Hi Swampee. Whether or not you can recast a 1950s ranch into an Arts & Crafts mode despends mostly on the aesthetic quality of the house itself. An informal, semi-rustic 1950s ranch, with spacious rooms & wide openings between them; with tall gables over tall, vertically divided windows; with a dark-toned hipped or gabled roof with deeply cantilevered eaves; with broad accent walls & heavy piers of rubble stone rock or tapestry brick; and with rough-sawn wooden siding might make a perfect background for Craftsman-style pieces, just as it is, and for a simple reason: both the earlier furniture & the later house spring from similar aesthetic impulses & both therefore have a similar respect for the subtle beauty of natural colors & materials. The Gamble House in Pasadena, despite its early date, is nothing so much as a well-executed 195Os ranch blown up to giant size. If, on the other hand, your house is the kind of 195Os house my friends all had when I was growing up--with small rooms, narrow hallways & hollow-core doors; with short double-hung windows surrounded by skimpy trim, with pink-&-black plastic tile in the baths; with turquoise counters & appliances in the kitchen; with gigantic plate-glass picture windows flanked by teensy wooden shutters; with a pale gray asphalt tile roof & only a band of one or two courses of gray cinderblocks to separate the expanse of wide-lap pastel siding from a wide swatch of crewcut crabgrass--then trying to create the expansive aura of an earlier period will be a harder--but not impossible--task, and here's a paragraph from Edith Wharton's The Decoration of Houses, that--despite the fact that it was written in 1897, and that it's talking about rooms, and that it's talking about a completely different style than the one we're discussing here, besides--explains why: "[T]he esence of a style lies not in its use of ornament but in its handling of proportion. Structure conditions ornament, not ornament structure. In other words, decoration is always subservient to proportion, and a room, whatever its decoration may be, must represent the style to which its proportions belong. The less cannot include the greater. Unfortunately, it is usually by ornamental details, rather than by proportion, that people distinguish one style from another. To many persons, garlands, bow-knots, quivers & a great deal of gilding represent the Louis XVI style. [A]n architect familiar with the subject knows that a Louis XVI room may may exist without any of these, and he often deprecates these as representing the cheaper & more trivial effects of the period, and those that have most helped vulgarize it. In fact, in nine cases out of ten, his use of them is a concession to the client, who having asked for Louis XVI room, would would not know he had got it were these details left out." In other words, you can't just stick leaded glass doors, copper lanterns & Craftsman-style wooden brackets onto a typical 195Os tract house, Mr. Potato Head-style, and expect to get a good-looking result. It doesn't work that way. But that doesn't mean you're stuck with aqua siding & white wrought-iron porch railings, either. It's just a matter of using the right colors & finishes & planting materials, materials that are compatible with both the actual period of the house itself and the also with the feel of the earlier period, rather than trying to gussy-up your house with inauthentic details that are incompatible with the structure--the proportions--of your house and that have a sstuck-on look. How about posting some photos so we can see what you have to work with? Regards, MAGNAVERDE

Great! If the roof is brown, you have a world of colors to choose from. In that case, I would chose a color for the trim and then paint the garage door that same color. The house door can then be another color to bring attention and help it stand out. Do you want to paint your trim every several years, or are you wanting to cover the trim with vinyl and aluminum? That is the first question you have to decide. The second choice greatly narrows your color choices. If you decide on paint, Chose a color family (like dark taupes or bronzes or ivory or hunter greens or turquoise...) and get paint samples at the local paint stores and paint some poster boards. You just live with them next to the house and roof on non-rainy days and see what you like. I once painted stripes of color on the wood of a house we were going to side. Neighbors walking by were asked to vote! Are you gardeners? Are you interested in taking care of annual flowers (water once or twice a day, fertilize occasionally, keep weed-free), or learning about perennials or bulbs? If you want to learn, you can actually make a garden bed that always has either a bulb or perennial in bloom. Or, you could go low-maintenance with shrubs and mulch. Again, your zone and your house's orientation (NSEW) is needed for anyone to give you advice on plants. I am with those who think that your bushes are way too old and overgrown. Maybe you can keep one or two that are green all the way to the bottom and don't look all shaved down. Use those as a backdrop and go from there. Are you interested in putting in any hardscape? If the window next to the door does not come down too low, it might look nice to have a bench there. Is there a concrete slab area behind the bushes there? if yes, you can use containers to add colorful annuals. If you want to garden, you can make garden beds in front of the front door area. Little fences or a raised bed made with landscaping stone are all options. Over where the room comes out further than the porch, there is a nice bush near the corner that may be in good enough shape to keep. Not the one by the downspout, the one in the front. (I would remove all of the bushes to the left of that one.) If there is a matching bush in good condition on the other side of that room, I might leave them both, but remove the ones in the middle, so the other two have room. You might be able to put a trellis under the window and train a flowering vine to spread side-to-side and fill some of that space on the wall. A few low plants around the tall bushes and in front of the vine, and you are done in that area. With a taupe roof and creamy brick, you have a pallatte limited only by your wallet, skills, and imagination!

We use the front door as an entry, it has a couple planets on it, I rant to decorate it a little bit more with a little bistro set maybe! I am looking for more budget friendly fixes currently since we are hoping for an addition on the back at some point and my husband does not want to put too much into the front, so if i can think of a good fix that's affordable then it's manageable! He is also amazing at diy and reno projects and my brother is a contractor so that helps!

What a cute little bungalow! The biggest impact will be removing or cutting WAY down on the bushes! They are hiding all that brick! Next, I think green or blue always look good with red brick. If you REALLY want a like green door, then maybe you could paint the trim lime too and the siding a cream color.