Welcome

When Scott and I first discussed house plans with our architect, one of the many things we talked about was the way guests enter our home. I hadn’t ever thought about this before. I just figured people walk up to the front door, ring the bell and you let them in. But after those early  conversations with Wayne, I realized that the path guests take to get from the public outside to the private inside of your house should be planned. After all, family, friends and visitors are on a journey of sorts as they travel from the greater world to your private part of it. It makes sense to provide an entry that welcomes them. For us, that meant  creating a space with a place to sit and a rack to hang coat or hat  - essentially a transition from out to in.

A large window seat made from local stone offers guests a seat. We created the coat and hat rack by covering the face of the kitchen cabinet which forms one wall of the entryway with the metal we purchased from Rustedmetalroofing.com.

The tricky part of the entry affair was the spot where the metal facade abuts the plaster wall and the stone window seat. To make certain there would be a nice intersection of the three materials, I made a cardboard template matching all of the curves and angles of stone and plaster.

Then we transferred the lines of the template to the metal, cut along the lines.

Voilà. It fit!

The wall is 48 inches tall. The metal comes in 36-inch widths. A piece of trim cut from our left-over timber frame wood covered the seam between the 36-inch and 12-inch metal sections.

As a final step, I had a small collection of old doorknobs, which Scott screwed into the 2X4 nailers behind the wood trim.

This is our new coat and hat rack.

Rusted Metal Roofing

Every fall, my sister-in-law and I always go to the Parade of Homes in Cache Valley. When we began this tradition, Barbara was remodeling her house after a fire and was looking for home decorating ideas. I went because it is always fun to be with Barbara. Recently, at least since Scott and I have begun building our house, I’m also looking for ideas.

In one of last year’s homes, the homeowner had covered the back of the wet bar with corrugated metal. I absolutely fell in love with the idea. Since the back of our kitchen counter needed some sort of facade, this seemed the perfect place to use that corrugated metal idea. But I didn’t want shiny silver metal. I wanted rusted metal that had been sitting on a farmer’s barn roof for years and years.

Since no farmers were knocking on our door, offering us the roof off their barns, I resorted to the shopping mall to the universe - the internet. There I found plenty of silver, galvanized roofing material, but nothing pre-rusted. Apparently farmers don’t sell their barn roofs on the internet either.

Eventually I came across Rustedmetalroofing.com. Their product was exactly what we needed. It had the look of rusted metal, without the mess that, on occasion, accompanies shedding rust. The product we chose was metal painted in a pattern that mimics the look of rusted metal. We could get corrugated or flat. We chose flat. The metal is a heavier gauge than most corrugated roofing materials and less expensive. We could afford to use this in three places in the house - the entryway, the kitchen and in Scott’s office.