We need to see the plans to understand the elevation.

Someone playing blind man’s bluff randomly tagged each area for a different cladding?

You should be concerned that there are far too many different materials on what is a simple house.

This house was designed by someone who doesn't know how to design.

Would you like a much better designed house?

I can change the materials. I was going for this look.

The image you show is of a rendering of a house that is not accurately depicted (I hope). It represents gable details that I find frightening.

Seek someone with design skills to design your home's interior and exterior with inspiration from reality.

Do you wear every single piece of jewelry in your box— all at the same time? I hope NOT. Resist the impulse to overdo everything. It is really creating tacky. Worse than tacky is a house that has designed in structural problems and created family dysfunction.

I don't know where where you found that plan, but you might want to back away fast and hard from that approach. You are planning on spending a huge amount of money. Ending up with that would be a high crime and a tragedy.

Normally I'd do a photoshop version showing you how to simplify this design but the problem is the interior needs help too and you can't design an exterior separately from the interior. Each affects the other.

A dozen different materials and gables “to add interest” is a sign of architect failure.

Never let builders design. That kopytka is what you end up with. Lumpy potato dumpling with attempts to jazz it up. Architects should Design, with a builder’s input. But builders should stick to building, and offering the occasional comment on load spans or costs of a specific detail in the whole.

You can at minimum stand to lose at least one of the wall cladding materials and one of the gables and instantly have a better design.

I assume that the sides of your house will be all siding and all of this style is only going to happen on the front? You will end up with a much more cohesive and 3-dimsnionally interesting house if you drop the board and batten on the porch and replace it with siding and use the money saved to put shake on the side facing gables as well. Alternately, you could do the whole house in board and batten. As that style lends itself to greater simplicity of material pallet I would then also either omit the stone or the shake and replace it also with board and batten.

Regarding the roof, start out by losing the gable over the third garage stall. I read in your other post that you are concerned with the garage calling too much attention. This extra unnecessary gable is part of the problem. The gable over the front door could also be eliminated without really effecting the house, or changed out to a shed dormer over the dining room similar to your inspiration. But if you are going to keep this gable it has to geometrically make sense. Right now it's apex is off center with the front door and it ends awkwardly over the dining room window. It either needs to be increased in size to be centered over the door or decreased in size so that it rejoins the roof between the front door and dining room window.

Lastly, the column spacing does bother because they relate only to the porch width not the house as a whole. However, I don't think that moving them centered on the dining room window is going to solve the issue, as it will result in 3 unequal spacings. This one will have to be worked out with the plan arrangement to yield a better design.

Thanks everyone. I put a hold on things, took off work tomorrow to see a designer.

The inspiration photo doesn't show gable vents but it does show lintels in the masonry over the garage door and windows. Why did you add useless vents and omit the lintels?

Have you considered visiting with an experienced and creative architect?

Make sure the "designer" does not bring you back to the same humdrum you started with. I would like to think using an architect would help to avoid it, but unfortunately may not always be true although I think your chances are better with an architect.

Res ed sketches..

No clue why I did that, ha. I honestly felt deep inside that I was drying to beef up a basic floor plan of a model that we looked at. I should of just went with another floor plan.

I’m hoping the designer can figure it out. I told him a simple roof, get rid of gables, revert back to three bedroom but larger, change the master so I have windows on two sides and a large enough bathroom.....etc the list went on. We discussed the suggestions and concerns that I graciously received from everyone. He appeared to “get it”. I’m waiting for his drawing.