White Modern Ranch Exterior Design Board

Sharing our plans for a white modern ranch exterior makeover for our dated rancher. White hardie panelling and black fixtures and warm wood features to keep it classic.

One of the projects that’s been taking a lot of our time lately… and not so lately, is our exterior! We stripped our siding last spring with the plans to reside it in the summer. Unfortunately, we found termites and a couple other problems that became the priority and by the end of summer, we had decided to leave the siding until this spring to do. It’s such a big job to DIY but definitely worth the savings to not hire it out. This is our second house we’re siding ourselves and while it’s time consuming, it’s not TOO hard to DIY. 

Today I’m sharing the design vision we have for the exterior as well as some of products we’re using and the progress that we’ve made so far! But before I get into details, should we throw it back to the ‘before’ photos from when we bought it?!

So this house is obviously very rancher in style. This dutch hip roof is not one I would have chosen but the house itself is so great. I really wanted to honour the style of the house and even though I of course wanted to modernize it, I wanted to let the rancher have some sun as well. I can’t remember who said it or where I read it, but I remember seeing a designer say that they like to not only consider the style the owners love when designing a space, but also what the room or house itself wants. I know that sounds kind of woo but it totally made sense to me. This ranch style is definitely something we could work with and even as we were designing inside the house, we kept some classic elements with some black metal and I think those both play so well wth the ranch style. So outside we are going with more of the same for this modern ranch exterior!

Since it’s such a low profile from the street (we are flanked by two or three story houses), we thought we could go with a bright white and it would help it stand out a bit in between these other two dark taaall houses. The roof is dark, the driveway is dark, and we have a ton of rock (although… look below, we scored some grass!). The white is going to balance this so nicely. 

We also love the look of black windows and vintage wood doors but those come with a hefty price tag. We opted to get the look without breaking our budget by just getting the front windows with a black coating on the vinyl windows exterior (this is from factory, we didn’t DIY it). We went for fibreglass doors that will hold up to our extreme temperatures without maintenance but with a stainable wood finish. We went with a walnut colour for those. If you caught our entry reveal, you’ll have spotted that new door already!

Okay so here’s where we sit today. The house is wrapped and ready for siding. We have had new gutters and soffits installed (black gutters and facia and white soffits). The roof we’ve kept the same for now but plan on replacing in the next few years just due to wear. I would love to go with a rich black colour shingle next time. We’ve closed in our carport to a garage, wired for extra lights and replaced all the windows and doors. We just have to get that siding up! We’ve started putting it up in the backyard, so I won’t show you that, but I’m so excited!

The other thing that’s been done in the front is the landscaping! We’re still working out a few things with that, but if you followed along on Instagram, you might remember us digging rocks for days only to find the rock in the front yard was more than two feet deep in some spots with a full lawn and irrigation underneath it all. We hired out the landscaping and it was such a treat to see this come together without moving any more rocks ourselves. It came together while we worked on my office last fall. We had planned to move rocks around and dig a few gardens into them to help disguise the large stump from the tree we’d removed (it was dripping sap on our vehicles like crazy). By the time the landscapers got to the grass and had a backhoe come in and scrape the old turf back, they were able to dig the stump out too. It felt like such a bonus. And after that… we realized how big the front yard was with that stump gone and we were able to take some of the space for some turf. I’m totally in love with how much this landscaping has changed the curb appeal of our house without even siding it- ha!

Okay, so let’s talk about siding! We are going with a Hardie panel board and batten like we did at our last house. (I never did post an exterior reveal for the last house, but you can catch the drift here). We chose this at the last house so that we could install it ourselves. We were told this is much faster to install yourself versus the classic horizontal hardie planks. It went up really nicely and when we started planning this exterior, I was excited to do it because of the cottage feel of the vertical battens. We’re doing our battens a bit closer together than we did on our last place to play that up. We’re going to do white window trim as well to keep the black details from getting too heavy. We have these Globe Electric lights (gifted) waiting to be installed and I’ve ordered this mailbox and this doorbell and am considering making the address sign on the house myself (although we have these ones already!). On the entry door, we’ve used this pretty handle set (I did a whole post about installing it here!). 

So that’s where we sit and what our plans are for a modern ranch exterior! I am so excited to get it done, this one has felt like a long time coming. Between the setbacks last year and now we’re juggling this exterior remodel and restoration inside from a flood (I share all this on Instagram, but the blog lives forever so haven’t shared as much about it here). So I’m hoping we get it done by mid summer and can enjoy it a bit before fall hits and snow flies!