Author Archives: Karl T. Ulrich

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About Karl T. Ulrich

CIBC Endowed Professor - The Wharton School. I teach, research, and practice innovation, entrepreneurship, and design.

Photo Sketching a House Design

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In order to give one of the design review committees a better sense of what the house would look like on the site, I made a quick sketch in Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator.

Here it is. (As with most photos on Baubilt, click to see a larger version.)

To do this, you need some facility in a photo editing tool and an illustration tool. Here’s what I did. First, I found a photo of the site that was oriented such that the front elevation of the house would be in the plane of the image. I then pasted the photo into Illustrator. As a separate layer, I pasted into Illustrator a line drawing of the front elevation from the architects. I then drew rectangles for the windows and filled them in with a color picked from windows in a photo of a neighboring house. I inserted boards for siding (rectangles filled with colors picked from siding photos). I drew the roof in and filled it with colors picked from neighboring rusted metal roofs. Then, I copied the trees and car from the photo in Photoshop and pasted them in front of the house. Finally, I drew in a driveway freehand in Illustrator. I pasted some rocks and trees in for landscaping. All of this took about 2-3 hours. I’m fairly good with these tools, but I was not fussy about the sketch. I’m pretty happy with the resulting image, which has been useful in communicating how the house is likely to look on the site.

Reclaimed Siding

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The exterior finish palette for my house is black/graphite aluminum windows, gray barnboard, and oxidized (i.e., rusted) cold-rolled steel. This house, by CLB Architects, basically has the same palette, except that I believe this siding is virgin cedar treated with Lifetime wood treatment.

Exterior, vertical, detail of SW elevation of main house with rusty metal siding, Healy residence/Double J Ranch, Daniel, Wyoming, Carney Architects, Willow Creek Interior Design, On Site Management


I hope to achieve more of a gray weathered look on the vertical siding, probably by using reclaimed barnboard. This house, although it is mostly faced in stone, has some nice gray barnboard as well.

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Interior Doors and Trim

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I reclaimed about seven doors from the main level for re-use on the lower level. These are very nice antique doors in oak and mahogany, originally in a hotel, and complete with numbered keys. I had another dozen or so doors custom made to match those antique doors pretty closely. I was very impressed by the prices at Allegheny Wood Works, and I was also happy with the resulting quality. I love that they post their price lists on the web. I ordered some of the doors in paint-grade poplar and some in mahogany to stain to match the antique doors.

For trim, we had the millwork supplier run custom casing and baseboard profiles to match what is upstairs. It’s remarkably inexpensive to do this. I think we paid $1.50 – $3.00 per linear foot for a complex casing milled from poplar. I don’t regret this for a second.

Main Level Modifications

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Most of this project focused on the lower level. However, because the spiral stair connected the lower level with the main level, we had to do a fair bit of work in the kitchen/dining area. I had done a “quick and dirty” kitchen renovation a few years ago myself and decided that it was good enough to leave in place. Thus, we mostly confined the main-level effort to the stairwell/apse area and the resulting open dining area adjacent to the kitchen.

I’ll start with how it ended up…and then show some of the steps.

Exterior Masonry

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Here are various shots of the exterior masonry work on the Church house. We added a door out through the middle of the apse at the stair landing, which came out great. We also did various patching of holes from relocated windows and doors. A big part of the job was putting in 100 linear feet or so of new stone retaining wall. This substantially improved the look and function of the back yard.

Spiral Stair in Apse

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The big idea the architect brought to this project was to put a spiral stair in the apse to connect the main level with the lower level. Furthermore, there would be a door out to the back yard halfway down the stair off of a landing. Here are some shots of how we did that. A custom curved stair manufacturer Stairworks built and installed the basic stair and rail. They did a nice job…actually they did a nice job twice. They messed up a measurement the first time and had to completely rebuild it. To their credit, they didn’t even blink and just did it.

Lowering the Side Entrance by 4 Ft.

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One of the big moves architecturally for this renovation was to excavate the side yard so that the entrance to the lower level could be at the level of the sidewalk. Originally, we had to climb a half dozen steps, traverse a few feet of walkway, and then step down a half dozen steps into the “basement.” It was actually my idea, which the architect liked, to excavate next to the house and make it a straight shot into the lower level from the sidewalk. That worked well; getting in and out of the house is a breeze.

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Pipe Shark

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Before I invested a lot of money in my lower level with all its new plumbing, I wanted to make sure that the waste line was reliably connected to the municipal sewer. I had replaced some of the sewer main the previous winter and was pretty sure that there was a lot more bad terracotta pipe between the house and the main sewer line. Sure enough, I had the plumber snake the video camera down the line and he declared that the terracotta was basically gone (100+ years old) and that my sewer line was really just a tunnel through the dirt.

Replacing a sewer main is not that big a deal normally. It involves a backhoe, two guys, two days, and a check for $10-15 thousand. You have to reseed your lawn too. Except nothing is normal about my house. Turns out that my sewer main runs 200+ feet down the block under my neighbors sidewalk to the sewer line on the next street down the hill. The plumber said that replacing it would be $20-25k for his part, plus $15k or so to replace the half block of sidewalk and curb that would have to be removed.

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