House Design – Part Two

Hello, and happy summer! Our family has been busy with fun summer stuff…gardening, beach days, some travel, horse shows for me, home improvement projects for Mike, etc.

There is also exciting progress happening with the new house design…

We’ve now met with our architect a few times, and can finally see what the house is going to look like in real life. The vague picture in our heads has been replaced by drawings and a 3D model that we’ll be able to hold in our hands and turn this way and that.

It’s funny, even though our architect delivered exactly what we asked for, the house turned out so different from what I had in my head. Mike experienced the same thing. We both were picturing something more akin to a colonial style box, but with a porch, attached to the garage by a connector (the mudroom) that doubled as the front door/entryway.

I guess we both ignored the fact that somewhere along the line we committed to a story-and-a-half with a dormer–and two gables rather than one–which creates a more “modern” farmhouse look than we were initially going for, but allows for the interior layout that we wanted. We wouldn’t have gotten the interior we wanted if we had stuck to the single gable/box style house that we prefer aesthetically from the outside.

This process is all about letting go of certain things in order to gain other things. Priorities and compromise.

But even if it’s not what I had in my mind’s eye, I really love the look of this little house. I want to live in it. It is charming and comes across as smaller than it really is, thanks to the lower profile and “cottage-y” dormer. The interior layout is everything I’ve ever wanted, so I can live without it being the grand colonial house of my early-american dreams. 😉

There are still some small tweaks to be made before we bring the design to various builders to get quotes, but we’re getting very close to that big next step! Stay tuned. 🙂

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