Siding details

Joe had to deal with some stuff around home today so we ended up taking the day off, which I was fine with. It gave me a chance to putter and take care of some neglected tasks. Part of what I did was play around with the siding detail along the rake of the roof. If you read the last post you'll know we were struggling with the height of the house; one way to visually lower things is to add a frieze along the rake. The frieze is the horizontal band that runs under the rafters across the top of the wall.

I did a couple of mock-ups. The photo above shows about a foot of the frieze to give me a sense of the size and how I'd want to change it. If we go ahead with this detail, imagine the wooden parts running leftwards in a line to the back corner, under the rafters.

The first version I built up was clearly too short and the shelf went way too far out. This is shown in this photo(click on photos for a better view):
The next version extends further down the wall and brings the shelf in a bit. Its better, but I think the shelf needs to be even smaller and the band that the shelf support lands on should be not so wide.

Nancy has long been advocating for some detail that would liven up the exterior and I think this may serve that goal. I've been sort of in favor of a more austere look, but I'm finding that the prospect of doing all this detail stuff is really fun.