Here is a before picture of the house, you can see where we enclosed the breezeway btw house & garage (although garage is not in this shot). I'm a visual person and need to see sketches before I can make any decisions :) My husband has brought up the deck idea as well and we are far enough from the road that I think zoning would allow (but would obviously check first). Our two issues with that are the chimney and the exhaust for our boiler (I think that's what it is) comes out right behind the chimney. Any thoughts & ideas are greatly appreciated, this stuff makes my head spin!

Thanks for your help, if I could bug you some more, what would you do in my situation? My townhomes are built on pilings. You walk up outside stairs to enter on the balcony. As I said there is no overhang. My builder thinks rain and water dripping from the second level balcony will cause water problems in my entry door. I don't like particularly like the look of awnings, framing seems rather expensive. Is there another way to keep water at bay or must I choose between awnings and a framed in overhang? If awnings would you go metal or canvas? I know metal is sturdier but canvas wins lookswise. Thanks

I agree with many of these comments. Your house is charming as it is! We just sold a ranch home that I wanted desperately to add a larger front porch and/or more interesting roof line to. In the end, we didn't. And wouldn't you know maintaining the structural and aesthetic integrity of what our home originally was (even if that wasn't on trend) is what brought us a cash buyer in 3 days at over asking price. I do think that option 1 from the architect is a nice look though.

hmmm i agree on the idea of using what you have with those diagonal posts. one thing i think we all need to see is how the house would look like without the landscape covering up the front as it is hard to tell when we only have the 1 photo , if you do decide to remove the landscape it would give us all a better picture of how the facade would look and what may compliment it.