new house

Porch Plans for the New House

August 23, 2016 · decorating the roost, Homesteading, new house

I recently teamed up with Arhaus to collaborate and brainstorm with them on the subject of turning an outdoor space into an additional living space with the comfort and warmth of the indoors. This trend is growing everywhere as we seek to make porches, patios, and garden areas into secondary living rooms set right into nature.

If you know anything about houses in North Carolina you will know that living out the country almost always necessitates having a screened-in porch!! We already use our screened-porch as an additional room for entertaining, dining, storage, and a whole host of other things.

We are planning to have a screened-porch at our new house that we are building (getting closer to starting–yay!) and it will be significantly larger. Actually, it will be pretty huge. I’m so excited about the possibilities of turning this room into another space for dining, entertaining, lounging around, and as a place for growing some plants and a little bit of extra storage. We tend to host a good number of get-togethers with a lot of family and friends and we always need more seating for dinners. The porch will be our perfect party spot.

Below is a look at our porch from our 3D model of the new house. You will notice we did not include any screening or a porch door on this model so you just have to use your imagination.

Rear elevation of 3D modeling of house, the porch is located at the center and right (imagine screening between those posts). There will also be a screened porch door and steps, as well as two windows on either side of the French doors that are missing from this rendering.

Side elevation of 3D modeling of the house, the screened porch is to the far left.

I’ve also drawn up a little sketch of my plans for our new porch using the current porch furniture we have as well as a few new things I hope to have (aka, getting my hubby to build me a super long farm table!).

We have already picked out a few of the details like fans and French doors but there is still much to be decided. Making a porch feel more like another living space requires that you fill and decorate the space with things you wouldn’t expect necessarily in an outdoor space. Things like:

-Furniture (check out the sofas and sectionals from Arhaus located here and here)

-Pillows and throws

-Storage pieces (the one on our current porch is made from free wood pallets!)

-rugs

-light fixtures

-outdoor fireplace (not sure if this will ever happen, but hey, one can dream!)

I put together an inspiration board (see below) for my porch on Olioboard, to better see what everything will look like put together. I love rustic wood elements, a few of industrial accents, and styles that remind me I do indeed live on a farm and the screened porch will indeed get dirty 🙂

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Feathered Nest Friday

Cutting Costs in a Custom Build

July 25, 2016 · decorating the roost, new house

This is the current state of our dining room table. Oh, the fun of building a house!

Our cost-to-build estimate for our new house went over budget of what the new house appraised for–by quite a bit. So, we are finding ourselves having to cut or change things in order to find more cost savings.

We knew with our budget we certainly wouldn’t be building our “dream home” but we are still hoping to include a lot of nice custom features. As we analyze the cost-to-build numbers with our builder, we are making changes and cuts to save some cash so that we can invest in the few things that we absolutely don’t want to compromise on (which is mostly me putting up a big fight on things like windows, ceiling height, and the fireplace). Building a house can cause a lot of arguments with your spouse, so choose your battles wisely!

Below is a list of some of the things we are doing to save on costs:

1. Lower grade flooring in some rooms. Carpet for all bedrooms and upstairs loft, linoleum in the laundry room. Save nicer hardwoods for great room, dining room, kitchen and entry hall.

2. DIY open shelving instead of upper cabinets in the kitchen.

3. Stock/inexpensive bath vanities in the children’s and guest baths

4. Inexpensive tile in bathrooms (and for Kitchen backsplash)

5. Minimizing the complexity of the roofline

6. Minimizing corners of the exterior of the house

7. Simple interior moldings and woodwork, no crown molding

8. Composite interior doors instead of solid wood. Save solid wood for front door and French doors.

9. Wood decking floor for the screened-in porch instead of tongue-and-grove flooring

10. No cabinets in laundry room (we will build our own in later)

11. DIY shelves in pantry

12. Reuse of our current refrigerator, washer and dryer

13. Doing all of the landscaping work ourselves

14. Painting all the interior walls one color to start, no complicated paint designs

15. Finding light fixtures that are on clearance or repurposed from Craigslist or Ebay

16. Finding cheap salvaged brick to use for foundation, fireplace and chimney

For those of you with experience in house-building, can you add anything else to this list?

