Add a Little Romance and a Lot of Green

From the outside, it looks the same as any other house in the District's Northeast neighborhood of Eckington. Which is just fine, unless you're trying to sell the place.

Tia Butler, the owner, had made improvements over the five years she owned the three-bedroom, one-bathroom rowhouse, including ripping out a chain-link fence and replacing a crumbling concrete retaining wall with brick. Attempts at gardening, however, weren't so successful. She said of the lone bush out front: "It once had a mate."

Bulter's house needed "curb appeal," that extra something that makes home shoppers hit the brakes and want to step inside for a look around.

We asked Sandy Clinton, a landscape architect with Clinton & Associates in Hyattsville, for advice on boosting the house's curb appeal. The work had to cost less than $1,000, assuming the seller did most of the work herself, and it had to be possible to complete it in a weekend.

Clinton said the biggest weakness of the house was the harshness of the front brick retaining wall. There's nothing to soften that space, she said. "It really needs something living."

Another issue was the color of the house itself. "All the painted surfaces lack warmth. There no real accent that one could focus their attention on."

Clinton aimed for a "more romantic look." She wanted to bring attention to the front door, a solid feature itself and a spot would-be buyers would gravitate toward anyway.

To do that, she would first open a few cans of paint: dark putty for the window and porch trim, tan for the columns, and terra cotta for the door

A $25 mission-style lamp from Home Depot adds polish. Painting the home's address on the glass transom window is another easy, classy upgrade.

Clinton offered these other suggestions to make Butler's house more eye-catching:

· Butler might have torn out her eyesore fence, but she couldn't do much about the neighbors' fences -- except to hide them. Clinton suggested sky pencil hollies ( Ilex crenata) to screen them off and provide a little privacy. The modest-size evergreen works particularly well in skinny spaces.