...because home doesn't happen overnight.
the black house

Hi! How are you? I hope you’re well and doing everything in your power to stay that way. Our household is fine. The kids are schooling from home; Steve is working from home. Our dining room table is ground zero and a bit of a disaster these days. I’m still working at the hospital pharmacy which has been a roller coaster of a ride the last several weeks, but I’m grateful to just be working when so many others can’t. Nevertheless, my work climate feels extremely heavy and in an effort to balance it out I’ve recently found myself craving “lighter” pursuits during my time off: long walks, bike rides, new dinner ideas, new workouts, photography…heck, even cleaning house has been a worthy distraction.

Which is how this post came to be. I’ve been wanting to mock up our current home’s floor plan for a while now. I’m oddly passionate about floor plans. I used to draw up dream floor plans in middle school. Of course, they included such fantastical things as indoor pools and slides, gymnasiums, art studios, hidden rooms, trap doors and the like. Even now, I’ve been known to sketch out floor plans of interesting Airbnbs I come across online. I love Dwell magazine if not for the sole reason that most features include floor plans. I like to imagine how the house unfolds itself to those in it and how it lives.

I spent some time last week mocking up our current layout (I used Floorplanner) and it was strangely satisfying. I love a bird’s eye view! I thought it might be a cool thing to share here for reference. Maybe it helps you piece together some of my IG photos so you can see how the spaces relate to one another. Or maybe I’ll actually get around to sharing some projects (fingers crossed!) and this can serve as a map so to speak. I’ll warn you. It’s…unique.

Built in 1979, the house is a living example of 70s contemporary architecture. Common features of this style include vaulted ceilings in public spaces, multiple levels, wide staircases, loft areas, floor-to-ceiling stone fireplaces and angled wood siding. Our home has them all! Originally, this type of architecture was designed to work on challenging, often sloped and wooded, plots. (Think Sea Ranch in California.)

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Our own home is perched on a small hill nestled in the woods. It sits back off a cul-de-sac and feels really private. Even though the lot is larger than our previous residence (we went from roughly a half-acre to one acre), there’s very little yard. We actually have less grass to mow here; it’s mostly woods. A small stream trickles through the front. It’s quiet and there’s a lot of wildlife. In fact, the day we first toured the house nine deer traipsed through the woods! The lot and the way the house is situated on it is what ultimately sold us on moving.

Now that you have a better grasp of how the house sits on the landscape, let’s talk floor plan. The house is a 4 bed / 2 bath and is technically two stories, but the second story doesn’t span the entirety of the first floor. The total living space is ~2,300 sq ft. Yes, that’s ~600-700 sq ft more than our previous home. Most of the additional square footage comes from a fourth bedroom, a small loft area and separate kitchen / living areas. Before I catch flak for touting smaller living then buying a bigger house, please know that if it were up to me only I’d live in a tiny house tomorrow. But the people I love and live with don’t exactly feel the same way. Also, if a smaller house with similar features were on this lot, we probably would have pulled the trigger on it, too. It’s the lot and location that ambushed us. That being said, I’ll be the first to admit that we use every square inch of this place. So, the main floor…

The sketch above isn’t exactly to scale, but it’s pretty darn close. The whole house is centered around an open, winding staircase featuring a landing that overlooks the living and dining areas. Not shown in the above sketch is a step down into the living / dining area from the entry and kitchen. It’s just one step but, along with vaulted ceilings and skylights, it makes the space feel incredibly open. The kitchen isn’t huge (read more about it here) but does include a small breakfast nook which we use regularly. Inspired by an Airbnb we stayed at in Connecticut, we added a screened room / porch off the kitchen. It’s our favorite spot to hang with neighbor friends when the weather…and non-pandemic conditions…allow. The laundry room is teeny and houses a furnace, water heater, water softener, utility sink and litter box along with the washer and dryer. It’s a tight space that could really work better. However, I do like having a designated laundry area behind a closed door. We use the full bathroom on the main floor as a kid / guest bath. (Two baths is our sweet spot! Couldn’t easily share one; don’t want to clean any more than two.) Three bedrooms round out the main floor.

