estreya- This is going to sound super stupid, but is the trellis the white structure outside the front door? If so, all of the houses in our developement have one and it is attached to the house and made of wood and painted white. I unfortunatly live in a cookie cutter community and ALL of the houses look the same in my development. I live in So Cal and this was supposed to just be a starter house but 7 yrs later with housing having gone up up up we could not afford to move and are still here. Hopefully with the market going down we can finally move to a larger home with an real driveway!! lindybarts- I really love the one with the choc. brown door! My fav so far!!

I guess I'm a "Lady Realtor" (*snicker*) and I've been having to show after dark far too often since the winter darkness usually begins before people get off work. It's something we have to deal with. What I've been showing is a really nice vacant townhouse to people who find it off Zillow, usually. Not a great scenario. So what do I do? I do not carry concealed and believe that most Realtor scenarios (narrow hallways, stairwells, in and out of rooms) do not lend themselves to be able to protect yourself if you are relying on digging your weapon out of your handbag. I talk to the gate guard after I go in and get the key and turn on the lights. He has my card and knows which unit I'm showing, and usually wanders down there to chit-chat with me because he's bored and I'm friendly. I meet the prospect in the parking lot outside the gate, and take pictures of their ID and license plate and text them to someone who can help me (my husband usually, but if he's at work, my teammate) and they know the address where I am. I am required to call them in 30 minutes after sending. This meeting in the parking lot also gives me a chance to feel the person out. Most have been women and many have brought their kids. Nobody has balked at letting me check their ID. If I know I'm meeting a man, I bring my 17yo son. He hates it because it's boring, but too bad for him. I make the prospect walk ahead of me into every room, up the stairs, and never get between me and the door. It's not that difficult in a small condo to wave people ahead and point stuff out from the doorway. After they leave, I lock the door and then go around to turn off lights and text that I'm fine and how the showing went. And I take a few minutes to talk to the gate guard before I drive off. (Bringing snickers bars to the guard has helped our relationship as well, but if someone doesn't rent this place soon, someone is going to start wondering what's going on between us!) And, I'm getting a FirstSign to hold in my hand. Wish I had one a month ago, when I was checking on a vacant home and found the back French doors wide open, but none of these products that I've wanted have been available yet. (I specifically wanted one that called 911, not just one such as the Cuff that merely texts your friends) Here is a link that might be useful: First Sign product

Hmm... I'm noticing that even though that article begins with a nice drawing of a bee visiting a bachelor's buttons plant, BB's are actually not included in the list of hardy annuals suitable for winter sowing. That's surprising as it reseeded quite well for me. I've always been intrigued by what determines whether the seed of any particular annual, dropped by the plant's mature seed pod in late summer or fall, starts to germinate a few weeks later in the warmth of late summer or fall, or doesn't and instead over-winters to germinate and grow the following spring. I remember seeing many BB (ok: Centaurea cyanis) seedlings around their parent plants around October of last year and thinking, "Oh, my dear brother -- you shouldn't be growing here now. It's not going to work out well for you in the long term. Have you heard of something called winter?" I'm guessing they eventually all learned their lesson. But other seeds from the same parent plant get smart and decide to remain on or slightly beneath the ground during our cold winters, don't mind getting snowed upon, and then in April celebrate their great fortune and good wisdom by growing into nice healthy plants in May. And then in June they celebrate their beauty by bursting forth a glorious blue, or purple, or white flower. I know that many plants know enough science to insert into their seed some sort of chemical that allows the seed to go dormant when it needs to. Do all annuals that grow on the east coast have a fall-dormancy chemical in the seed? Some? Most? Even if many do, I would guess that sometimes it just doesn't work. Maybe the dormancy chemical is only effective for some percent of the seeds, and that some other seeds do germinate, or try to germinate, in the fall when it's a fairly good bet that germination will not lead to a full plant. We all know that's why nature insists that flower plants produce so many seeds: to guard against the unexpected or unwise. But every spring when I see these brave seedlings, already nicely-sized for early May -- way, WAY bigger than any plant growing from seed I'd been able to plant even in earliest spring -- I think: yes, this is one of the real advantages of winter sowing (or really, fall sowing), here done by nature, not by any human. She really knows what she's doing, or at the very least, how to make up for any inability on her part to foretell the future.

Salmon or peach is a very difficult color to work with if you are going to flip the house. I sell in South Florida where we are known to have a broad variety of exterior colors that aren't typically seen elsewhere and salmon is perceived as an old/dated color in my market which is a buyer turnoff. Your market may be different, but I would stay away from it for selling. It adds to your DOM and many will offer less in order to repaint or just skip over your house and not even see it.