To make the best of the situation, Reiners decided she wanted a colorful mural painted on the side of the garage that faces her backyard pool and home.

While in brainstorming mode, Reiners thought she might want a picture of Tuscany or of the California wine country painted, but then said: "Who am I kidding? I don't live in Italy or Napa. This is my backyard."

She carefully interviewed three artists but didn't find the right fit for the job until she met San Jose muralist Devon Holzwarth.

Reiners says the mural on her garage is more impressive than she could have ever imagined.

"She was just so down to earth and full of wonderful ideas," Reiners says. "She took this huge obstruction and turned it into a work of art."

The idea for the mural finally came from a picture in Sunset magazine, although Reiners still isn't sure who found the mural-inspired photograph.

Holzwarth refers to the mural as a trompe l'oeil painting, which when viewed from the right place can deceive the viewer into thinking it is real. Trompe l'oeil is French for "trick the eye ."

The picture she painted will last for about five years. It's full of multicolored plants and trees, with a painted window that looks real and a red brick path that winds through a painted garden.

Holzwarth spent approximately five days creating the slice-of-life picture on the wall; the picture is about 12 feet tall and 24 feet wide and cost Reiners $1,000.

She says that the muralist created the wall art using freehand in 90-degree heat, sometimes dangling from a tall ladder.

"I wouldn't change this mural for the world," Reiners says. "The price wasn't outrageous compared to the change it made."

Reiners might never have found her muralist if Holzwarth had not recently changed careers.

Holzwarth left a steady job at San Jose magazine to begin her own fine-art business. This might have been too great a risk for most artists to consider, especially in a downtrodden economy, but Holzwarth's decision came as little surprise to her friends.

"She's one of the most driven people I've ever known," says Jaime Wells, Holzwarth's former roommate at Rhode Island School of Design. "She doesn't let anything stop her."

The artwork at Reiners' home is Holzwarth's first outdoor mural.

Her first mural project was her church pastor's idea, a way to bring new life to a Sunday school classroom at WestGate Church. Holzwarth hit upon the theme Noah's Ark, sketched out her concept in the room and unleashed a parade of otherworldly animals across the walls, among them a polka-dotted penguin, a checkerboard-pattern elephant and a lime-green butterfly. Thirty feet long and almost 15 feet tall, the mural, in about a week's time, had transformed a bland classroom into a never-neverland.

Holzwarth's mural-painting firm just celebrated its one-year anniversary. To its credit: A half-dozen metamorphoses have been created like the one at Reiners', with clients in such disparate places as the city of Campbell and Texas.

It's a profession that Holzwarth says has been a dream come true—a way to make fine art and support herself doing it.

"I think when you're an artist, you're always thinking, 'How can I keep making art? How am I going to do this for a living?'" she says. "You feel like you should be doing what you're doing, and contributing. ... I think you know in the back of your mind that you can't do anything else."