Hello all,

Long time lurker, first time poster.

I'm working on our house and am finally at the point of thinking about an addition to the front to fix what is a very odd design:

Aside from not being very appealing, it's not super functional. The front door opens right into the living room. It would be nice to have some space to unload shoes and generally contain weather related messes outside. Also, the current design doesn't offer much protection from the elements as there is no roof over the large window and front door.

We would like to:

1) add something to break up the 'spaceship' look and give us greater functionality. It would be great to have a front porch area and/or some of the basic features of a mud room or even a vestibule.

2) we would like to bring the garage (red door) indoors and convert that into conditioned space. There are a couple of opportunities included in making that change. If we relocated the front door to the space currently occupied by the garage door, we could have a much nicer entrance and take advantage of what would be a room with nice tall ceilings (10 foot). Making the internal changes is fairly straight forward, how to build them into what we will ultimately do outside is a bit more complicated.

As someone who spends a large part of the day deconstructing buildings from the inside out, I'm not finding the solution to this puzzle very easily and I would sure appreciate any thoughts on how to best approach the 'spaceship' remodel.

Here are a couple of satellite shots to help situate the house:

Thanks!