House Update - End of December

Here's some updated photos of the house.  It's all closed in for the winter with plywood and roofing, but it's harder to tell what is changing from day to day.  The most exciting thing was being able to enter the front door and walk through the entire house.  Up until recently you could go in the front door and see the existing house and then go in the garage to see the new part.  Now they are one cohesive unit.  This week the plumbers, electricians, and the HVAC people have been wrapping up their work.  Next up is insulation and sheet rock...then we will really see the progress.  Unfortunately progress equals $$$.  boo.

We are also trying to take a different design direction with this house than what we did the last time we built.  Our house in Multnomah village was a Craftsman design.  We tried to keep everything consistent with what you would find in a craftsman style home.  This house is a ranch style home that up until we got our hands on it, it was more country than anything.  I don't want to add a bunch of craftsman style things or things that would look out of place so we've been looking around for inspiration.  While driving around Portland we started to see some updated ranch homes that were a little more modern.  Then someone asked us what we were doing for garage doors since they are the first thing you'll see as you drive in.  We realized we needed to do something unique.  All the doors out there seem to be carriage type which we love but it felt a little odd with our design.  Then Andy and I both came to the realization that the aluminium and glass modern doors would be so cool.  They are 2x time garage door budget but after a lot of thinking we realized that it's what we need to do.  It will set the house apart from others from a resale perspective (not moving...but always have to be conscious of that!!), we love the look of the door, and this will let me have my "MODERN RUSTIC" style home.  I've been saying all along I want modern rustic which means wood and metal.  Whoo hoo!  So now that those babies are ordered we've been trying to figure out what we should do for siding of the home.  We have all that wood that was milled on site and just today found out we could also mill some boards to be used horizontally.  So I think we'll have a combo of raw wood and painted batten board.  We still have some time to decide, but that is where our heads are at....for now.

View from the living room

Future home of my new garage doors

Guest bath

coming down the driveway

We took out a long bank of windows and added a double slider to the deck

Master bathtub