Decisions, decisions … our contractor wants our final selections on the doors and fiber cement siding next week. Since my last post, I’ve pretty much scrapped my plans for the projecting door surrounds I posted earlier and have reverted to going with some sort of typical New England colonial/Georgian/Federal door surround. I also THINK I may have settled on a new color – James Hardie fiber cement siding in “Evening Blue.”

Again, a reminder of what our house currently looks like (click for larger version):

We’ll be keeping the existing shutters. One of them fell off in a recent windstorm and is sitting in our garage right now.

In a nutshell, here are my current questions & concerns:
1. What kind of door surround would look best on our house? I’ve been told it’s best to have our contractor build it from scratch rather than going with a Fypon kit. I would like something that looks solid and correctly designed. It would be nice if the cornice projected a bit, as it currently does – I’ve seen a lot of historical homes in Portsmouth with this. It would be neat to have small corbels appear to support this cornice in some way, but I haven’t seen much precedent for this other than the photo I snapped in Newburyport (see below). Our budget is not particularly big for this door surround (not including the door) – $2,000 – $3,000 materials & Labor. Our granite stoop is 8′ wide.

2. What can we do about that little window over the entry? I think it look rather odd and out of place. The window straddles two closets for the upstairs front bedrooms – in fact, the dividing wall between the two closests appears to be molded right into the center of those glass bricks! So putting in an equal sized window to the other two is out of the question. One idea I had was to board up the current one and trim it out to look like a larger window with two closed shutters. I’ve even thought of putting a real window there but boarding it up behind it with a black background!

3. What kind of window header treatment for the two ganged windows can we install to add some more interest to the front of the house?

4. How wide should our corner trim be? We’d like to add a water table, too.

5. I like the look of dentil trim around the subfascia of the house. Would this be appropriate on our home? There’s not much room between our upper windows and the roof.

6. The door I’ve chosen is most definitely a Craftsman style door, but I really like it. I would go with a more typical 6-panel, no-glass door if we had sidelites or a transom. We have very little room to add sidelites (and zero room for a transom), so we probably won’t be doing that.

***

Here’s a door surround I came across in Newburyport the other day. This is a home that was only built a few years ago, but fits in nicely with the historical neighborhood in which it’s located (click for larger versions):


… and the window headers:

I also thought this door surround was pretty cool with the brackets supporting the cornice, though I’m not sure how “architecturally correct” it is:

Soooo … here are some of my current Google Sketchup / Kerkythea mockups of my house with various color and door surround options:

James Hardie “Evening Blue” with some sort of off-white, cream-colored trim (which REALLY makes me regret our white vinyl replacement windows!!!!):

… with a shuttered fake window over the entry:

… close-up of entry:

… with a triangular pediment:

And other color options:
James Hardie “Harris Cream”:

… I love yellow, but I think I prefer it in smaller doses.

Certainteed Weatherboards “Olive”:

As far as color schemes go, I’d really like the trim (and gutters) to be painted an off-white color as opposed to pure “Azek white.” However, with those vinyl windows, I’m not sure how bad it will look to trim them out in another color. How I wish I could turn back time and go with new construction windows at the same time as re-siding the house! I love the look of black windows with off-white trim.