Brick

One of the design choices we were least interested in is the exterior brick.  Initially we just asked for the same brick that was on the existing house, however it is no longer available, so we had to pick something else.   My taste in brick is pretty broad, anything "dark redish" seems to look ok to me, but Theresa has some more defined opinions, so I think she was pretty happy to have the opportunity to look into some other choices.
 
Once again, Theresa did the legwork in talking to the brick yard and got some addresses of recently built houses that had some different brick styles and we took a look at a few of them this weekend.  True to form, I liked almost all of them, but Theresa found a few styles that had some darker elements mixed in with the red brick that she really liked a lot that looked a little like this:

After she pointed those out I quickly saw how right she was.  So we narrowed it down to two or three options we like and I think we're happy with any of those.  So yet another design decision hurdle cleared