Thursday, February 24, 2011
Wednesday, February 23, 2011
Decisions Indeed!
Update: We have decided to go with Hardwood Floors, Glenn and Vince the Floor Guy worked the numbers and brought the price down....whahooo one more decision DONE.
Above you can see a picture of our final choices. The wood in the middle (back) is our flooring, the Dark Brown/Black is our cabinets throughout the house, and the granite is for the kitchen.
Look for more pictures soon...I am heading over tomorrow, I hope it's all primed! Maybe cabinets will be dropped off!
Saturday, February 19, 2011
Decisions Made
Busy morning.
Now that the weather is less of a disaster and drywall is complete, the finish trades are ready to move in and get the house finished, and their waiting on us to tell them what materials we want.
So we had some decisions to make.
We spent all morning meeting with different suppliers and sub-contractors finalizing what we're going to do for paint, our carpet, harwood floors and tile.
The good news is... all of that stuff is now picked out and behind us. The bad news is... I'm utterly terrified that it's going ot look goofy when it all comes together, the even worse news is that we somehow managed to spend about $1000 of unbudgeted money on paint and carpet. *sigh*
The redeeming quality in the extra expense is that we moved away from natural stone. At the end of the day we couldn't find anything that was quite right and it didn't justify the extra expense. We found a porcelain tile that we both like, and it should be cheaper to purchase and install, so we should save a few $100 on that to reclaim some of the extra expenses we incurred today. At this point we've made all of our decisions except for two. Our lighting fixtures, and our staircase.
So here's what we decided:
Flooring:
We're going with dark wood on the floors, a darkish brown twist style carpet. The carpet is a very slight upgrade, so it will cost a few $$. We're also probably going to include flush mounted wooden air vents in our hardwood floors instead of the drop in metal ones. Again, that's a small upgrade and we would have spent 50% of the cost to switch out to drop in wooden vents shortly after we moved in.
Paint:
We decided on a shade of grey on the walls that has a very beige/brown hue. I was leaning towards going with more of a "true" grey, but Theresa (and the painter) thought that the warmer shade was a little better fit... it'll be interesting to see how it all comes together. I am worried that it might be a touch too dark because we went with really dark floors.... we'll see I guess. We're going to stick with one color throughout the house, we debated doing accent walls, but we were rushed into picking our colors, so we didn't have time to figure out how/where to do those, so we might go back and add them later ourselves. We also debated going with more traditional brown/beige in the bathrooms, but with the shade of grey we picked, the color change wasn't ENOUGH of a contrast to really make that worthwhile. We are going to go with white ceilings through out the house, which is the source of the extra $$ we're spending, white ceilings are only included in the "main" areas of the house.
As an added bonus, while we were out there today, I noticed that the basement walls have been painted, the permanent furnace (91% efficient) has been installed and the basement windows are almost done.
The painter is going to prime next week, then the cabinets go in, then the tile, then painter finishes, then the wooden floor and carpet, then the finish carpentry, electrial and plumbing., that's pretty much it. Wild.
Sunday, February 13, 2011
We have Drywall...Finally!
So after weeks of NOTHING, we finally have drywall! Pretty darn exciting if you ask me. It's like its a new again....I am finally getting impatient for it to be done....a month of no progress was NOT fun....
While we were looking around at the drywall, it was fun to envision where everything is going to go and what it is going to look like when it is done!
Brad keeps switching which bedroom upstairs he wants for his office thus I don't know where my scrapbook room is going to go.
After we looked around for awhile we went to the New Tile place....we were only there an hour and we made a lot of decisions....better than the Tile Shop that we were at over 10 times and nothing concrete was decided! I was very excited to get an idea of what we are going to have and even decide on two rooms. I feel like we make a lot of "almost" decision, but no final decisions. Jennifer, the designer we worked with at the new place, was awesome. She really helped us and we were able to tell her what we liked and what we didn't.
We have made decisions on two of our three granite choices, and are pretty certain what the 3rd will be. We also have it narrowed down to three hardwood choices.....
Ohhh also the other day i saw a full sample of our door....man was it DARK! I didn't see any brown, just black....I was very nervous at first, but more excited than anything.
Bad news is that interests rates seem to be going up, which means our mortgage is higher than we even projected...plus my condo is on an arm.....so here's to hoping we won't be house poor! Good thing we are building our dream house and aren't big on going out!