Hi everyone, first post here and sorry it's a long intro! :)

Just moved into our 1948 house in Seattle a month ago, and we already made a bad decision choosing a GC for some simple fixes around the house (despite dozens of positive neighborhood reviews). From what we're guessing he's in a bad financial spot and hired sketchy subcontractors. A pipe blockage turned into them quickly convincing us to rip open the outside wall to get to it. Of course an hour of licensed plumber work it was fixed, but it left us with a gaping hole outside. Luckily/unluckily we found out the upper siding was regular old plywood and was starting to rot out.

The rest of the siding is in good condition, original rough cut cedar planks. We need to replace the area only under the gables. This is a huge unexpected expense, so we may do the "bad" side first and the other sides later. Will will also need to replace the couple original windows as well.

We are in the middle of getting quotes on the work, but it's sounding like they all recommend and work with James Hardie. That's fine by us, but if we do we're not quite sure what style would work best and what color.

Here's some background:

The whole house was just repainted, so we'd like to save money by not touching the dark gray wood siding.

I'm open to repainting the exposed cement for the daylight basement/garage level if needed.

We need to replace the broken original garage door, would love one with stained cedar horizontal boards.

Those "tudor" boards on front were added in the flip and need to be removed.

We want to move towards a modern design (upper floor will eventually get popped out to take advantage of a view, all windows will be replaced).

The design of this house is already all over the place, so I can't find pictures online that are apples-to-apples to help with ideas.

Thank you in advance!!