Exterior and Other Thoughts

They dropped the pallets of bricks off at the house last week... so that's some progress.  The only problem is... they don't look like we thought they would.  

The brick color we got is called Mulberry and we really liked it when we saw it on two or three completed houses.  But the bricks we have at the house don't seem to look like that.  We even went so far as to call the brickyard again to verify that the houses we looked at previously did, in fact, have Mulberry bricks on them.   They did.

Mulberry Brick on a completed house

As you can see, Mulberry is a deep red brick color with a few blackish bricks thrown in here and there... which is why I'm confused about why our bricks look purple???

At this point we're hoping that they look better once they're on the house... which they probably will.  It's hard to get an accurate sense when they're sitting on a pallet, plus bricks age and discolor and weather and so on...   No clue when they'll start laying the brick.

We're also having trouble picking siding.  We'd like a dark brown/tan siding (similar to the picture above), which is very similar to what the existing house next door has.  However, we're actually getting a slightly higher quality of siding than the existing house had, and it's not available in that color.  We can always downgrade our siding and get that exact color... but then it's a lower quality.  We're trying to see if there are any other color options for the better stuff, but we might be stuck deciding between the color we want or a better quality product.  :(

In other news... plumbing and HVAC are (mostly) in and the electrician is getting started.   Our final electrician bill came in about $500 over budget, so... eek!  We're getting some much needed lighting and outlets though, so there is definitely value in that expense.    I'm very comfortable working on residential electrical, so I can probably add a lot of this stuff after we move in a lot cheaper, but my motivation to fish wire through drywall in a 2 story house is somewhat lacking.  That being said, there are a few areas where we backed off of adding a light fixture or an outlet somewhere that we wanted, just because it will be fairly easy for me to add them in later.  

I keep worrying about money... because that's just a thing I do in my daily life, so naturally I'm going to do it when we're spending OMGREALLYYAREALY!!! amounts of money, but everything I've read, heard or seen about construction or major remodeling projects has indicated that most people reach a point where the budget is completely shot... we're not there and it doesn't look like we're going to get that out of control.  We probably are going over our bottom line numbers, but we'll be at least close.   So we win.