Have you considered expanding the front porch across the entire front? It would give you a more cozy facade by breaking up the front vertically.

You have window placement issues. You should have the architect defenestrated.
Casey

Hi Hihohiho

Here is what I would do. Currently your elevation has seven or eight different window sizes and combinations, which makes things look scattered, so I think having more repeated elements would make it look much more harmonious. This goes for the roof too. With the six front facing gables you have right now, I think there is just too much going on.

I would align the exterior wall of the foyer and the office, along with the open area and bedroom below, to reduce the number corners you have on the front of the house. This allows you to have one large central mass/gable, which helps balance the house. As for the upstairs windows, you might have to do a little rearranging of the bedroom and bath to keep symmetrical window placement.

Like DennyDine suggested, I'd also extend the porch across the front, and have it wrap around the corners on each end. Along with thicker columns than you currently have, the longer porch helps ground the house and makes your elevation less choppy.

Keep the shutters to only single windows- shutters should not be placed on windows where they would not cover the glass if they were to actually be functional.

Your masonry foundation should stop at the point where floors transition, not at the bottom of your first floor windows as it currently does.

I hope this helps!

This post was edited by nicke360 on Wed, Jun 18, 14 at 16:28

Your roof seems very tall for a shallow house. Is there a third floor/attic?

Nicke360: Your elevation is so beautiful!! The porch, the window placement and balance. everything. If I drove up to that house I would want to buy it instantly. It's the kind of house I always wish would be on the market, but never is (at least not around here). Because the owners hand it down to their kids and never sell. So pretty.

OP: I actually have always liked shallow houses. The light transfers between the rooms and around the house better that way! Another great selling point (not that anyone on this board builds to sell, but still a good consideration). I also like tall houses. I think you should go with the one attic window on the main gable, as above. Just my preference though. Will the attic be living space at some point?

Great job nicke360!

I would make the entire gable to the right of the front door stone. Also, have you thought about incorporating batten board to break things up? I love the roof lines and gables! It's what makes it look custom and not like a box!

Nicke's is head and shoulders above the hat trick of builder cliches. The original is overly ornamented, fractured, and frankly amateur.

Our draftsman is clearly not a designer. She just draws what we ask for/ puts in whatever fits. Which leaves us at this forum ;)

Nicke360 thanks so much! How did you do that? That looks quite nice. My husband is very happy with it (he is freaking out about the house looking big). I have a few questions. I am hoping we can make our plan work with that. For the most part I think we are ok the biggest issue is the rightmost window in the middle set of three. This is a bathroom window and we can't move it or else it will be above a bathtub. Any ideas? I am going to attach a picture of the upstairs floor plan so you can see how it works. Actually I just re-read what you wrote and have a feeling you already saw our plan on the other posting since you knew the bathroom was there.

The one other small concern I have is, I wanted a deep porch so we could hang out on it. My husband wants to save money and therefor only have a small section of it deep. With a porch this wide, I assume we can't afford to have the whole thing deep but at the same time it seems tis design would look bad if only a piece were deeper than the rest. Any ideas? By deep I am thinking like 10 feet? Enough for some seating maybe a glider or something.

We spent literally years working with our architect...I chalk up his fees as my tuition on learning house design...and one of the hardest lessons to learn is that the house must be designed inside and outside at the same time...the windows and shapes on the inside must work on the outside and vice versa. Lots of moving parts coming together to make the house a whole...

What Annie said, you cannot (or should not) do one without the other. And from the looks of it you need an Architect not a draftsman as that elevation is all over the place and quite frankly pretty hideous on my opinion.

Glad you like it! I used Google Sketchup to make a quick model of your house using the exterior dimensions. Due to time restrictions and blurry dimensions I wasn't able to do the work to the plans in the same fashion... please forgive the rough paint mock ups.

Have you thought about moving the playroom up front? Not only would make the windows across front elevation work, but it would make the space less isolated from the rest of the house. Switch the front bedroom with the playroom and put the bathroom in between the new bedroom and the lower right bedroom.

