3 - Elevations

With thunderstorms comes the inability to sail. We haven't gotten to sail the past two nights, which are our typical race nights out at the lake. A little bummed by it, but we did get the chance to drive by our future neighborhood again since we were up that way. Imagine our excitement when we see the "sold" sign on our lot!

So, a lot of decisions must be made when it comes to building a house, obviously. I anticipated the more obvious ones, but one that I didn't think of was the front elevation of the home. The elevation is basically how the exterior of a house looks from certain angles.  Who knew?! Probably most people, but not us.

We got to meet the director of sales during one of our visits to the model home. Yes, we frequent often. He said that, while we wait for our design meeting to get scheduled, we should drive around and look at some of the completed homes to see what type of features we'd be interested in. We were thinking brick, doors, window accents, etc..., but didn't realize this also included the style of roof too. Interesting. Here are some of the ones we've seen, that are options.

This is the basic roof style, which is just two gables. We'll have a column that comes off the front corner of the porch covering that wasn't added to this house. We're going with a brick column, but they can do cedar as well. We thought brick would be more low maintenance... and we're all about low maintenance.

The next two are what the builder called triple gables. If we went this route, I think we prefer the bottom one, where the middle section isn't so tall. It just looks better to us compared to the top one. The only thing is, Vernon was concerned that the section where the middle, tiny gable meets the other roof line, there's always the possibility that stuff would get stuck be difficult to keep clear. Also the idea of pooling snow, freezing ice, etc just collecting and sitting and potentially giving us roof problems did not seem fun. Things to think about I suppose... It looks nice to me though :)

These next two are dutch gables, though I think the sales girl called them a Texas hip? I couldn't find it on Google, so maybe it's a local term. The top is a less dramatic one. Again, I think the bottom looks nicer, but I don't think we will go with this style. The contrasting shingles would be some type of wood, and we're trying to steer clear of wood in hard to reach places on the house. Neither of us wants the duty of having to stain it, or whatever you do to keep its appearance, in years to come.

This last one, the builder called a clipped gable, but I've also read it called a half hip as well. Maybe there's a difference in the terms, but I didn't look too hard to find out. There were a few houses in the area that had corbels as "braces" underneath the clipped part as well, where the two points are.

I think in the end, we'll either stick with the basic, double gable, roof... or maybe that second triple gable option. Not sure yet. What do you think?