"Mit Bonde-Hyte et Konge-Slot skal blive"

What's missing from this picture?:

The answer is snow! Its gone. All gone. I am ecstatic. The grass is on the verge of becoming green again! Today was a gorgeous day and we were outside for nearly all of it. I took a whole bunch of pictures of the house and the neighbors' houses because we are gearing up to stain the house later on this spring, and I'm hoping to make a few small adjustments to the color scheme. I've never been wild about the red roof - brown-red base - ochre trim - blue door - combination. I don't really like any of the colors individually very much, and together I find them grating. So change may be afoot. Here are some of the factors to consider:

1. The house to the south really dominates our yard:

As you can see, the two base browns are fairly close, but they don't really coordinate very well. The next house up the street is pretty much the same reddish brown too, so it would be nice to distinguish ourselves a little bit.

2. There's a big white house behind ours that totally looms over the terrace:

It's actually a fairly attractive house, but we feel like we're under surveillance, so we're thinking of putting up a fence. Even though it has a big new addition, it's a fairly traditional house, and it would be nice to connect with it visually in some way, since it's so dominant.

3. On the north side there's an unassuming red house:

I think a darker brown would look better next door to a true red than our reddish brown. The neighbors both died a year ago, and we're not sure yet what their heirs are going to do with the property, so it's a bit of an unknown factor.

4. The house that shares the property line with both the red house and ours has my favorite color scheme of them all:

It's not really visible from the street view of our house, or from most of our yard, which means that it wouldn't be a big deal if we copied the scheme. I love dark brown (bordering on black) houses with white trim. I think their roof is a little too bright, but I'm seriously thinking of trying to go a few shades darker with our brown and then change the ochre trim to a warm (creamy?) white to emulate but not copy this. Not sure what to do with our blue doors, though. We'll do a dry run on the garage during Easter break, then if we're happy with the result, do the whole house once we're done with school.

I sat out on the deck and knitted and read and dozed for most of the afternoon. Got the body of the Noro Laurel sweater finished and started on the cowl neck. I'm basically satisfied with it:

The sizing is turning out totally different from the Laurel I knitted out of a different single ply worsted weight yarn on the same needles. Very strange.