We are now trying to decide on our exterior elevation trim & stairs. This is an ocean front beach home built up on pilings (stilts). These pictures are all looking at the house from the street side. The bottom floor looks fully enclosed, but when you get up close, it is actually louvers with space between the strips for water to flow thru in case of storm overwash. For the middle & top floor, we are leaning towards the vinyl shake siding like this ...

Trim was pretty easy ... we thought the wider trim looked much better (on right). Maybe it should be even wider ?? Any ideas on how to "fancy up" the exterior ? We are looking for ideas on things that won't add a whole lot to the cost.

Which do you like for the gable ?

From the stairs, you step up onto a 5'x5' porch set into the house. As it is now, the railing of the porch follows the line of the bay ... it's kinda hard to tell in the pictures. I can enclose the porch more, partially or fully, and/or we can add a post (which I think we will have to have anyway). 1 shows no bay wall, 2 shows full bay wall with just an opening onto the porch, 3 shows a partial wall, and 4 shows the partial wall with a post. The floorplan drawing shows the layout as a partial wall.

The one we are having the most trouble with ... how to lay out the entry stairs. 1 & 2 are similar, 3 & 4 are similar, and 5 & 6 are the same except 5 has a plant in front of the stairs.

Our entire house is only 36 feet wide (which allows 4 cars wide) and the lot is only 50 feet wide, so no parking space is going to have very far to walk. Setback from the street side of the property line is 25 feet and from there to the street is about another 10-15 feet of useable space (I am showing 10' to street edge in drawings). The building permit will require us to have parking for 6 cars and we will exceed that with parking for 8-9 cars. Under the house (thru garage door) will already park 3 cars in tandem, so all of these layouts work above the requirements for permit purposes. At the beach, all the houses always have to have cars parked tandem (and the resulting moving cars to let someone out).

Ours will not be as fancy on the exterior as these houses which are the exception rather than the rule on our island, which is just a typical NC beach. But our house will be much fancier than a lot of the houses that you can find here. Here are some of my favorite houses on our beach, (we can see the red house from our house) ...