Sketch-Up 3D model of the New House

May 21, 2016 · new house

My husband is definitely a jack-of-all-trades. He is surprisingly talented at SO many things outside of his forte as a scientist, and in addition to leading the way in our house building process he took the initiative to build a 3D model of our house in Google Sketch-Up.

I especially need to be able to see things visually and spatially a lot of times before I can make design decisions, so this modeling has been extremely useful for us. It’s also just really cool and fun to work with! Of course we don’t have every detail on the model yet, but here is a rough draft of what the exterior of the house may eventually look like from several different angles:

Front Elevation

Side Elevation (Screened Porch, Master Bed and Bath)

Rear Elevation (Screened Porch and Laundry Room)

Side Elevation (Kitchen, Breakfast and Dining Room)

You can also model/design the interior and add various textures (aka materials) walls and so forth. Sketch-Up even has furniture you can place inside the house if you want to see how different layouts will look. The textures do make the actual model look a little off in terms of color and tone, but it gives you a general idea. For example, we aren’t planning on doing a green metal roof (most likely a gray or silver one) but it comes out looking light green on the model in Sketch-Up.

Below is a section of the model looking into the kitchen and breakfast area with the dining room on the far right and the pantry and laundry on the far left. I’m excited to be able to print out these sections for each wall so that I can draw or write onto it notes for materials, paint colors, and other design features.

Section of the what will be the south elevation, looking at from left to right: laundry, pantry, breakfast nook, kitchen, and dining room.

My husband says it wasn’t at all difficult to do (but he doesn’t think anything technical like this is hard!) but it does take some time and a bit of playing around with Sketch-Up to learn the ropes. I used to use Sketch-Up in graduate school and haven’t touched it for quite some time, but I’m learning quickly again 🙂

Have any of you used Sketch-Up or a similar program for design work?

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The Scoop

Spring at the Roost

April 25, 2016 · chickens, Homesteading, new house

Ahhhh, springtime. We just returned from spending a couple of weeks in Kentucky with family and since I hadn’t posted in a while I thought I would share with you a few glimpses of our spring around here. I wish I had remembered to capture photos of when the redbuds are all in bloom because it is always so beautiful!

Our chickens have been enjoying the warm North Carolina spring weather…..and (hopefully) we will have some baby chicks soon as we have a broody sitting on eggs as we speak 🙂

The screened porch is a must-have here in the country and we are planning for an extra large one in our new house!

I love hellebores–they survive in shade, are hardy, and multiply every year! Also such a classic southern addition to any garden.

Of course you will not find our house without flats of seedlings and starts either under a grow light or hardening off on the porch like these tomato plants are. They will go into the ground in the next week weather permitting.

Because we have been so busy planning for the new house this spring, for a while now I’ve neglected our current rental in terms of any decor projects or updating. As you can see below, our house plans came and it is exciting to see the all of the details laid out! Now on to the land survey, building permits, and plan modifications with our builder.

I hope you are having a pretty spring and I can’t wait to update you as we continue the new house design and building process!

Homestead Design: Landscape Details

March 16, 2016 · gardening, Homesteading, new house

Lets talk homestead landscaping!

A lot of times landscaping around a house is an afterthought but in planning our homestead I think it is important that we design the landscaping simultaneously with the house itself, so that they can evolve together and so that we can maximize the use of the plants–whether they be ornamental, edible, medicinal, or as natural pest control.

FYI– if you haven’t heard, we are building a house on 10 acres in the country! You can read about our decision here and look at my first draft of a homestead design here.

In addition to designing the kitchen garden, I’m hoping that the landscaping around the house and driveway can be just as functional and beautiful. I plan on putting in some of my favorite flowering plants and bushes like hydrangeas, peonies and lilacs, a couple of small flowering fruit trees such as cherry and non-fruiting ones such as camellias, a small herb garden on the rear elevation of the house and shade-loving perennials on the north elevation of the house.

The orchard will be located to the southeast of the house where we plan to have varieties of apple, peach, pear, fig, plum and nectarine trees. Large and medium sized trees such as pecan, walnut, American hazelnut, magnolia and oaks will provide nice shade in the summertime and as a bonus supply us with nuts or pretty foliage.

I have zero experience with landscape design so I very much value your suggestions and advice! What do you think?