I am planning to get a facelift

We went and talked with the designer who is coming up with a plan for residing and reroofing the house. Since it will get an entirely new skin, we want to add a little drama. The front of the house looks like we live in a hobbit hole at best, in the hobbit's garage at worst. The siding and roof are in bad shape, though not leaking. He has come up with a very cool entryway addition with some pretty exciting posts and beams, with a metal roof and board & batten siding. We also asked him to incorporate some stacked stone facing, and he has lots of it in more places than I had thought of, so that is a big plus. We had a bit of a problem imagining exactly what this might look like with the actual materials, so he is going to work up the design drawings a bit more with some color adjustments, and also a couple alternatives for materials. But I did some surfing and found a blog with some nice examples of these materials, so now I am starting to get it. Here are two paticularly nice pictures from that blog, with all the elements he showed us, just not in the same configurations.

Our windows don't open out like the ones below, but this is a very nice example of the types of materials and structures we will probably incorporate into the changes to the facade. He has proposed using cabling like this for the railings on the decks, which i also love.

I found a "Better Homes & Gardens" specialty magazine called "Exteriors" (they have one for every topic I can thing of) that has some other interesting variations along this same theme. After I show these to my husband and get a yes/no vote on the options, I will go back to the designer and see if we can finalize the plans.

Then we'll need to get bids.

Gulp.