I've been skimming quickly, and have a few comments based on my quick read. First, everyone's work on their ranches - fabulous! However, and apologies if I've misread or misinterpreted, but cathleen has or will have a relatively limited budget and is not a DIYer. pirula's gorgeous reno looks like one that had a nice-sized budget, and joanneemb, you've said you and your DH did all the work yourselves. mtnr is 100% correct IMO that if cathleen has the budget to do all that kind of thing herself, she also the budget to get a nicer house from the start. "Built ins, higher baseboards, solid wood doors, new windows, custom moulding, new kitchen and bathrooms...... All of that is very expensive, especially if you are not DIY, and if you were you probably wouldn't be asking us. It kind of begs the question, if you can afford to do all of the above, you can afford a nicer house to begin with (especially since, often, all of the above are cash expenses and a nicer house you pay for over 30 years)." That list above - baseboards, wood doors, and so on - those are just the things you can see. Sometimes (not always, of course, but it could happen), there is basic work you have to do first, or you may have to do it in order to make the changes you envision. We had to have lots of electrical work done before we even got to the good stuff. Our electrician is great, a true artist if you will, and reasonable, compulsively careful and concientious. He told us that for what he had to charge to do the work on our house, he could have rewired an entire new house. We did everything we had to for safety plus some things we wanted to do - and there is still work we decided not to do because of the cost. We were so lucky to have found an excellent, very reasonable contractor. By our calculations, had we gone with anyone else, our total reno costs would easily be two-thirds higher than they've been. We would not have been able to do this work; it simply would have broken the budget, so badly damaged as it is anyway. That leads to: if you are not a DIYer but will want to make many changes to a house to transform its look and style, you will need to be confident of your ability to hire the right people. Our contractor has great taste and an aesthetic sense, as well as technical skills, and he has worked on many old houses. The guy before him, let's just say the work was perfectly competent, but he would have done only and exactly what we told him to do. That means we would have had to have been thoroughly informed and completely educated before starting anything. Through word of mouth, including our contractor's own recommendations, we now have competent, trustworthy people to work on every conceivable part of our house if necessary. The last find - finally - a great plumber. We just paid him ~$400 to fix a kludged-together mess with the kitchen plumbing.... That leads to another thing: cathleen, even after you've bought what you hope will be your perfect house and have budgeted for molding, wood doors and all the rest, you will still need to have plenty of funds available for fixes and problems that could pop up over time, things you might have failed to account for in the beginning. "If anyone knows where to find detailed cost breakdowns, please let me know. I have not been able to find this information." Can anyone steer cathleen to some websites or other places where this info is available?

I moved from a historic French neighborhood and majestic home pre-dating 1875, which I lovingly restored with salvage materials painstakingly gathered over the course of about 7 years. I may not know anything about the style of our new home (which is, frankly, new construction where I come from) and yes, I happened to find it quite unattractive. But it's ridiculous and inflammatory to cast shame upon me and suggest that I do not know anything about old houses. When you didn't even know what a rafter tail was, then yes I assumed you were someone who was looking to remuddle the house into an HGTV home. I've seen way too many homes of your house vintage ruined because of the owners being clueless. Plus your thread calling this old beauty "sinfully ugly" made me upset, because I imagined another old beauty being destroyed. I looked for over 2 years in my neighborhood to find an old beauty like yours but every single one that saw had been remuddled by whatever had been the latest and greatest of the time and they had not kept the integrity of the house. I apologize if that wasn't you and if like me, you appreciate old homes and will be willing to bring back her beauty. I agree with you that the vinyl windows need to go and be replaced with something appropriate. However I also think the first floor is original to the house and that includes the stairwell windows. Just because the other homes were brick, don't assume this one was. The stucco on this house looks original to the period. The rafter tails are structural to the build and were quite popular.

The question is...does it matter? I think it does, because words matter. We throw around words on this board constantly when we really mean other things, and I too am guilty of this. Custom really doesn't mean custom when used on this board, it means architect. So someone who maybe isn't experienced on this board may see the word "custom" and think they designed their house from the ground up, therefore it is very custom. When most posters really mean the house needs someone with professional design experience and some measure of talent to guide you through the design process or actually design the home. ----------- Also a better understanding of the differentiation can lead to better advice. In the area I was born in (an area that I still own land in), the major tract builder can build a 4,000 square foot house for under $280,000. If you can't differentiate between a tract and production builder, it is hard to understand how that is possible. ----------- Finally, I am not sure this board does a great job these days of helping people build a home. I might be alone in this, but I would prefer a well built, poorly designed home over a poorly built, well designed home. We focus so much on the design process and the freedom you have to make selections that we sometimes miss the real tragedy of production and tract builders, the shortcuts they take in construction in order to deliver those appealing prices. While I agree custom homes are better than semi-custom and semi-custom is better than production, etc., the real quality cutoff for me is control of the how the walls are built rather than where they are built. For me this is the biggest draw for an architect and the thing rarely touched on, but may actually pay dividends far into the future that make architects not only affordable, but profitable for those value conscious consumers. Again, this is just my opinion.

I’m going to disagree a little in that I don’t like houses where the interior is entirely unsympathetic to the exterior, or to the location. So with that in mind I’d try to identify features of the house you like (in our current 1930s foursquare, there is some lovely trim work) and try to make your choices play nicely with those features. This can be through color, or style, or proportion, it need not be copying exactly. If the house interior doesn’t have any features, then look to the style of the house and what people might consider ‘typical’ for that style, and pick things from there to work with. (For example, I think Scandanavian can play very nicely with some of the colors you’d typically think of being used in a Costal Cape Code, so you could probably do more Scandanavian style furniture but primarily use colors and wood tones that feel more coastal-Cape-Cod-y, like blues and grays. If you don’t like those colors then find something else about Coastal Cape Cod you can use as a guide when looking at which other style items you pick.) The idea is to get somewhere that looks like it isn’t fighting with the house, even though it’s not exactly what would be ‘typical’ for the house. Europeans sometimes do this very well with mixing very old and very modern, and there it tends to be down to colors/materials (so stuff doesn’t clash horribly with the older stuff) and proportions. That said, don’t forget that there are some rooms we do more expect to be ‘funky’ than others. So if you’re a little hesitant but want to go all out somewhere, then consider going wild either in private spaces like bedrooms (which most guests don’t see) or in the powder room if you have one - there’s definitely an idea that powder rooms can be the place you go a bit crazy because it’s so small and pretty boring otherwise. The powder room is where you often see people using more interesting wallpaper or tile (especially since you need less of it to do the room so you can go for more expensive stuff) or I knew someone who went a little Cherub crazy in hers and her whole powder room had an Italian old world feel with cherubs here and there - like cherub light switch plates, who knew? To be fair, I never saw her bedroom so maybe that was a bit wild too. :D (She was in general a collector - she had a TON of Santas and Santa stuff she brought out every year - so the cherub thing was something you went ‘okay, yeah, I can see this being a thing she would do.’ Which probably helped it work.)