Life ain't nothin but decisions and money

Bonus points for the title reference..

So we're finally hitting the period where we're starting to spend more money than we planned :-/  So far we're keeping our overrun pretty manageable, it's a lot of money in $'s, but it's only about 2% of our expected cash expenditure for building, buying and moving into this house (that includes appliances, furniture, etc...), so in terms of budget variance, we're actually doing pretty good.  As of now... we're pretty much out of things to we can possibly upgrade.   So hopefully we're done bleeding!

First up.... faucets!   Because we made a deal for an exact copy of the previous spec house, our "builder standard" for a lot of things is the upgraded versions of the "standards" for most contracted houses.  This is great, and is saving us some money and/or giving us a little bit nicer finishing materials in a lot of places.   Faucets is one area where this applies.  Our faucets are actually pretty nice.... the only problem is that they're polished chrome.

Our bathroom faucets - stainless steel finish

Polished chrome is a very popular finish,  it's classic, it works well in a lot of decorating styles and a lot of people really like it... we're just not those people.  We simply prefer the duller stainless steel finish.  The only problem is that it's going to cost us about $400 to upgrade all of hte bathroom fixtures (faucets, tub, showers) to that finish.  

Ouch.

We've also decided we wanted to go with a nicer Kitchen faucet.    (I blame Theresa for this one!) So we started looking at our upgrade options there.  We have a few very nice choices that would cost around $170 to upgrade.  But, of course, the one we really want is like $60 more, and that's probably the one we're going to get because hey, if you're already spending $170 what's another $60?  This is how budgets begin to die.

Our likely kitchen faucet choice

 

 

 

 

Our next big expense was electrical work.  I knew we would spend some money here, but I thought we'd get out for around $500.  However,  when we walked through with the electrician we somehow managed to rack up close to $1000 worth of work to:

• Add recessed lighting to our formal living room and library, neither of which have overhead lighting standard
• Add 2 more recessed lights to our family room
• Add 3 or 4 more misc recessed lights. 
• Run speaker wire from the library to the back patio
• Run speaker wire in the master bathroom and closet.
• Pre-wire the kitchen for under cabinet lighting
• Add a few misc outlets

Again... ouch.   And again... the decisions.  Having to decide where you wnat cable/data drops, where you're going to need plugs and switches, where to place the lights.... AAAAAAHHHHH.  I don't know 80% of the answers to those questions, and I'm not going to know the answers to those questions until I've lived there for a month.   But it all has to be decided now.  I'm already reconsidering or adding too a lot of stuff we decided in our walkthrough.  Luckily the electrician won't start until Monday, so I have all week to finalize my thoughts.  This is definitely the worst part about building a house.  Wondering if you've made decisions you're going to regret later.

About half of that cost is for the recessed lights (damn those things are expensive!) and we may just go with single overhead fixtures in the living room/library.  We're still thinking it over.   This expense in particular really bugs me.  I'm comfortable with residential electrical, I've worked with it a lot previously, I'm knowledgeable about most of the electrical codes, etc...  In short I could happily do all of that stuff myself for the cost of materials (which is.... not much).  But I'm not allowed to work on this house while it's under construction and most electrical work is extremely hard to do after drywall has been installed.   If I had to go in and add recessed lights after we close.. It'd take me an entire weekend, I'd have to hack the everloving hell out of my nice pretty drywall and I'd probably kill Theresa our of pure frustration.... and then I'd feel bad.   So it's just way easier to have it done for me now.

We're also getting to the point where we need to decide on a ceiling fan and a vent hood.  I found some cheap vent hoods on Amazon.  I have no idea what kind of quality we're going to be getting, but the price is right so we're going to give them a shot.  There isn't a whole hell  of a lot to a vent hood, it's a piece of ductwork with a blower attached to it, so I'm hopeful it will work out.  They have pretty much every style of hood available, and I can't decide if we want to go with the modern glass look, the transitional look with the thin horizontal shelf, or with the traditional canopy.  

For the ceiling fan... we need something that is 54-60 inches, has a light, is reversible, has a remote control and looks decent and modern, is under $400.  So far we're coming up completely blank and we need to get that figured out soon!