A Master of None: Exterior Remodel: 5 Years in the Making!

Five years ago, I designed a whole new facade for our house as well as a new siding layout and roofline. I spent the last five years trying to find a contractor brave enough to take on the project. I finally found one! Shane Chunning, owner of SC Built in Cedar City, has been working on wrapping up all my unfinished projects that I haven't found the time to finish myself and has begun our Exterior Remodel that I designed all those years ago. He has been wonderful to work with, shares my attention to detail and works well with women (having all daughters himself), which is super helpful since, although I have 6 sons and only one daughter, I myself come from a family of 7 sisters.

The house originally was in very bad shape, figuratively and literally. The condition was bad, with the entire front porch rotting out, holes all over the cheap vinyl siding, and no house- or window-wrap anywhere to be found. But the "shape" of the house was also very poor: the scale was all off, with puny little dormer windows, too shallow roof pitches, no architectural interest or detail with casings or mouldings or eyelines, terrible attention to light and how to bring more into the house, and just a generally ugly aesthetic overall:

Front Elevation BEFORE

Adding plants helps but only goes so far. The house was just ugly.

Back Elevation BEFORE

Side Elevations BEFORE

There were significant design challenges with this house: while it appears as if it is symmetrical, it isn't actually symmetrical and making it appear symmetrical and balanced took some very tricky fandagling with measurements and layout. But, I think I managed with my design while adding significant architectural interest to the design and giving the house a much more welcoming personality:

Shane, the amazing contractor, and Rulon Barlow, his immensely talented framer, knocked this out in a couple days while we were on vacation for Spring break. You can imagine the excitement as we drove up to our house a couple days ago and saw the significant change that took place while we were away. They made difficult decisions on layout choices to give the house a more symmetrical appearance, despite the difficulties I mentioned above without even interrupting my vacation. While their solutions differed from mine, I feel like they did an excellent job problem-solving the design problems. They are awesome!

I am super excited to see it finished. I am now working with the siding guy while Shane prepares for the brickwork that will be done. We will replace the front door with a 3/4 lite door, but even with the existing door, vaulting the elliptical arch ceiling over the doorway already brings significantly more light into the entryway from inside.

Shane extended the depth of the porch gable to better match my design plans this week. Much better!

Siding is finally going on. The gables were framed a bit differently than I drew them which presented a few problems. First, the left gable was framed nearly a foot wider than the right. Second, both gables were framed in such a way that the windows aren't centered. These are significant problems considering that The siding plan for the gables is board and batten, which emphasizes both the significant difference between the widths of the two gables and the fact that the windows are off center. That means I needed to spend a couple days doing some fancy math to create illusions that the gables are the same size and the windows are centered. This was NOT easy, but I think I managed pretty well.