Picking the exterior of our house has been causing me a lot of stress lately. I don't want to make any mistakes because I know how important curb appeal is... But I also don't want to do anything too typical either.
With finishes inside the house, you know that eventually they will become outdated and need some revamping... But the outside takes a lot more money, a lot more time and a lot more guts to change down the road.
We have decided to do a stone/siding mix. We chose James Hardie fiber cement board in Iron Grey for the main part of the house.
It's kind of a blueish-grey and we really, really like it.
I'm not a huge fan of bright, stark white trim paired with dark siding, so we chose James Hardie Cobblestone as our trim colour.
I think it's a little softer and a little more subtle with the Iron Grey. Although trying to find a picture of that combination has been impossible. I just have small 8x8 samples to go from so I really hope that this doesn't become a risk I'll regret!
By not choosing white as our trim colour it made picking a window colour a little more difficult. I've seen a lot of houses where they've tried to match trim and window colours (typically beiges or creams) and have failed miserably. The easiest way I could think to avoid this issue was to go with something that doesn't match at all. Black!
I've seen black windows look really good on houses, but I've also seem them look too dark when paired with other dark trim or stone choices. That's what I'm afraid of.
When there's enough of a light trim with the black window, I think they look elegant and classy.
We ordered our windows from Dashwood Windows. We have had a really good experience so far. Customer service has been phenomenal and I would recommend them to anyone. They even came out to our house and went through our quote and plans window by window. For people who have never ordered windows before, this settled our nerves and made us feel confident in our decisions.
We have 3 windows on the back of the house that were a struggle for a couple other companies we had quotes from. Dashwood didn't have any issues at all.
Other companies struggled with the great room windows:
We decided to leave the grilles out of these windows so we have an unobstructed view of the yard and mature trees.
And my favourite window in the whole house! The kitchen window:
I guess the problem with this window was having the camber top AND windows that open. The "V" shape in the drawings shows windows that open.
Remember the dormers from our plan?
We were originally going to use James Hardie Shakes in iron grey as well up there, but after a trip to the hardware store we decided that we wanted to have the look of real cedar.
Cedar tends to be pretty expensive. So we looked at every kind of cedar-style shake available on the market, but they all looked really fake.
Since those spaces aren't very big, we opted to go with real cedar shakes. We wanted something completely maintenance free, but I guess staining a few shakes every 5-10 years isn't a huge deal.
We will stain the exterior pine timbers to match the cedar shakes for a more cohesive look.
We were worried about trying to coordinate too many wood colours, so we're going to paint the garage doors and front door black to match the windows. I may paint the front door a different colour eventually, but this will give us a good start!
The garage doors we're going with are a carriage style door with arched windows to highlight the camber garage door frames. These are Upwardor from the Bronte Creek collection. They're affordable, have a high R-value (insulation) and are Canadian made!
The only problem is they don't come in black! So we're buying them in dark brown so it's easier to paint black instead of trying to painting black over white. We won't be able to paint them until the weather is nicer next spring, so I'm sure many people will question our garage door colour choice until then!
The bottom part of the house will be done in stone. We picked Permacon Lafitt which is a man-made stone. Man-made stone tends to be easier to install because they fit together better without much chipping/reshaping so labour and material costs are lower. Yay! But the actual stone is about twice to cost of brick. Boo.
We debated about using stone on the front and a coordinating brick for the sides and back to save money, but we think that brick will really take away from the beauty of the back of the house, so we're sticking with stone all the way around. This is why we've cut out quartz counter tops and a few other things that can always be changed later if we wanted.
Can you imagine this as brick? Just not the same is it?
I was waiting with "baited breath" come Monday ! Keep them coming !
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