This is how the house looked when we bought it. We're facing south here, towards the north side of the main house.

I took this picture the first time we looked at the house. We looked at this picture over and over, and finally decided the colors were a problem. Being very dark, the architectural details get lost, and painting shingles ought to be a felony.

This was the picture of the front of the main house from our Christmas letter, taken before we'd actually closed. Note how the dark trim color causes the columns to fade into the shadows

Here's the old entry way. Note the light fixture. It was attractive enough, but the swallows that nest under the porch just in front perched on it, and their babies sometimes fell inside. The glass was also cracked.

This excellent screen porch is one of the best features of the house. Nearly all the old porches in Las Cruces have been walled in, just like porches everywhere.

This bay window was added on to the dining room after the house was built. The trim paint here showed some promise. Bungalows almost always had the window sashes painted a different color than the trim, and red was common.

This shot of the south wall of the main house shows how the painted shingles merged visually with the white stucco below. Not a very Arts & Crafts look. The overhang above the french doors was added in the '80s. For some reason, there were only two support brackets, and you can see the edges have drooped. Also note the window a/c unit and the cap to the cistern tank.

This is the east wall of the guest house. It's now the kicthen, but in 1915, was a screened sleeping porch. By this shot, the painters had started prepping the surfaces. There was much water damage here, an uninteresting light fixture, and deteriorating wood trim everywhere.

Looking right, you can see worse trouble yet.

This is the exterior wall of the guest bathroom, just to the right of the previous shot. Here, the painters found that the stucco overcoat had been eaten up by water and ivy growth, but the adobe bricks underneath were miraculously intact.

This is the west wall around the yard that provides privacy from Miranda street for both houses. Built in a style somewhere between Mission and New Mexico Territorial, it has a course of brick trim on top. We used the brick color as a source for some of our trim choices.

This deck at the back of the main house, made of a modern recycled synthetic material, was only two and a half years old. But it was already disintegrating. The manufacturer agreed to replace it for free, but we're still nervous about its long-term survival.

While the painters prepped the walls and trim, Carol and I rebuilt every screen for every window and door on the property. It was difficult and painful.

Here the painters have repaired the stucco, textured it to match the rest, and added their special formula primer. The formula consists of going to the paint store and buying up all the paint other people returned because it was the wrong color, and just mixing it all up. The neighbors were horrified that we might be painting the whole house this color.

By now, we had two new brackets installed under the overhang, and the painters' special mix was up as a primer. I'd feel bad about revealing their low-cost primer secret, except I know none of their competitors will ever cruise this web site.

These are some of the exterior colors we tested. We knew the original wood trim was green, so we just needed to decide what shade we wanted. The walls were originally white, because they were plain lime plaster. White was not commonly used on bungalows elsewhere before the 1920s, and since we now had cement stucco anyway, we went with a more interesting wall color. The red and terra cotta colors were simply derived from the tile and brick around the house.

Once Scott started trying to repair the porch ceiling, he found that the '80s texture was in sad shape. So he just started knocking it all off, or more precisely, started allowing it to fall off on its own.

The porch ceiling was dreadful. Here you can see the original plaster under the added texture.

At this point, Carol and I finished replacing all the screens, and vowed we'd never let them get damaged by intruding vegetation again. The first applications of the yellow paint looked pretty extreme.

We knew the sun here is brutal on paint, so we went with a color we knew would tone down on its own over time. We really think the extra brackets are a huge improvement.

When it came time to fix the deck, the crew discovered that some of the wooden support structure underneath was unpainted, allowing any sprinkler overspray to quickly ruin the deck via water rot.

Wow! The new shingles are finally on, and the exterior is more or less complete. We will be doing a radical landscape overhaul next spring, so this is the way it'll look for a good long time.