Exterior Makeover

Almost three months have gone by and most of that time was just waiting for work to begin (and doing other, unrelated, very bloggable projects) and then, a couples of weeks ago, the new siding makeover took place almost overnight. Well within a week, to be precise. A week of a crew of at least 6 people working 10 or more hours each day. It was quite a project. Let's go angle by angle, to walk through the process.

First the most important and changed view, in our opinion. D, who was the brainchild behind this project, was particularly annoyed by this approach to our house, which became all the more visible five years ago when the owners of the empty lot next to us cut down all their trees. With the trees cleared, we lost both our shade to that side of the house and any hope of hiding our white vinyl siding. Despite pressure washing it yearly, it just looked dingy. And even when it was clean, D hated it.

Here are some pictures in progress, which at the time, I intended to post as they went. But they moved so quickly it was hard to keep up.

Bye bye vinyl

In wrapping the house with whatever the pink and green layers are, we were also provided a little bit of additional insulation. Obviously that's not why we made the upgrade, but it doesn't hurt.

And here's the beautiful finished look. You can see in this picture below that the dormers had been updated by this point as well, but I'll talk about them in a moment. Though I was not so excited about this project as D, I have to admit even I get a little jolt of happiness when I come drive this way towards the house.

One comment before we move on, while it's easy to scroll between the top picture and this one, is about our shutters. Part of this upgrade included replacing the shutters, simply because they were old and because we preferred a panel design rather than the louvered style we had. But when they put these up, we immediately felt they were too small. The company will be giving us wider ones, but like everything else right now, there are supply chain issues and we'll get them when we get them. So we have too-skinny shutters for now. 

Now onto the back of the house. Here's our before picture. Everything white. Which, while boring, turned out to be very easy. You'll see what I mean in a moment.

Here's an in-progress shot. The team had to be very careful with the way they set up the scaffolding, since we have a slate roof. Usually, they can traipse all around the shingles. So our job was extra difficult and required much more careful set-ups, so that they could minimize the weight on our roof. We haven't had a slate person out yet to take a look, but we don't think more than a handful of slates got damaged, so that's pretty good. The siding company did warn us before beginning that they would do their best but that we had to accept some risk that slates would be damaged.

And...here we go for the final reveal in the back (complete with sun flare). A few things to note here--first, they replaced our brown metal gutters with white ones. It was a little jarring at first and not something we had discussed at all during the planning stage, but apparently gutters are supposed to match the trim and it really does blend right in. I'll have to get used to the very white downspouts (and, let's face it, they'll get dirty soon anyway--it's like white sneakers right out of the box).

Here's where we really started to question what should be gray and what should be white. It was easy before when EVERYTHING was white. But since we had white trim around the windows and doors, this wasn't as easy as just making everything gray, either. As we look at this, for example, we now think we probably ought to paint more gray around the patio door, like the border around the gray panels and the strip immediately above it. I'm interested to know if you agree. Fortunately, Hardie (the company that makes the siding) partners with Sherwin Williams so we can buy the paint easily (and, in fact, already have a can of it).

The side by the garage was also fully converted from vinyl to Hardie board, not that I usually even remember it's there with all the giant camellia bushes around it. It's pretty remarkable that they were able to get in there without disrupting the plants too much.

And we continue around to the front of our house, probably the most important view, despite my focus on the side. In addition to (obviously) focusing on the siding itself, one other thing we wanted to upgrade was the design surrounding the dormer windows. You can see in the "before" picture that it's just more horizontal siding. Oh horror! (I'm being sarcastic because honestly I did not care about this at all, but D hated it.)

The "after" picture shows how we changed up the design to create a cute little triangle top with white trim and solid gray sides. No horizontal lines for us (from the front view).

The front is where we really started to struggle with what should be white and what should be gray. My complaint was that we paid all this money to change the house color, and the front still was mostly white (we didn't pay for this upgrade specifically to change the color, but still...). As a result of my concern, we all agreed that the picture window should be gray--as it is in the above picture (my complain being before I took this picture). I lost the fight on making our entire frieze board (the wide board immediately above the brick) gray, since we established, after a long walk around our town, that the trim on most houses seems to match the windows.

So that still lives us with some question as to what should be gray and what should be white. I already asked about the back patio door. I thought we should perhaps paint the panel on our front door that is below the four glass windows, to mirror the gray panels in the sun room, here:

But now D thinks we should perhaps make that entire section around the windows gray, so that it's not a small gray panel framed in white but a gray panel (leaving only the window frames themselves white until you get to the frieze board). He's also considering whether to paint the panels of the garage gray, so that it looks like gray squares each framed in white. I think that might start to look a little weird and like a checkerboard.

And so, with the project mostly* done and with minimal hitches**, we still find ourselves wondering how it should look. Fortunately, this level of paint job is something we can do ourselves, so there's no pressure to decide and implement particularly quickly. Please let a comment and let me know your opinions about what, if anything, we should switch from white to gray.

*"Mostly" done because during a very rainy weekend, we noticed some issue with the back gutter, and we are still waiting on the shutters, as I mentioned above. 

**There was a dicey moment when the work crew arrived and thought they were trashing all of our gutters and giving us new ones (not in our contract anywhere, though they said it was--perhaps it was assumed since it's easier to just tear off old gutters than to carefully remove them). Thank goodness D was home to talk with them and emphasize that while we did not care a bit about the back gutters, our front gutters were copper and most definitely should not be replaced. Equally thank goodness, the gutters didn't wander off from our backyard for the 5 days or so that they were not attached to our house, copper prices being what they are.