Also, is there any reason that the left portion of the house (living, dining, master bed, master bath) is slightly shorter in the front and the back than the rest of the house? If there isn't a specific reason, go ahead and line those walls up with the others (shown with all red lines). Not only will this get rid of some expensive corners, but it will line up your hip roofs and reduce the expense there as well. (This doesn't mean chop off the office like it shows... that mass falls under the gable extending from the house)

The only solution I could come up with for your deep porch was to move the wall your front door is on back, and line it up with the front wall of the living room. This makes a roughly 20' by 10' rectangular covered area, plus the rest of the porch that runs in front of the office and wraps around the opposite corner (I'd keep these between 6' - 7' deep if you're not planning on using them). I know these changes might affect the coat closet area, so maybe combining the office closet and coat closet into a walk in for the office and using that other strange closet for coats would work.

Moving the wall the front door is on would also move the wall above it, which would alter the main mass/large gable area, so I kept the existing measurements up there and made a ledge overlooking the foyer. Not the best solution, but it could work. Actually none of these ideas are the probably the best solution, but hopefully they give you ideas to go off of.

Some very good ideas thanks! Here are some responses (sorry for the delay, only had time to respond now).

One reason the playroom is in the back corner is that there is a door there to access the garage attic. I imagine we will use that space for storage and if we ever needed more space (which is unlikely but you never know), we could easily open it up. Also, we were hoping to keep the bedrooms all the same size, 12x13, and I think to put it there, it would have to be a few feet smaller. Also, not very important, the back of the house is southern exposure so that also has more light and I imagine we will be using the playroom quite a bit.

The left side was slightly shorter than the rest because my husband wanted to try and cut off some square footage (save on taxes) and we felt the living/dining room was already bigger than we needed. He does like your design though so he might be open to increasing the size slightly to achieve a better look.

I will have to try and think of some other tricks to achieve the window spacing. Your ideas are very clever. I do think I would rather leave the playroom but I am sure there must be some way to work around it. What do you think of dormers? I have always loved them but not sure they would work in your design. I will try to give this all some more though tomorrow to see if I can come up with something. Not sure of how you think of these great ideas so fast! Even the tiniest things seem to take me forever.

A big question is why isn't your designer using SketchUp? I don't know an architect who doesn't prefer it to 2D drafting software for design. A computer drawing of an elevation is only useful for bidding and construction; it is of little use for design.

The view of a house in elevation is as if you were looking at it through a very long lens from a great distance. In reality what you actually see is distorted by foreshortening. The front porch will look big and the giant hipped roof will look shorter. You need to stop designing as if you were in the next county with a telescope. Plans and Elevations only exist on paper.

This post was edited by Renovator8 on Fri, Jun 20, 14 at 0:06

The house appears to be designed as most have been in this century by first developing a first floor plan then the second floor plan and then putting a roof on it composed of trusses enclosing unconditioned and unoccupied attic space. Then multiple front facing gables and partial gables with unusable windows are added and multiple cladding materials are used to reduce the apparent size of the house.

The roof design tradition before the use of trusses often used a 1 1/2 or 1 3/4 story shell broken by dormers that often allowing the second floor to be 90% of the second floor area. This reduced the volume of the attic, lowered the ridge and produced a 1 1/2 story profile at the ends of the house.

The most common version of this design concept is a gambrel roof with a shed dormer running almost the full length of the house. A better version is to use large front facing dormers connected by a shed dormer as shown below.

Nicke360--I like your rendering...a lot. It is very pleasing to my eye. But can the OPs designer make the changes you did and still come out with the same effect? Are these changes that can be made without the proper software?

R8--I like the sketch you did. I don't want to hijack this thread but since everything I've seen from my architect is hand drawn so far, I wondered if maybe I should be seeing something in Sketchup. This article may be outdated but I thought it was an interesting perspective. It would be nice if someone would clarify when computers should do the work and when the Architect's hand should do the work.

