Before the Redo
“It reminds me of Legos,” says Dan Kern of his 1970s Garrison Colonial, in Northfield, New Jersey. “It’s just one block stacked on top of another, without any architectural detail.” The no-frills facade is typical of its era but a far cry from the Craftsman-style homes that Dan and his wife, Kelli, admire.
To help the Kerns translate their Craftsman dreams into reality, This Old House turned to architect Max Hayden, based in nearby Hopewell, New Jersey. His plan would start by adding a porch with a pronounced roof overhang that extends up the sides of the house to the ridgeline—an immediate way to give the boxy original some architectural identity.
After the Redo
To offer the couple some upgrade ideas, we turned to architect Max Hayden, based in nearby Hopewell. He’d start by adding a porch with a pronounced roof overhang that extends up the sides of the house to the ridgeline, giving the original second story the look of a shed dormer. Adding an overhang to the existing roof edges is less costly than replacing the roof, but the results are just as dramatic. “And the porch masks the offset second story and the asymmetrical windows,” says Hayden. Doubling the windows upstairs adds balance, while the stone-veneered water table anchors the house.
“It’s all really inspiring, but the porch is my favorite part,” says Dan, who hopes to recruit his parents and brothers to help him build it.
Pictured: Stone on the chimney echoes the facade’s new veneered water table.
Additional Windows
Installing two more windows upstairs reduces the dead zone created by back-to-back closets behind this wall.
Pro Tip: Todd Tsiang, a design consultant featured in This Old House Magazine, recommends thinking about window placement room by room: he “always starts by thinking about how rooms will be used, then imagining the various viewpoints from inside.” Bigger isn’t always better—poorly planned windows can frame the driveway or bulkhead while missing the good stuff, like a flowering dogwood in bloom.
Architectural Details
Brackets and exposed rafter tails dress up the eaves.
Garage
A new Craftsman-style door and olive green paint tie the garage into the rest of the house.
Finishing Touches: Shutters
Cutouts embellish simple cedar board-and-batten construction.
Shutter Craft; from about $200 per pair
Finishing Touches: Paint
Renwick Olive, Roycroft Copper Red, and Roycroft Vellum perk up taupe siding.
Sherwin-Williams; about $50 per gallon
Pro Tip: When testing exterior paint colors, skip the tiny swatches. As architect Mat advised on a recent This Old House project, it’s “so much better to see it on the actual house, that way you can get a full breadth of what the colors look like on the house itself in context with the house and its surroundings.”
Finishing Touches: Sconce
The prominent bronze metalwork on this wall-mount lantern suits a bungalow-style home.
Capital Lighting; about $115
Finishing Touches: Column
A tapered square post atop a stone pier is a classic Craftsman entry detail.
HB&G Building Products; about $425
While traditional wood columns remain a classic choice, today’s structural columns are often made from fiberglass-reinforced polymer—rotationally formed and rated to carry up to 10,000 pounds. They arrive from the factory smooth and ready for paint, with no wood components, so insects can’t eat them and they won’t rot.
