Vibrant shades of orange and purple, smatterings of leopard and tiger print and a small menagerie of felines and canines scramble for your attention as you walk into the Polovich house.

Peggy Polovich answers the door of her home on Oakland Avenue, near the Carbondale Fire Department, wearing a long-sleeved leopard-print blouse and a welcoming smile. She gladly discusses the happiness - and headaches - her house has given her.

The house was built in 1954, and the Polovich family has lived there since the early '90s.When the time came to make some changes, Peggy had no idea what she was in for.

What began as some work on a bathroom after a floor fell in has ended up as an addition that is more than twice the size of the house itself.

The project began in March 1998 and, because of many unforeseen difficulties, is still not yet completed.

"We call it the 'never-ending addition,'" Polovich said.

After adding a second bathroom, a leak that "acted like it had a brain," according to Peggy, caused numerous problems, eventually causing the whole floor and walls to have to be replaced.

Her husband, Andy, was concerned about the wiring in the new addition because two of his homes in the past were badly damaged by fires. After they had completed the addition and put new wiring in the garage to make it into a computer room, CIPS informed them that they would also have to replace all the wiring in the main house, which no one had warned them about before.

Despite the trouble the construction has given them, Peggy and her husband have found ways to look beyond their frustrations and get a little creative.

The house is painted a striking shade of orangy-yellow, which sometimes makes passers-by wonder what possessed the owners to choose it.

While the couple even had the paint custom-mixed, it really wasn't expected to turn out quite as bright as it did.

Andy is color deficient, meaning he has trouble deciphering shades of colors. He was, of course, consulted when it was time to pick out the paint for the outside of the house. Most color choices looked white or washed out to him, but he found he was happy with a yellow-based shade. When that soon faded to a "strange chartreuse-green color," according to Peggy, they had to repaint the house. This time they went for orange shades, and Andy chose the color that is now on the house.

"After we'd painted one side of the house, a neighbor came by and said, 'Gee, that's very...bright,' and that's when I was a little alarmed, because he works at Silkworm and I knew he'd seen every shade out there," Polovich said.

She tried to convince herself the paint was just still wet but soon found that wasn't the case.

Peggy's son was the first to realize that the color of their house closely resembled the color of the Crayola crayon box, except maybe a bit brighter.

"It did cause quite a stir in traffic over the two weeks it took to finish," she said.

The home apparently stands out so much that it catches the eye of more than just motorists.

The Polovich family lives only one house away from the Carbondale Fire Department. The firefighters told Peggy once that the helicopters appreciated the home because it made it easier to locate where they were going.

Peggy thought they were just being funny until a few months later, when both she and her husband were sent to the emergency room on the same day.

"The nurses said they knew us because we lived in the 'spotter house,' which the helicopters used to know they were near the hospital," Polovich said.

The crayon-box hue on the outside seems appropriate after finding that the array of colors doesn't stop on the exterior of the residence. Peggy used 24 different colors of paint in the house, most of them custom-mixed.

When asked what colors he wanted used in his room, Peggy's son handed her a Cubs jersey. She was concerned at first about how the room would look, but the red and blue walls "are actually very calming and warm," she said.

The couple's bedroom is painted in shades of violet and lavender. The top color on Andy's list was navy blue, but none of the ones Peggy showed him looked right. Then one day while out shopping, he saw the perfect navy blue on some curtains on display. When Peggy checked them out, she was happy with the color, too. They were definitely purple, and that's her favorite color.

The Polovich house has many other interesting aspects besides bright colors.

Of course, there is the endless parade of pets poking their way into your field of vision. Two dogs and four cats round out the Polovich household, some of them pound pups, some foundlings and one that was a gift from the firemen.

Solar panels heat the hot water for the house as well as the pool in back, though Peggy said the ones for the pool are, not surprisingly, working poorly.

A concrete pagoda sits in front of the porch, a replacement for the first one, which was stolen.

"Someone asked me if we had it weighted down; it weighed about 350 pounds, so I thought it was self-weighted," Polovich said. "My guess is it's sitting in some frat house now, being used as an 'incense burner.'"