Please note: the screened porch and garage are not included in the total square footage as these spaces are not temperature regulated.

The second story sits atop the kitchen, breakfast nook and laundry (remember, the living / dining area has vaulted ceilings so no second story there) and consists of a small loft and master suite. Once again, this isn’t exactly to scale but hopefully you get the idea. We weren’t really sure what to do with the loft area, but it’s organically grown into a music nook / library / home office. We’re just letting it be what we need it to be instead of trying to give it a specific look or purpose. The master bedroom is just big enough for a queen bed, nightstands and a small dresser but lives larger thanks to doors that open up to a deck (basically the screened porch’s roof). An awkwardly placed bifold door reveals a Juliet balcony overlooking the living area below. It’s both scary and cool. We haven’t quite decided if it stays or goes, so it stays for now. (That’s always been one of our mottos: When in doubt, live with it a while.) The ensuite bathroom and closet are decently sized but inherently dark. There are no windows. In my opinion, windowless bathrooms are the greatest downfall of the floor plan. A toilet and bathtub occupy the small space not labeled in the master bathroom.

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Never in a million years could I have dreamed up this floor plan, but it totally works for us. The circular layout, while somewhat confusing to visitors (“How do I get to the bathroom again?!”), is like a roundabout keeping foot traffic flowing. Kids and cats constantly going round and round, haha! The ratio of open public spaces to smaller private spots feels just right. The nook under the stairs is the coziest! Steve and I like having our bedroom upstairs, separate from life’s daily happenings on the main floor. In our previous home, we never wished for more room but sometimes more rooms, if that makes any sense. To us, it’s obvious that the builder thoughtfully designed the house to fit the lot. There isn’t another house just like it in our neighborhood.

We’ve already made some tweaks to the original brown-on-brown-on-brown color scheme, and we have plans for more changes to lighten darker spaces (goodbye kitchen and bathroom soffits!) and improve function in the utilitarian rooms. (I’m side-eyeing you, kitchen and laundry.) However, there are NO PLANS to knock down any walls or move any doorways. We really don’t want to make this house something it isn’t. It’s a quirky, cool product of the 70s that is well suited to a quiet life in the woods. Basically, it’s my spirit house.

images: Dana Miller for House*Tweaking

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If you’re a longtime reader (thank you!) you know we’ve been planning to add shade sails to the backyard for a while. Even though the back of our house faces north, we’ve discovered that a high summer sun reaches the deck and heats up the space pretty quickly. The Trex composite gets super hot in direct sunlight, and if you’ve learned anything from this blog it’s that I’m barefoot 95% of the time as is the rest of my family. Smokin’ deck + naked feet = no bueno. Not only that, we knew shade would help make the air feel cooler, too. (In fact, up to 15º cooler! Did you know that?) It seemed like a shame to have this great outdoor space but not feel comfortable in it during prime deck season.

We considered a modern pergola (similar to this) or a retractable awning (similar to this) or even a combination of the two (something like this) but ultimately settled on shade sails because we thought they’d look better on our squatty ranch, cost less and require less maintenance. Plus, we’ve always liked them everywhere we’ve seen them. They feel a little less rigid and have more of a playful design.

A few friends and readers suggested checking out Costco’s shade sails and we did (along with other ready-to-hang versions from other retailers). But after considering our needs and what we were hoping to accomplish, we decided larger, custom sails with robust hardware would be the best option for us. We had a local company (Miami Valley Shade Sales if you’re local) come out last year to give us a free estimate. We had sticker shock over the $4,130 price that was quoted to us for two sails plus installation. (!) That’s when we started researching a full or partial DIY installation. Still, the estimate proved to be extremely beneficial. The company took measurements and gave us recommendations for the overall design, post placement and sail shape/height.

