Getting down to business

Only my husband would wake up on Christmas day and think, "What a perfect day to start remodeling!" He's been outside happily (no joke) hanging new siding (he prepped them by priming and painting each piece in the basement this week and ripped the old siding off at the same time).  Here's some pics of the man and his work (and the sunny Christmas day).

Our siding is going to be "board and batten" style, like this (source):

Mark had this style in his mind since the beginning (he has been itching to get that plastic siding off since we bought the place), but I wasn't quite sold.  It was in Hawaii that I saw a bunch of houses that had that same style on the top floor with brick/stone on the lower floor and I was finally convinced it would look good.

Now, mind you, we are only doing this one side of the house because we are enclosing the covered patio - that whole side will be done and new.  We'll do the rest of the house later. I love mismatched siding. It reminds me of my first car. I think I had three different colors on that thing for a while.

Anyway, back to what I was talking about... Tomorrow, Mark is going to start framing in the enclosure of the side patio (which will become a part of our master suite). So, I guess without further ado, here is the plan!

Our house layout (top floor) currently looks like this (the living room and part of the entry is missing, I know, but we aren't really touching those):

And this is going to be the finished product:

Sorry about the not-quite-to-scale drawings.  The two guest/kid bedrooms upstairs are going to be a little smaller, but they'll be for kids in the future, and if (once we finish the basement) we have two more bedrooms downstairs plus another huge living area...I'm sure they'll have more than enough play room.  As you can see, we are also planning on turning the dining nook into part of the master suite, something I was not willing to do at first, but if we wanted 3 bedrooms upstairs, I had to make a sacrifice. I will gain a nice big window seat in my room - my own personal sunny reading nook (it faces west)!  Overall, I think our plan will work well!!

(We are completely ignoring the basement of our house for now...it's truly a gross dungeon...but we do have plans to tackle it in the future so that all 3200 square feet are fresh and new!)