Now that I have a bit more free time over the summer, my mind has turned to picking up some of the projects that I promptly dropped after moving into the new house in December.

Specifically, the time has come to think about the Philadelphia special: flower boxes and shutters.

I spend an embarrassing amount of time wandering around this city and taking pictures of my favorite houses—most of which have both.

Witness (not my picture, but this is the best example of the style):

Clinton Street….the stuff of dreams.

By comparison, here is my (much smaller) house:

It has been my dream to add shutters and flower boxes to it. But, back when I was on a roll after I first moved in, I brought in a shutter specialist to look at it, and he pointed something out: a big, fat drainage pipe and a lot of wires running too close to the left upstairs window for shutters:

Now, I could pay somebody to come in and shift the pipe and the wiring to the left, but that would be a lot of expense and a lot of bureaucracy and still might be too close.

So I’ve been on scouting missions for alternatives, and here’s what I’ve come up with. Some houses have shutters on the downstairs windows and none on the upstairs windows, like this:

What do you think of that? Does it look weird and disproportionate, or nice? 

Second question: given the weird dark color of my brick (another project, perhaps, for another day), what color shutters do you vote for?

Thank you and good day.