Revisions

The first "draft" Bill presented me with was actually pretty good. Layout wise, I was pretty happy. Nice open kitchen, garage in the basement, etc. However, I did think the aesthetics needed some work. First of all, the peak on the living room window in general seemed a little out of date to me. I grew up on a street where the majority of the houses were built in the 60's and most of them have that look. Not that there's anything wrong with it, it works well for some people. I just didn't think it was for me. Here's a picture of a similar house. Mind you it still wouldn't have been exactly like this even with what Bill proposed.

The first thing I noticed that I wanted to change (other than the "porthole" above the front door) was how flat the front window was to the house. I wanted some sort of boxing or "bay-ing" of the window.

Here would be an example of what I refer to as "boxing":


I definitely liked this a lot more than Option #1 but I had to be honest with myself, something didn't seem quite right.

I eventually ended up driving by a few houses with bay windows. I liked them but the majority of them seemed to be much bigger houses. Much to my delight, it was do-able for me as well.

An example that caught my eye was this:

Other than the fact that there was no garage, this house was definitely more up my alley (minus the "porthole"...if anyone can explain the appeal of these things, let me know).

I thought some more and looked at this one and a few other rival designs. Something wasn't quite right about this one either. Overall, I prefer when the bay window is in the living room and basement for this type of design. I found a house that exhibited this feature and I was pretty much sold:

This design was definitely close to the one. I cleaned up a few things, removed the peaks from the windows, and the large overhang drifting over the door and finally came up with:

Insert random potlights in some strategic places and you have my new home!