Steve gets all the credit for this project. My only input was on the sail design and lending an extra pair of hands to set the posts. He researched the hardware, posts and sails. He’s an engineer, so this project was right in his wheelhouse. Stuff like this is fun for him. Being married to an engineer has its perks.

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We ended up with a large rectangular sail above the deck and a smaller triangular sail above the dining patio. In the early stages of planning, we thought we’d do three sails (a large rectangle and two smaller triangles overlapping the patio) but when we started mapping things out three sails felt a little crowded in our modest yard. We figured we could always add a sail, so we decided to do two sails and see how we liked them before investing in a third.

Our setup posed a few challenges because we were pretty much forced to tie in all the sails to the fascia of the house. You can add a mounting post to the roof that sits higher, but since we have a vaulted ceiling inside it would’ve involved tearing into that which sounded like a terrible idea to us. Instead, we installed two adjacent corners of the rectangle sail at the same height off the eave and slanted the sail upwards toward the backyard/north. We weren’t able to twist it into a parabola as is most commonly done.

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The deck sail is anchored to the eave by two heavy duty rings. We purchased the hardware for the house (eye bolts, eye nuts, rafter brackets) from Shazeebo and actually installed it last year. (See more here and how awesome is that company name, Shazeebo?! It’s my new favorite word.) This required pulling down sections of soffit, drilling holes through the fascia and then bolting the rafter brackets to the rafters. There wasn’t a ton of room to work with at the end of the rafters, so Steve used a 90º drill and ratchet set to tighten everything down.

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The posts are actually three 4″ x 4″ steel square tubes with .313 thickness. The two nearest the deck are 14′ long and the one off the corner of the dining patio is 12′ long. Steve bought them locally from Industrial Tube & Steel in West Chester, Ohio, the cheapest source he could find. We had to borrow my dad’s trailer to pick them up. They were HEAVY! Steve laid the posts up on sawhorses in the garage (who are these people who actually park cars in their garage?!) over the winter last year and gave them three coats of paint. He used paint leftover from painting all the exterior doors. It’s ‘evening hush’ mixed in the Behr ultra premium plus exterior enamel line in a satin finish.

Earlier this summer we rented a one-man auger to dig the holes and Steve’s quote, not mine, “It was a pain in the ass.” It was obvious it was an older model. A newer one probably would have worked better, but the one we rented was tired. Steve ended up hand digging most of the holes. The powers that be suggested burying the post 1′ for every 2′ above ground. We didn’t get quite that deep, but it’s close and the posts are well below the freeze line. It was also recommended to set the posts a half bubble off vertically due to tension, even for steel tubing. The posts will bow a bit once sails are hung.

We worked together to carry and set the posts. They were super HEAVY!! We probably could/should have had more hands on deck, but once we start something we’ll do just about anything to finish it ourselves…including break our backs. There was a lot of shimmying and tweaking and checking the level to get the posts set just right. Once we had a post where we wanted it, I made like a statue holding it in place while Steve hooked ratchet straps to the top of the post and secured them to stakes in the ground. When all three posts were up, Steve poured the concrete and let it set. Then he drilled holes at the tops of the posts at pre-determined heights and added the eye bolts and eye nuts. Lastly, he installed square snap-in caps to the tops of the posts to prevent them from filling with rain.

Our backyard was wide and shallow to begin with, so we don’t feel like we sacrificed all that much yard space by setting the posts. Other than jumping on the trampoline, the kids mostly play and run in the front yard which is much larger.

FYI – During our post-setting efforts I failed to snap a pic of the tops of the posts, but here’s a shot I took just this (rainy) morning.

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Once the posts were set, we measured for and ordered the custom sails from Sail Shade World (totally unsolicited) based on cost, quality and customer reviews. If shade sails are something you’re considering, keep in mind you cannot order custom sails until after your posts and anchor points are set. It’s critical to get accurate measurements with the posts and anchors in place. Otherwise, you could end up with sagging sails or sails that are too taut. Both scenarios compromise the stability of the sail. Sail Shade World has extremely thorough instructions on how to take proper measurements. We measured everything probably five times to make sure we were doing it correctly.

