We had a wonderful Christmas and have been back in the swing of things once again on the house. We were excited about the 3 day weekend over New Year's to get lots done...but sadly, the hubs was sick for one of the days so we didn't accomplish as much as we thought. Oh well. He's better and we still made progress.
One of the things I've been busy doing is mocking up the outside of our house for the people doing our siding. My sketches are quite rough but can you see the potential?
From this....
to this...
In a few weeks they'll be getting started and I can't wait! We'll have gutters again! :) And no more peeling paint!
We have chosen hardie siding which is a cement-based product that has to be painted. So...we'll still have some work in the spring to paint everything but the primed white color it will be throughout the winter will be a vast improvement from our current look.
I actually had a hard time getting my head around the exterior design. I love designing spaces inside and can easily visualize what things would look like if a wall were gone or moved, different colors and finishes, etc. But I don't have any experience designing a house exterior and didn't even know where to start.
This is what I was going for originally...
I snapped this picture on my phone several months ago while I was watching this episode from Sarah Richardson on HGTV. She was doing the kitchen inside this house and I loved the siding treatment when I saw it! It's so unusual but still simple. I thought it would be perfect. But it turns out...it would also be a little more expensive. Bum.mer.
I had a meeting with our siding company and was told that they had a bunch of hardie shakes sitting around that could be used on our house cheaper than the option from HGTV. Normally, shakes are a lot more expensive so I hadn't even thought about it...and decided to find a way to incorporate it into the design. Lots of Cape Cods have shakes so it stays within the style of our house. Love that.
But there were some problems...when I started mocking it up with shakes I immediately disliked it. Our roof already looks a little 'shake-ish' so the flow wasn't right. See what I mean?
A lot of houses block off an upper triangle on the side of their house and do shakes at the top but that wasn't an option for us because the triangle sides aren't actually symmetrical. Annoying.
In the end...I chose to put the shakes as an accent at the top of the new front door overhang and around the entire front door. The entire side of our garage will be shakes too. Like this...
And we are also doing shakes on the whole back of the house...with the exception of a few accent parts that will be 8" siding. It's kind of the opposite of what most people do, I guess. A lot of houses have fancy fronts with brick, stone or beautiful siding and then the back is plain-jane. The back of our house will actually be more fancied up than the front...which is ok with me. Afterall, we bought our house because of the backyard...where now we'll get to have a nice view of the back of the house. :)
Can't wait to post more progress soon as the siding starts going up!
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