The Fugly Truth

There are so many things I love about our house and very, very few things I'd change. We've already cleverly solved for most of the design challenges inside and out. But with the exterior paint job set to wrap up shortly on Holtwood House, we find ourselves still scratching our heads over one not so teeny weeny problem.

Behold. The most offensive dormer you've ever seen.

Front view- the ugliest dormer you've ever seen

No rhyme nor reason for this added attraction. It serves no functional purpose and adds no architectural interest to the inside of the garage or anything. It's just there, conjuring up images of the Pizza Hut logo every time we pull in the driveway.

When we bought the house, this was one of those "no problem, we'll fix that" areas and was by no means a deal breaker. It actually was faced (very badly I might add) with regular ol' plywood. Painted blue to match the trim on the house. Why?!

The Mister and I questioned a couple of original homeowners around us about it. We had never been able to find another house in our track with the same dormer so we figured that the previous homeowner had made a very bad decision sometime after the house was built. But we learned that the house actually was built with the dormer in the late 60's. I wish I could have a talk with the architect who had the bright idea for this madness. Why?!

Our first thought was to remove it and re-design the roof atop the garage. That turned out to be a more costly fix than we'd budgeted for with all of the other renovation projects going on. The dormer actually structurally travels all the way from front towards the back of the house. It isn't just something that sits atop the roof. So we learned it would not be a quick and easy job like we had hoped for.

Post stucco work

Fast forward to a year later when we finally began stucco work on the front facade. We figured the stucco would be an upgrade from the plywood facing, so we asked our contractor to finish it off while he was here. Problem is, it made it stand out even more now. We considered applying some sort of moulding or gable vent to design and distract.  But in the end, we decided decorating it would only highlight it. The goal is to make it disappear.

Removal is not an option right now. So we find ourselves faced with two alternatives- paint it a darker color to blend in with the roof or tile the face of it to match.

We're trying paint first. Seems the easiest and most cost effective fix.

Crossing our fingers.