front door options

We need to choose our exteriors doors so that Neil can install the final casing and then put a temporary door up to secure the house.  Many of the contemporary door styles, just don't fit with what we want...and the ones we really like are over $3000 for one door, like 3 or 5 below.  We like the use of metal on those two and our thinking is to do something ourselves, like #6.  Start with a $600 fir door (which is really a fir veneer with a solid core of other wood) and then route out and apply a metal panel to the exterior.  Even thinking of laser cutting our address number into the top panel.






























I used photoshop elements for the study above.  I took a still image from the model that i had created for the drawings in Archicad and grabbed images off webpages of the front doors and replaced the doors with the different styles.  The lighting isn't perfect, but it very quickly shows the options.

rug choices

Sometimes it is just to hard to visualize something in my head, especially when there is so much else going on in there. Photoshop is definitely a great tool to help with this and make decisions. I've shown a few examples on this blog at how I use it. Right now it's coming in handy with rug colors. Do we go off-white, dark gray, black or brown? We are moving our couch over soon and putting a new gray cover on it. It will be a couple shades lighter than the chair - kind of like the mid tone of the blanket. Is that too much gray? I do like the darker shades. Dark for a floor is my preference. We have a light blue carpet in our current home and it shows all the fuzz of 2 cats.

genesee home

The Karina is not the first project that Neil and I have worked on together. The home we currently live in was the first and was completed in 2006...before we were married. The project was to design and construct a garage with an Accessory Dwelling Unit (ADU) above it, or "mother-in-law" apartment. This was before the now allowed Detached ADU, so it had to be "attached" to the existing 800 sqft, 1930's house. I designed it so that eventually the older house could be demolished and the garage/apartment could stand alone. Our property is skinny...only 30' wide by 100' and it's on a busy street. We actually didn't max out the current lot coverage at the time, but we came close to it. Our neighbors property is about 4' or so higher than ours, so we were not concerned with blocking sunlight. My main concern was balancing Neil's wants of a large garage (lots of tools, motorcycles, work area) and maximizing the apartment size with addressing the street and wanting to bring down the scale of the addition. The new addition would be where Neil lived and he ended up renting out the older house for a couple years...until I moved in in 2008. Now my stuff lives in the older place and our day to day living is in the 500 sqft apartment.
Both Neil and I wanted to paint the house grey. Even in our grey Seattle weather, I love this shade. It's rich, yet isn't stand-outish. I really wanted the new house to fit into our surroundings. We originally thought we would use yellow as an accent, but doing these photoshop mock-ups, we realized we wanted something more subtle.

accent color choice

Neil is about to install the gable end vertical siding and I need to decide on color. Either a lighter tone of the body with an accent stripe or just go all red? Photoshop comes in handy for these kinds of things.