HANSEN -- In many ways, the home of Barbara Homan is similar to others in her sleepy Hansen neighborhood.

It is a diminutive one-story with a small front yard, minimal landscaping and a concrete stoop leading visitors to a screen door that squeaks. It is the kind of place that might go unnoticed.

But on second glance, it becomes clear that the Homan house is something special -- a home some residents call the most unusual in town.

Painted in simple brushstrokes over the home's two-tone blue and white front is a tender landscape of snowy mountains, stately pines and a lake. The mural, about 4 feet high by 20 feet long, was painted in 1980 by Homan, who was inspired while putting on a fresh coat of regular house paint.

"It really started out as a joke," said Homan, who wanted to surprise her husband, Charlie, with the mural when he got home from work. "I planned to paint over it."

The scene started as a single snow-topped mountain and a few trees but quickly developed into a full mountain range and pine forest as the artist in Homan -- a lifelong painter of folk art -- emerged.

The mural took only a few hours to complete, and when it was done the artist stepped back to the curb to take it in. That is when she nearly tripped over one of the 15 or so neighborhood children who had gathered in silence at the curb to watch the mural unfold. Homan had been so focused on the painting she failed to notice some of the neighbors standing in awe on her lawn.

She changed her mind about painting over it after her husband -- and the rest of the neighborhood -- urged her to let the mural stay.

That was 25 years ago. Since then the mural faded, becoming almost invisible. A few weeks ago, she decided restoration was in order.

Monday, her 72nd birthday, Homan stood hunched in her front lawn, a brush in hand, touching up the painting the neighborhood once enjoyed so much. Much progress has already been made on the mural, and the neighbors are starting to take notice again.

"I think it's beautiful," said Melanie White, the Homans' next-door neighbor. "It brings personality to the neighborhood. It is something I'd do to my own house if I knew how to paint."

Not all the neighbors would, but they enjoy Homan's art nonetheless.

"It's not something I'd do to my house," Dan Scholl, a neighbor living a few houses down from the Homans, said with a wry smile. "But I enjoy looking at it."

So do hundreds of others who have driven past the Homan home in the past 25 years, some from as far away as Idaho Falls.

"People come from all around to stand in our front yard and look at it," Charlie Homan said, smiling at his wife.

When it is not too hot, Barbara Homan works a little at a time restoring the mural. A few worn brushes lie at the bottom of an old wooden box on the home's front stoop near some canning jars half full of red, yellow, blue and white pigments. She carefully mixes the paints to match her original colors. The lid to a plastic bucket her pallet, the siding of her home the canvas.

Barbara Homan has no plans to paint any new murals. She mostly sticks to less lofty projects such as landscape scenes on the saw blades she gives as gifts to family and friends.

But take a drive down a sleepy street in Hansen this month, and you may catch a glimpse of the artist out in the yard adding a new tree or perhaps some shading to a mountainside. Don't be surprised if she doesn't notice as you stand at the curb and watch. After all, it takes a great deal of concentration to maintain the most unusual house in town.