Here is a link that might be useful: Link to article

Renovator 8: That is exactly how it was done. We did first floor, then second floor, then exterior. Our designer doesn't seem knowledgable about design. The original exterior she gave me was pretty awful. The current version is a very large improvement over that. Though we are still unhappy with it, in comparison it seems decent. I honestly have a feeling she doesn't know how to use sketch up (or at least she has no intention of using it for our project). I used it awhile back when I was trying to layout the kitchen. I can try it again now but I have a feeling it will take me many hours to do basic mock-ups. I am still amazed that Nicke360 was able to do that mockup!

You seem to know a to about exterior work. Are gables poor design? I know most houses in the neighborhood that our house will be in have that design element. My husband and I love dormers and more cozy/country design but we also don't want to stand out too much. It seems both you and Nicke360 use a very symmetrical design which seems very appealing.

The idea of a reduced attic height also seems like a good way to make the house seem smaller. Not sure how we would cut back the square footage of the 2nd floor at the moment since we wanted the bedrooms to be a minimum size and cutting it would mean making them smaller.

I wasn't really sure what direction you wanted to go style-wise so I tried to do a prairie rendition and maybe went a little crazy with the overhangs and the columns. However, I realized after your comments that I think you're looking for something different, so I'm going to try something with more countryish with dormers next. If you have any inspiration pictures post a couple, maybe there's a way to incorporate what you like without too much trouble.

4H, the 2nd floor space lost in the fake 1 1/2 story design would only be where the roof drops down at the corners to look like a 1 1/2 story house which is perhaps 40 s.f. (10 s.f. x 4 ). It's really a 2 story house disguised as a 1 1/2 story house. This is a very common design trick for those who do not want tall 2 story houses and/or low sloped roofs. That was a common goal until builders discovered roof trusses and tall houses with stuttering gables became the norm.

Red, using a computer to design a house is far more difficult than doing it by hand however when it is time to draw the construction documents the computer is far more efficient especially if you already have the design drawings on the computer. But beginning the design on the computer is simply a terrible way to design for several reasons:
1) there is no scale on a computer; you make the drawing larger or smaller simply by rolling the mouse scroll wheel or clicking a zoom tool button. Therefore a designer has no way of judging the proportion of design elements when they are not on screen at the same time and a very poor sense of it when they are. Architectural design is all about proportion and scale so the difference between one designed on a computer and one designed by hand should be immediately apparent.
2) The computer doesn't like approximations so you must enter exact dimensions.
3) The computer interface is not as direct and fast as the signals from your brain to your hand. It is therefore much easier to test ideas with a pen or pencil and then put another layer of tracing paper over it and develop the idea further. Drawing on a computer involves constant interface decisions that are not necessary when drawing by hand.

IMO Sketch Up is the most important design tool developed in 50 years. It makes it possible to design in 3 dimensions on a computer. That was not possible before or at least not without thousands of dollars in software and hundreds of hours of training and those programs were not easy to use even after the training. SketchUp does require training but the tutorials on YouTube are excellent and there is professional training available online or in seminars.

Here is a link that might be useful: Windows tutorial

This is the original design the old exterior was based on

http://i113.photobucket.com/albums/n227/hihohihohihohiho/Mobile%20Uploads/ScreenShot2014-01-11at75448PM_zpsa3f621a2.png

I am not sure what to call our style. Something like traditional with a little farm mixed in. I also like craftsman but my husband isn't a huge fan. I honestly haven't seen any pictures online that I am completely in love with. I looked at houzz, any other sites to scour? I attached a few links to pictures below. How does the 1 1/2 or 1 3/4 roofs work? I think that is something we would want to do. I am not a huge fan of that prairie look. You guys are amazing. We can't believe how skilled you are.

