Exterior

 After the layout and lot, the next set of home-building decisions center on the exterior and foundation. This post is about the exterior and elevation because it's not so technical!

When we first started talking about building our own house, I was in love with the idea of the grand foyer, the two-story great room, and the arched front entrance. I was thinking of something like this:

But then, as Niels swayed me over the green side and I started to see the beauty of a more understated foyer, great room and front entrance. We seemed drawn to contemporary craftsman houses with their cute fat stone pillars, like this: 

In fact, we kept coming back to this gray house. It's a gorgeous dark gray, and with the white trim, it really pops. When we drove by it recently, the owners were out front and we told them we had been admiring their house for almost two years, based on the first picture we had taken of it. They were gracious enough to let us take a few closer pictures:

See that pretty purple door? I'm getting a pretty purple door!!!

This is the actual gray we'll have (with white soffit, fascia, trim). It's called Granite Gray by Certainteed  Vinyl Siding.  On the sample it looks a bit lighter than our inspiration house, but we didn't want to pay more for a custom color.

Fun fact: There are two styles of siding: Dutchlap and clapboard. You can see a picture of the difference below. Despite the name, we are NOT going with the Dutchlap. We like the cleaner lines of the clapboard, and there's our beautiful gray again
.

After the siding, it was off to the stone yard to pick out our stone. We knew we wanted something with color. We had two companies to choose from: Paragon and Dutch Quality. In case down to color, and we went with Paragon Poplar Bluff.

Poplar Bluff with our Granite Gray and White siding samples.

Larger sample of the Poplar Bluff, shown in limestone. We're leaning toward the Manor Stone, though we haven't priced it out yet. If there's a difference, we'll go with the bargain. 

 So, that brings us to our current elevation, and maybe now you can picture what it will look like in living color!