Oopsies

So...you know how I'm a little opinionated? Okay...big understatement. I'm a LOT opinionated...and once I get something in my head it's hard for me to shake it.

I mocked up what I wanted the house to look like...and our wonderful, fantastically talented contractors got pretty close. BUT there were a couple things they did that I wasn't thrilled about since it wasn't what we originally pictured. 

I wish I were a little more easy going because they did a fantastic job. Other homeowners would have been thrilled to see some of the details they came up with...but I had it in my head that I wanted things to look a certain way. And a couple things had to be ripped out and done again. :(

Oopsie Number 1:
Bird boxes...we wanted to add a little architectural detail to the sides of the house where the steep roof ends. The little boxes we had built where the roof wraps around are called bird boxes and we are really happy with them! But this first picture shows something hard to see...there's a piece of trim that wraps around the entire box. Oops!

There may be houses that have trim around boxes like this, but we didn't want that since our house color will be dark and the trim will be white. We were afraid the white lines would make these boxes stick out in a weird way and instead of looking like they were built-in and more original to the house, they'd look like they were stuck on as an after thought. Not what we wanted.

So...the trim was taken off and now it stops part way under the box...exactly the way we wanted it to be. See the difference?

Oopsie Number 2:
We put a mixture of shakes and straight siding on the house. At the back, we went with mostly shakes. We actually wanted the shakes to wrap around the house on the second floor at each end of the house. Oops! As you can see in the picture below, the straight siding was put on the side of the second floor. On this side it actually looked ok, but the other side didn't...so...

 ...the brand new, nicely put on, straight siding was changed to shakes on both ends of the house.

Oopsie Number 3:
The new front overhang was tricky. The first step the contractors did in trimming out the columns was to figure out the size and add trim all the way to the ground. The columns looked huge to us, probably because we were used to seeing skinny 2x4s here for a year and a half.

But at the end of the first day the guys spent trimming out the overhang, something seemed off... The columns seemed disproportionate for some reason. We finally figured out what it was.

See how in the picture above the 'eyebrow' shaped part dead ends into the columns? It just didn't flow well...and it didn't match our inspiration picture. So we had them make the eyebrow part wider and make it cover up the top of the columns. It instantly felt much better and we love it! More on the after pictures of the overhang here.

The thing I love most about our contractor is how well they took all this 'news.' I'm sure they were quite excited to get finished with our house so they didn't have to deal with us me anymore. But they were great and took it in stride. They wanted to make everything perfect...and we're super happy with it all!

I hope my Jeff Lewis stage is behind me and I can be more easy going if we ever do a project like this in the future. We love you Wolf...thanks for putting up with us!