This is his favorite house
http://i113.photobucket.com/albums/n227/hihohihohihohiho/Mobile%20Uploads/photo1_zps93140fb6.png

I think this one is cute but that might just be because it is a small house. He doesn't love it
http://i113.photobucket.com/albums/n227/hihohihohihohiho/Mobile%20Uploads/ScreenShot2014-06-20at54838PM_zpsac4a97dd.png

This one looks like renovator8's design...pretty nice
http://i113.photobucket.com/albums/n227/hihohihohihohiho/Mobile%20Uploads/ScreenShot2014-06-20at55144PM_zpsda36dc13.png

I like, husband doesn't
http://i113.photobucket.com/albums/n227/hihohihohihohiho/Mobile%20Uploads/245ea7fe1e63c82d566e46baa1526ea4_zps12b8781d.jpg

Maybe something like this could work? I dropped the roof on the master bedroom and the far right bedroom so the exterior wall is only 3-4 feet opposed to a full 9 foot wall. I'm not really sure what the term would be but the windows could be put into half dormers that would have the full 9 foot exterior wall. I think this makes everything look a bit less huge, and you really wouldn't lose too much space in the bedrooms.

I still like the first rendering the best. My husband is happy with that as is. I would like to add a few more details. I like having some kind of gable or something over the front door to make it stand out a little. Also I still wonder if there is a way to keep the porch on the left since that will give us a large area but still keep the expense down a bit. I tried to take rendering 1, and add a few things from other images I have seen that I like. Not sure at all if this works. Here is my attempt at a sketch (also can't draw so please excuse). I liked the Tres LeFleur house recently posted. I tried to copy that 1.5 story entrance roof, then add that to the main gable of the second floor. Also added two dormers on each side, and made the roof lower like was suggested on the sides with the dormers (not all the way to the base of the dormers, but starting at somewhere around the window height). Had no idea how to draw the porch in perspective but it would be the front door segment and the area to the left of it, built out about 10 feet or so. The area to the right could maybe be just a small roof with no porch? Again not sure if that works at all. And I wasn't sure what to do about the window above the front door (drew circle) and the windows in the main gable section. Any opinions on this design?

I see some interesting possibilities in your sketch.

Does a 1.5 story roof over a font door/porch make sense? The plan I saw it in was a (mostly) one story house so not sure how it works in a 2 story (where the entrance area has a 2 story ceiling height). I also wasn't sure about how the window above the door would work with something like that (drew a circle but not sure that's the solution). In general not sure about any of the windows (when to use single windows, double, shutters etc.) But in general do you like this style? It's ok if 'interesting possibilities' means its ugly! Just tell me. I am at a loss with this elevations thing. I just wanted to add a little more to the blue house design niccke360 did. I also tried to take some elements of Renevator8's design as well (like the two symmetrical dormers). I am trying to start copying this into sketchup and I think I can get the box shape of the basic house but no idea how to go about roofs.

This has been a very educational post - I am really enjoying it!

Another updated sketch. This has Nicke360's sketch on the bottom to compare. The new one is on top. Very similar to my last posting but no more 1.5 story entry. And a little more simple. I think husband and I are both liking this but what is the general consensus? Also one big usse with this design is the porch. We want a nice deep porch but didn't want to spend too much on it so were thinking something like 13x10 or so. In this new plan the porch (or at least porch roof) is the length of the house. This breaks the house up well and makes it look smaller but we are not sure we can afford to build that much porch (and not sure if building code will allow it). If this went the length of the house it would range in width form 10' to 6'7 (based on the outer walls of the house being at different depths). I think that is probably the minimum width I would want for it running the length of the house but I think the price will upset my husband. We might be able to build just part of the roof line as a porch as the rest just be a small roof overhang but I think that might look weird since the segment of porch is a bit deep and the overhang would probably only be a foot or two. Any ideas/opinions on this? Thanks again to everyone for providing so much input. This had really been such a great place to develop our ideas.

You've got the right idea using sketches instead of computer drawings but its still difficult to do it efficiently going back and forth between elevations and plans and even harder to communicate those designs to others. To avoid all of that difficulty you should be designing in 3D with SketchUp.

Renovator8- I completely agree. My computer that has sketchup on it is down at the moment, and my skills aren't great. I am hoping to try it out. I am not sure if i will be able to figure out the roof details in a reasonable amount of time....I will play around with it today