We live in a 1970's split level that's been slowly coming together over the past few years. We'd like to finish the exterior, which is aluminum siding with a white brick facade in the front. Siding was just repainted a dark wood-brown color.
My personal vision is sort of Alpine chalet-inspired...I like the contrast between the dark siding and white brick, and I think rustic shutters and window boxes would complete the look.
For shutters, I like the idea of sage-green or forest-green with a cottage type design. That's easy enough for the windows on the brick facade (bottom right), but much trickier on the 2nd-story windows. The white PVC trim around the windows is very wide, and hanging shutters next to the trim would result in a large gap between shutter and window. This gap would look odd and would also ruin the "illusion" that the shutters could cover the windows. I don't want to tackle removing the white PVC trim at this point.
Any advice on how to handle this would be much appreciated! Thanks!