Thanks all for your suggestions. We've started the work. So far, we've changed the shape of the hedge flower bed so it's not taking over the yard. It's just straight now in front of the porch and then circles out a bit towards the right side of the house to make a nice size bed for something. That circle-ish bed on the right side is about 12 ft x 12 ft and there's no window there. The ixora were pretty bad looking after the last of our freezes here in Daytona, so we uprooted them all and put 7 Lavender Formosa Azalea's in their place. (the original photo still shows the ixora) So far so good on those. Now, we bought a 4-trunk robellini / pigmy date palm and will pick it up this weekend. I just have to decide where to put it! I had pictured it on the right side of the house, but do we need something taller there instead of the robellini or in addition to the robellini? In the photos below, the only thing that's actually in our ground are the azeleas closest to the house. All else is my mockup to get opinions. That center bed isn't even there yet - just an idea. I like the Christmas palm because of it's multiple trunks, and we've got so much coquina in our area, it's not expensive to get a decorative rock for the center bed. That center bed isn't even there yet - just an idea. So, please help with suggestions for where to put our robellini that's coming in this weekend. It's about 7 ft tall from base of trunk to top frond, so it's pretty nice. Side note, we're extending the right fence so it's flush with the house and need access to the gate, so nothing can be planted in front of it, we've got 2 ft. of stationary fence right next to the house on the right, but no further than that. So, bottom line, I've got a robellini coming in and I've got to decide where to put it! Original - how our yard looks now My fav, the robellini in the back and a christmas up front, maybe a queen in the back for height? I'm not sure if we've got the room for the queen though. But it doesn't look bad without the queen Or the robellini in the front? I tried 2 queens in the photo in the front bed and it was too busy and 1 queen looked lonely. Any help or suggestions are greatly appreciated.

Thats a neat little place you have there. I think the wood columns instead of the wrought iron will make a nice change. Will the posts be white like the roof wood trim or natural like the stairs? As for a few ideas for the landscaping, It would be nice to see something to the front right side to break up the hard line from the edge of the house and to cover up from view the electric/telco boxes on the front of the house. Im a big fan of Hydrangea, so *I* would probably plant Hydrangea Macrophylla there: http://www.whiteflowerfarm.com/63142-product.html Or maybe some incrediball: http://www.whiteflowerfarm.com/63133-product.html WOuld also be nice to see another shrub/bush to the left of the window with some nice color in between. Maybe a Purple leaf sand cherry bush or Weigela on the left and some Lillies, Crocosmia, Lavender and echinacea with a decorative grass or two mixed in to really stand out in the middle :) Echinacea: http://www.whiteflowerfarm.com/28460-product.html Lillies: http://www.whiteflowerfarm.com/381417-product.html Crocosmia: http://www.whiteflowerfarm.com/40737-product.html Lavender: http://www.whiteflowerfarm.com/32822-product.html Grasses: http://www.whiteflowerfarm.com/30051-product.html http://www.whiteflowerfarm.com/73382-product.html http://www.whiteflowerfarm.com/30011-product.html http://www.whiteflowerfarm.com/30045-product.html

Hve you used the door designer on the Thermatru website? I wouldn't go all the way down to Smooth Star - we built a modular and upgraded to the Fiber Classic (I don't think they offered the Classic Craft in 2007), it wasn't anywhere near that much $$$ even with sidelights. Check with local suppliers on their prices. I wanted our door prefinished, it wasn't. You may be able to get exactly what you want at a lower price from a local lumberyard, though sidelights and transoms complicate the matter. Maybe an option is to get the sidelights and transom you want in the "Classic Craft" (though I don't know if the construction of those is really that different from line to line) and get a "Fiber Classic" door that will be OK for a while (and still has grain), it would be really easy to upgrade just the door later. Much harder to upgrade sidelights and transoms. Here is a link that might be useful: Thermatru doors

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