If you want them I would say go ahead and get them now. I really didn't focus on the garage and earlier this week went out to price windows for our 16x7 door. Your estimate is dead on as the price for the panel with windows(they only come insulated) was $550 + tax. Seems kinda crazy when Clopay is actually running a special thru Home Depot right now that if you buy the door right now for $550, you get the windows for free! You may want to check with Home Depot and if you can purchase your own garage door, you can take advantage of the offer and get free windows! Now would be the time if you are wanting the carriage door look to decide if you want your large garage door to look like one big carriage door or two seperate carriage doors. If you want the look of two doors you will need to get two sets of hardware for the door and inform your builder before they start drilling holes for the handles. My garage door was drilled for a single set of hardware and I want two sets so know I have a panel that will be useless because it has already been drilled. I surely wish I would have thought about this awhile back as I have the double garage door plus a single car garage door so windows are going to cost me eventually! :( Kinda of depressing for me but hopefully someone will learn from my mistakes! :)

It's interesting how people differ on this issue. Our house came with standard, builder-grade, uninsulated, 4-panel garage doors with windows in the second panel from the top. There are no other windows in our garage, so I thought the windows in the garage doors were fabulous. In fact, I wanted even more light so we replaced the original doors with 3-panel carriage-style doors with even bigger windows last year. It's great to have so much natural light in the garage during the day. We don't have to turn on a light and we can see outside without ever opening the door. It's funny though - when we first moved into our (new) housing development 13 years ago, many of our neighbors had blacked-out their garage windows. There was even an article in the HOA newsletter about products you could buy for that purpose. I used to joke with my husband about how the neighbors must have meth labs in their garages because I couldn't understand why someone would block perfectly good windows when everyone can see everything in your garage whenever you open the door/s, which is at least a couple times a day for us. Besides, with the slope of our driveways, you have to be taller to see into our garage than to look out of our garage. In any case, most of our neighbors have removed the material from their garage windows, so I guess they're feeling more secure now - or they moved their meth labs to another location :-)

Simple garage doors, painted to match the color of your brick siding, are usually the best strategy. Garage doors are almost always the single largest architectural element on the facade of a house, thus the need to play them down and keep them from overwhelming the view of the house. When the garage doors are visible from the front of the house, the advice to downplay them and keep them from dominating the aesthetic of the house is even more important. Perhaps the best advice for garage doors is to keep them from being seen from the house front. There's very little that's appealing about garage doors.

What everyone here is reacting to is the bland design of the main facade of the house. It's not modern. It lacks design. I'd put effort into the window size and placement. If the small interesting spindly pine were removed the remaining picture would be woefully lacking in character. The stone column bases need to be part of more. The roof lines are nice beginnings. The large blank siding expanses would benefit from some reveal of what they cover.