Designing a timeless home and self building our dream home:

Today I’m sharing a DIY dream home build update and how we’ve been focusing on designing a timeless home by choosing classic color pallets and quality materials for the exterior of our new home!

 

 

When we first drew up the floor plan for our home, I was on the fence about the style of the finishes we’d use on the exterior of the house. There are a lot of architectural details and period correct ways of finishing a homes exterior and beautiful styles that I love and am really drawn to.

We have over 20 years experience renovating and updating homes vs. building a new home is very different from remodeling. When you update a home, you already have some boundaries and perimeters  as far as the architectural style of the home and that gives you a starting point. I quickly learned that designing and building a timeless home from scratch is totally different than renovating a home. 

 

With new builds there are countless options and choices to be made and it was very important (as the one making these choices) that I was clear on the direction I wanted to go, that I chose our materials in advance and that I didn’t chose and install one material at a time (running the risk that it could start to look very disjointed).

The Original Blue Print below is pictured with vertical board and batten siding…much more farmhouse than what we wanted

 

 

During the planning process, I found that one of the best ways to narrow down your design style is to go back through your Pinterest boards and start paying attention to things that are either pinned multiple times or pins that are super similar to one another. Take a closer look at what is similar about the images…are you seeing a certain design style popping out at you? What are you drawn to? I was very focused on designing a timeless home. 

The majority of my favorite photos/pins were all from “Period Architecture” based in PA. Their work is outstanding and absolutely beautiful!

 

Looking at my Pinterest boards with fresh eyes was really helpful for me in realizing what my heart was drawn to over and over. Timeless, white, lap siding kept popping up on my Pinterest boards over and over. I also either pinned houses with cedar shake roofs or a med brown tone roofing material. I pinned countless homes that were true colonial homes and others that leaned more towards French Colonial and some that leaned a little in the direction of Pennsylvania Farmhouse/ Colonial style. And STONE…every house I really loved had some amount of real stonework on the front or skirting/foundation area! 

MY PINTEREST EXTERIOR INSPIRATION BOARDS

 

 

I read through a lot of books and watched videos to learn as much as I could about period correct architecture. Brent Hull on YouTube is a wealth of knowledge and I learned  a lot about architectural details when designing a timeless home from his videos. The books  “Get Your House Right”   and  “Creating a New Old House”  were two that really answered a lot of my questions and taught me a lot.

 

 I decided to lean into a bit of a blend of Classic Colonial, Colonial Farmhouse and French Colonial styles for the exterior and interior of this home for the finishes. Once I had that decided, choosing materials became a lot easier because it ruled out anything that didn’t either fit in that category or if it isn’t true colonial, it needed to at least blend with it seamlessly and complement it (in a more fresh and updated way).

 

 

 

Looking back, I am grateful that out house is taking so long to complete (we are hand building the home ourselves) because it gives me time to really think through all the decisions that have to be made every day. This is our forever home and we are putting a lot of man hours working on this home…so I am glad I don’t feel rushed. I can take it one day at a time and hopefully make as many timeless choices as possible. 

 

 

I believe that our homes tell a story and they have a narrative. I hope that when our home is all completed, it doesn’t actually look like a brand new build. If our guests (someone who didn’t know our story) walk into our home and have NO idea when the house was built, maybe ask us when it was remodeled or ask if something is original to the home or new, that would be a huge complement! 

 

 

We want our home to feel like it was created for the property (it truly was designed for this land). I’d like it to feel as if the center section of the home was the original farmhouse, maybe built 100+ years ago and that it had additions built onto it over the years. I wanted to feel as if it already had a long life, many memories had been made here, and most of all I want it to feel warm, cozy and full of love. 

 

Rendering mockups of the exterior of the house was very helpful and gave me a visual and a better idea of what my house would look like with different types of siding and multiple colors (just to be sure I was going to be happy with the choices I was making). It was wonderful to be able to digitally swap out things like the front door style and colors, light fixtures, paint the garage door different accent colors and I even considered Stucco for the home at one point. Yes, I know NOT colonial style whatsoever…but it was a process to narrow it all down and making those mockup pictures on  Canva.com really helped me make some pretty big decisions for sure (even though I am very aware my mockup skills are lacking…they still helped)! 

 

 

 

I have always been drawn to timeless design and prefer to use real, raw materials (over the manmade option) when the budget allows. While I do enjoy a “trend” as much as anyone, I never opt for trendy finishes and material for big ticket items that are not easily replaced on a home. Our homes tell a story and it’s important to choose materials on the exterior that coordinate with the architectural style of the home and take into account the location and surroundings as well as making sure the exterior and the interior of the home are telling the same story.

 

 

Choosing the exterior materials for your home can be exciting but also a bit daunting. There are so many choices to make and siding is a huge investment.We researched siding, the pros and cons. of each brand and chose James Hardie Plank Select Cedarmill siding. It came primed and painted and we chose the color Arctic White for a classic and enduring look.

 

 

Before choosing siding, we also took into account the cost of not only the siding itself but the trim as well. We have over 4o windows and 7 exterior doors to trim around so we knew the cost of the trim would add up fast. We researched the install process  quite heavily because we’d be doing the work ourselves. We needed  to make sure we understood what all was involved.

 

 

Equally as important as cost of materials and labor, of course I thought a lot about the design and style. We wanted our home to be as timeless and classic as possible and that’s what lead us to choosing this siding even though we realized it would be challenging to install due to the fact that our home is ICF construction. Install on ICF required use screws instead of nails to install all the siding on the house and trim around each window and door opening. 

 

 

The corner pieces I chose really slowed us down. Hardie siding doesn’t make a product like this so we got these elsewhere. They had to be installed one row at a time and because they didn’t make the size we needed, we had to pilot drill a hole in each side before screwing them into the corner. It was very tedious and time consuming. On top of that, you can’t start the next row of siding until you’ve gone all the way around the joining wall on the house. It probably sounds confusing, just trust me when I say…It was complicated and meant moving ladders or the skytrak we rented way more times than if we would have just run a piece of Hardie trim down the outside corners on each side (vertically) to butt the siding up to. I think we would have finished in ½ the time. But, I’m glad it’s behind us, I am really happy with how it looks.

 

 

As we installed the trim and siding we also installed the needed flashing and used color match exterior caulking and touched up the paint everywhere as we worked (so we wouldn’t need to come back to that area later to touch up any paint or anything). We worked off of ladders and rented a Skytrak for 5 weeks. My husband built a platform to work off of on the forks of the Skytrak and I operated it while he installed the siding from the platform. 

 

 

We trimmed out the windows and doors with James Hardie Trim on every opening except the front center section. I used Canva.com again to mock up some different options for the window trim on the four windows that are front and center. I chose a 12″ tall colonial window pediment for above those windows to add more detail and character to the front of the home. I’m also considering using the same crosshead/pediment for above our main entry double doors as well!

 

I color matched Arctic White paint and used my Wagner paint sprayer to give them a few coats of paint before installing them on the front of the house and caulking around the siding and trim.

 

 

After a couple months working on siding we paused on that  because we still had a lot of work to do on the other two front sides of the house before we could continue with the siding including building a wrap-around porch on the North and East end and installing all the stonework on the front center section of the home. Which I’ll share more about later on in an upcoming blog post.

 

 

I can’t wait to share the continued progress and more about the exterior finishes we chose. If you’d like to see the progress updates be sure to click this video below and make sure to subscribe to my YouTube channel to look back to see the entire self building journey so far and to for all the future progress updates to come!

 

Thanks so much for following along on our DIY dream home build journey!