but can you imagine living next to it? too bad there's no photo of it w/the article.
Striped house brings a little more color to the world
JENNIFER VOGELSONG
York Daily Record
SPRING GROVE, Pa. - Lloyd Herring got bored driving by drab brick, gray weatherboard and beige aluminum-siding houses.
He was sick of seeing the same old thing on one street after another - houses in cookie-cutter shapes, often of the same color, with nothing to distinguish them from their neighbors.
He couldn't do anything about it - couldn't change people's preferences or homebuilders' styles.
What he could do, though, was add a splash of color to his own little corner of the world.
And so, one day in 1996 while his wife was at work, he began what would become a multiyear project.
He bought six quarts of red paint and added broad crimson stripes to their pale yellow, two-story house along Route 234 in Jackson Township.
Needless to say, Ruby Herring was a bit surprised when she came home from work. "What was I supposed to say? It was already done."
Two years later, Lloyd added blue stripes and black edging. "I did the back of the house, too," he said. "I didn't skip."
A couple of years ago, he added green stripes and painted every block in the chimney a different color.
Now, the place looks like a lollipop of sorts - a rainbow of primary colors.
People often stop to stare and ask him why he did it.
"Just to be different," he said.
Lloyd half expected to get calls from his neighbors or folks at the township when he started painting - he thought for sure there would be some complaints.
But nothing happened.
Sandi Sterner, Jackson Township's zoning officer, said the municipality has nothing on the books that would prohibit such a paint job. For as long as she has worked there, "I've never had any inquiries about (the house)."
Lloyd was pleased when a woman from Pittsburgh finally stopped to talk with him one day after making three passes by the house.
"She said, 'We don't have many weird houses around where I live - you don't mind me calling it weird, do you?'" he recalled.
"I told her to call it anything she wanted. I don't care."
He was proud last summer when he and Ruby were at a campground in Nashville and a lady there knew exactly where he lived because of the impression his house made when she drove by it once.
Ruby laughs at her husband's "project," as she calls it. "I don't care what he does."
She knows people probably have all sorts of theories about who lives there and why the house looks like an art project gone mad.
"You can see people staring as they go by and you have to know they're wondering," she said. "They stop and take pictures."
She keeps a list of the names people have called her home: The Jellybean House, The Lego House, The Candyland House, The Happy House, The Rainbow House.
And Lloyd isn't finished yet.
He's contemplating a return to solid colors next year.
"I was thinking of doing the whole place in one weird color," he said. "Maybe a real rose with black trim - or it might be pretty to paint it all green with red trim. ... I want something real bright, to slap you in the face when you see it."
to him for being different...