Now I can travel back to Switzerland every day!

Well... not quite!  But I was so impressed but the stunning & very cute window boxes on all the houses & chalets in Italy & Switzerland when we were there I thought "Maybe we can do that at home... on our shed?". 

Last year we had a new workshop built in our back-yard & we were keen from the outset that it didn't look like your typical back-yard "tin shed" deciding instead that we wanted it to look more like a cottage.  Consequently, instead of colourbond, we had it clad with flat 'blue board' panels & with a double glass door. Then we painted it with the same textured paint as the house so that it blended in really well. It did, but it still didn't quite look quite right to me. 

A possible solutuion occured to me when Anke & I were on holidays in Switzerland... fake shutters with planter boxes under them!  Would it work... or would it just look kitchy?!  You can be the judge. 

Not being prepared to pay a fortune for proper shutters, I managed to find 2 old louvre cupboard doors at a local junk yard... all that was required was to cut them in half & put new ends on them so they were 4 of them exactly the same size; paint them in blue to match the existing glass doors; mount them straight onto the wall and then hang some planter boxes planted with geraniums to complete the trompe l'oeil effect.  Voila!

Very happy with the end effect...  Anke reckons maybe we should turn into a guest house after all as it sure doesn't look like a shed now! Perhaps more like a Swiss Chalet in the Alps. Perfect.