I like the mock up. Will you be switching to the black windows in the mock up? I think that’s what helps modernize the house.

@Chris we will probably keep them white for now since we replaced so many around the house. We don't know yet, we have a lot of windiws so changing them all at once might be a lot of money. We love the white window look too like this and maybe we will just change the front windows with the grilles:

I'd look at your sun. Will the sunroom get any? Because I'm seeing a space in a lot of shade in your pic (and some shade trees). Their photoshopped pic is very bright, which looks quite nice, but may not reflect what you'll get if you follow their plan.

Where are you? Because if you have serious winter and the porch floor insulated and over the foundation, your sunroom will be hard to keep warm, even if you get a lot of sun. If your house is not south-facing, your porch floor outside your foundation (which the lattice suggests it is) even if you insulate that floor, you're going to have a cold room.

To look at what your original porch might have looked like, look around your neighborhood for houses of a similar age and style and look at their porches. Some towns and cities took pictures of their housing stock long ago. Ask and you never know, you may find your original porch.

I like their wide stone steps, but you have one more step than they do. And your steps look steeper than theirs. You should probably ask them to fix that. You need a visualization of something you can achieve.

The orangish shutters and grayish siding is doing you no favors. I'd remove the shutters. It makes the dormers look like they don't match the rest of the house.

@Sigrid thank you! The house is original vinyl siding aside. Shutters are cedar that we replaced the sun faded 1990s burgundy shutters but we're not attached to those. The house is south facing, it gets a ton of sun in the mornings. The mockup is not based on measurements, it's just for picking colors and materials mainly.

I think I prefer your current look to the mock-up, but I’m an acknowledged old house purist ☺️

I do like the idea of closing in a sunroom on half, and keeping the other half as a porch. Is it possible to do that while leaving the current porch front framing in place? Specifically, I’d leave the broad corner columns on both sides, and if you feel really strongly about making the porch side more open, I’d go with a period appropriate wrought iron railing. My 110 year old house has original wrought iron around our southern exposure screened in porch- it’s a really classic look. I think the hyper modern railing in the mock-up is a miss for your house.

@Chicago TudorReno I agree. I had asked to keep the enclosure "balcony" look but maybe it got lost in emails. My conundrum is, if we keep the "thick" columns (lol look at my architect terms), how do I keep a cohesive front? I was thinking this type of window enclosure for the sunroom, with maybe a "paneled" base, and a spindle railing for the open side:

I like this visual a lot- definitely more in keeping with the era of your house! I would do exactly that- try to keep existing structure and add windows like these / spindle railing in place of lower wall for the porch and be pretty true to your era.

Separately: what other updates are you making to your house? Anything else in progress?

@Chicago TudorReno we have a few things. We're putting our basement back together after having french drains installed, widening the driveway, and possibly putting an addition on the back of the first floor to open up the kitchen into a large family room (that would sacrifice the servant's staircase though).

A familiar list!

We just finished an overhead sewer, and driveway widening had to happen early on to allow for dumpster delivery/egress of other large vehicles.

We also moved our old servant stairs. They were incredibly steep and narrow, and caused our kitchen to be divided into four parts. We shifted them to a corner of the house, and shuffled flour plans from basement to the third floor to accommodate them. I wouldn’t recommend something that drastic unless it gave you dramatically new options, but for us the third floor with its old servants’ kitchen and three small bedrooms was a terrible use of space, and it made sense to turn the kitchen from four small spaces (butler’s pantry, cooking area, pantry area, breakfast area) that circled a staircase into a cohesive kitchen that is designed for the family to cook in versus a servant’s domain the family wouldn’t have ventured into.

At least, I hope it will be 🤞 We demo’ed in July and I’m still probably at least six months away from a functional kitchen again.

Are you living in the house through your updates?

@Chicago TudorReno do you have Instagram? I'd love to follow your reno journey. I love my servant's staircase. It's steep, narrow with precarious angle steps and we all have fallen down, but it's nice to come down directly into the kitchen. Sadly we don't have anywhere else to relocate it to and the use we get out of an open kitchen is more than having two stairs. We also need to add a detached garage - we have a little "barn" is diagonal across from the driveway and it has always been to narrow for a regular crossover vehicle, so we converted into a 2 story loft. The exterior is also a project, ha! Off to find barn garage doors:

Yes, we moved to this house 5 years ago. We've added a second full bath and rearranged the second floor, renovated the kitchen and added a mudroom. Took down a lot of trees that were growing wild and leaning into neighbors' houses, added privacy hedges. The list goes on. The mudroom and kitchen were done in the thick of covid (we started in Feb 2020), that was fun!

I love the loft! Garage finagling is also part of our reno ☺️

I’m not terribly public with our reno details- I don’t love having everything out there for broad consumption. So no Instagram. I will plan to post here with a mid-reno update and then final pics when we get there some day, lol. Do you have a reno social account you’re comfortable sharing?

We all fell down the servant stairs our first week in the house, and that was part of what reinforced they had to change! Because they were really designed just for passage from servant’s quarters to the kitchen they were impractical for many other reasons as well. Access to the second floor was doored off, with a lock from the outside, that kind of thing. And cheap trim and finishes of course.

Glad to hear other people tackle these levels of projects and maintain sanity living through them! I’m off to stalk your old posts to see if there are kitchen/mudroom pics as I’m excited for proof that ‘afters’ do exist!

Even with plenty of sun, a typical porch floor over an open crawl space (ie not your basement) can be difficult to insulate adequately for winter. Talk to some local contractors about it. Getting a general estimate is always helpful, because a good contractor can walk you through what it would take to achieve your vision, which might (depending on your budget) be the deciding factor, so it's useful to know before you get too set on a sunroom.

As a side point, I've always lived in cold places. It was minus 1 with howling wind yesterday. YMMV.

Do you still have the awnings? We have some in our basement, but they no longer match the house and the windows they went on are shaded by an overgrown Japanese maple. We've never put them on.

@Sigrid yeah our contractor said they will use spay foam insulation from underneath. We will probably insulate the whole porch because we feel the cold air coming from the floors in our front door vestibule. It's 6 degrees today! The awning no longer exists, but we also have 2 large holly trees for privacy so we don't feel it's needed.

Check out the fenestration of your home in the old photo. I believe that most of the windows were originally 8 over 1. The smaller ones are 4 and 6 over one. But the bottom window seems to always be one pane of glass. I would emulate that look in any new windows that you install. Your home is lovely!

Your house is gorgeous—and there are architects and contractors who specialize in old houses. Find one who can give you what you want while doing it justice?

i like the overall mockup but I’m not crazy about the sunporch. As someone pointed out above it doesn’t seem to get a lot of sun and I feel the windows are not cohesive with the rest of the home since they lack the muntins that are on the other windows and doors. Would like to see a drawing without the sunporch.