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The sails are top of the line as far as quality goes. We selected premium commercial grade 340 g/m² fabric in the natural color for each sail. The heavy duty, maintenance-free fabric has a 10-year warranty against UV-degradation, provides up to 98.8% UV protection and doesn’t hold water. Thick, double-stitched seatbelt webbing along the perimeter and at seams prevents fraying. Marine grade stainless steel rings are stitched into the corners of each sail. The superior fabric and corner rings are what sold us. A few of our neighbors have store bought shade sails less than a year old that are already faded, fraying and sagging. We wanted our shades to last more than one season. Steve even contacted the fabric manufacturer to ask more questions about the hardiness of the sails before we justified the extra cost.

Installation was fairly simple. The sails come with tags so you can correlate them with your measurements. We did have a thread galling issue with the provided turnbuckles. Basically, they quit turning before the proper tension was achieved. Steve contacted Shade Sail World and explained the problem. They were empathetic and reimbursed us for the hardware which allowed us to order heavier gauge turnbuckles from Amazon. The 5/16″ turnbuckles worked great. We’d highly recommend them for a larger sail, especially if the sail will be removed each winter (as ours will).

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Even though this project spanned a few years from conception to execution, we’re super happy with the results. So far, the sails have held up beautifully. We’ve had several severe storms blow through already and the sails still look brand-new. No fraying, no fading. The outdoor furniture under the sails does get wet when it rains. The sails are purely for shade cover. We’ve been removing the cushions before wet weather strikes for years, so this is nothing new for us. We aren’t sold on a third sail, so we’ll probably live happily ever after with two sails.

We’ve spent more time on the deck in the last two months than we have over the last two or three years combined. If the weather allows, we’re out there. (In fact, Everett has been choosing to do his homework and eat his afterschool snack on the deck.) It feels like an extension of our home and the sails provide a cozy ceiling effect that we weren’t expecting but love so much. For several months out of the year, we gain another room! #sonotreadyforwinter

I wasn’t sure how I would like the slanted vs. twisted rectangular sail, but it’s not as terrible as I thought it might be. It kind of reminds me of a mini amphitheater the way it opens up to the backyard. It keeps the sight lines from the kitchen window nice and open, so I like that. The triangular sail twists down at the western most corner. This is by design. We mostly use the dining patio for al fresco dinners, and the setting sun used to blind us. Now, the slightest dip in the shade sail makes for a squint-free dining experience.

If you promise not to judge, I’ll show you a view from the opposite angle…

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I wish I could snap my fingers and make the hose reel, bulky grill, AC unit and giant purple trampoline (affectionately referred to as Prince Dos) disappear for this shot, but the truth is they’re all things we use on a regular basis so I’d never want to live without them – even though our backyard would look way less cluttered without them. Maybe an AC enclosure is in our future? Or a built-in grill? As long as Prince Dos wears out my kids, he stays. I still wish the neighbor’s fence was charcoal or black. I haven’t had the guts to ask them if I can repaint the side facing our yard like many of you suggested. Oh, can you spy the store bought sail next door?

Now for a cost breakdown:

house hardware – $295
steel posts – $483
post caps – $30
auger rental – $0 (our rental fee was refunded since the auger didn’t work properly)
250″ x 185″ rectangular shade sail – $840
140″ x 195″ x 260″ triangular shade sail – $440
turnbuckles – $100
concrete – $150

TOTAL: $2,338

While definitely not a drop in the bucket, we saved nearly 2K by doing it ourselves. It helps that we broke up our purchases over a two-year period. We like to think of it as the cheapest two-room addition ;)

You may have noticed a few changes to the deck area. I’ll be addressing those in my next post! Stay tuned.

P.S. – Read about how the outdoor furniture is holding up and other backyard adventures here. See our DIY electric meter screen here. Still lovin’ those Woolly Pocket planters.

images: Dana Miller for House*Tweaking