won't look soo bad and they'll show signs of having any sort of attractive top foliage by fall.

Lets see if anyone agrees.

Looks like tips are a little yellowish.

I like your suggestions. Why not try pruning back now and when it doesn't work, remove them in the Fall. Ah well. Likely that's what will happen.

I don't know exactly what kind of conifers those are but a branch might die if you remove all foliage from it. Many conifers can't grow new foliage from old wood, making drastic pruning impossible

BTW I like your old volvo 245, not many left of those now

i wouldnt want a 2 to 4 year renovation project out my front door ...

where are you

ken

btw.. chamaecyparis is my guess ...which is a conifer .. as well as a tree ... so if you want to google up pruning.. you use conifer .. and the latin name.. not just the general term.. tree ...

and my point above .. sometimes the question isnt what you can do.. its what you should do ...

then of course.. the is always to general thought of going for it.. and see if you can live with the result ... and if you dont like it.. kill it ... have no qualms about such ... as i am sure you will replace it with many other things ...

ken

https://www.google.com/search?q=chamaecyparis&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ved=0CAcQ_AUoAWoVChMI3Nf0ifnzxgIVCJQNCh0hfg85&biw=918&bih=745&dpr=0.9

Third for chamaecyparis and nope can't be pruned w/o looking stupid.

Yes, these are a couple examples of the many different golden Hinoki cultivars on the market - it will have taken many years for them to have reached their current size. You might compromise by cutting one down and keeping the other, continuing the comparatively light pruning of the new growth to keep the walk clear (without creating a bare section on the tree).

The one in the middle is in a better spot in relation to the house and the sidewalk but the one on the left is a more attractive example. And the one in the middle is crowding the weeping birch. So it might be best to just cut them both down and start over.

You definitely don't want a matching* pair of anything in front of this house as it does not have a geometrically symmetric facade.

*Failure of plants used to stay identical to one another over time - as has happened in this instance - is a common problem with formal planting. Even when shearing is employed to create an architectural appearance individual specimens can grow more slowly than others or develop disease problems, even die - resulting in irregularities and gaps in the layout.

Wow, thanks everyone for your input! This is really helpful.

I think Embothrium is probably right that these are golden Hinoki cultivars. They seem a little more gangly than the chamaecyparis. I may try pruning the left one to be more symmetrical and closer to the roof line. You can't tell from the photo but it shoots up an additional couple feet and is tangled in the cable lines. Looking at the picture again it appears there's a natural line I could try to trim it back to. (I'll google conifer pruning- thx Ken)

The one on the right is crowding the weeping birch, which is a really nice little tree but very overgrown. Another project I'll need to research on what to do...

This is a wonderful forum! So glad my friend Mokihana told me about it. My son used to call me the Kevorkian of gardening, but I'm going to try very hard to nurse this yard back to health. Thanks again!

The one on the left looks like it was planted with no allowance for growth. The one on the right shouldn't even be there. Both have been sheared to accommodate the steps. The one on the right, more so.

I would prune the one on the left by removing all the larger branches, leaving the smaller ones. Maybe even taking off all of them down low so as to give it a visible trunk. They have nice trunks as they age. The net effect would be a lot narrower and more in scale to it's location. I would trim the top to a point, at the highest I could get away without interfering with the cable lines. Heck, I might even move the cable lines! That's not too difficult. I'm not using a walker yet.

It would be fun to thin the one on the right. Maybe do a little Niwaki. If it doesn't work out, you could always remove it. Like I said, it doesn't belong there anyway.

The Ch. obtusa, 'Aurea' gets much larger, as do the green varieties of both.

All are very nice trees, given enough room to be themselves with very little or no pruning. Shearing is out of the question as far as I'm concerned. Their texture is just too nice for that. It's one of my favorite trees.

Mike

"these are golden Hinoki cultivars. They seem a little more gangly than the chamaecyparis."

Just so we are all on the same page, Hinoki cypress or Hinoki false cypress is the common name for Chamaecyparis obtusa. And if any pruning is contemplated, I would go with Mike's suggestions. But they are completely out of scale with both the area in which they are planted and the house so I would be more inclined to remove them completely.