Decisions and Budget

We've made a few tough decisions in the past few days.

One was our decision on our shower door.    Neither of us is very happy with how the master bathroom has turned out for several reasons.  Layout, finish, the unlevel installation of the shower heads and controls... that room is a complete and utter dumpster fire.  We both want to redo it at some point.  However, we realize that we probably don't have the time, money or motivation to do that for perhaps quite awhile, so we reasoned that we should make it as nice as we can in the meantime, so we went with an upgraded frameless, Eurpoean style glass shower surround.  That was quite an expensive upgrade, but after we realized the choices this supplier was offering us weren't going to work for us, we decided we wanted to purchase our mirrors and towel racks on our own, so we were able to roll the money the builder was planning on spending on that stuff into the upgrade, so at the end of the day it wasn't really that much money.  I don't know if that will be enough to "salvage" that bathroom for us, but I know we would have hated the "standard" metal and chrome "cage" we were going to end up with if we didn't upgrade.   If we redo that bathroom soon, it was a waste. But I think this is at least enough to keep us from feeling like we "have" to do it soon.

The other decision we made was on our stove.  We're going with a 36 inch stove rather than the traditional 30 inch and what we didn't fully realize when we made that decision was that our options were very limited, and those options are all very expensive.   We were eventually able to find one we liked a lot and even though it was still expensive, it was on the low end of what the options that were available to us.   However, it's discontinued and very few vendors had it in stock.  We thought we had found and purchased one, but the online vendor turned around and sold the model out from underneath us, and despite scouring the whole of western civilization, we were unable to find another one, so we were right back at square one.   Eventually we "settled" for another stove that we don't like quite as much, and that cost almost $400 more :(.  Theresa was able to guilt the online vendor into knocking $150 off of that price, but it still stings to have to pay more money for something we don't like quite as much.

I'm not sure if going with a 36 inch stove was a mistake, it certainly cost us a lot more money in appliances, than we bargained for, but both of us think that those extra 6 inches really add a lot in terms of making the kitchen feel more high end.

The best part about these two decisions is that they are the last major decisions we have to make!  We are essentially done with the decisions, at least in the "building" process.   I'm sure we have a ton more in the moving and living in it process, but we'll worry about those later.

I'm very glad to see the last of the decisions fall by the wayside, both because I hate making them, but also because our budget was starting to get a little bit blown.  We were doing really really good up until the past month, and then we just started spending a lot of money on little things here and there.  The good news is that we've also been able to save or earn a lot more money than we had budgeted, so at the end of the day we're not any worse off than we had planned, but the fact of the matter is that we probably paid "too much" for the house if you're looking at it from an investment standpoint.  But we're thinking of this as a place to live and the things we spent money on are things we're going to use every day we live there (which will hopefully be a long time) and we felt they were worth it to us.  

However, part of our original rationale for building was that after we had purchased and existing home and put money into fixing up an existing home on some level, that the total investment would be somewhat close in cost to building new.  Instead, we simply spent the same amount of money we would have spent renovating an existing home on upgrading the one we're building, so the true cost difference between existing and new construction is probably quite a bit more than we originally thought, making the price rationalization for building less valid.  

But... oh well. That reasoning was only one of many factors we considered and I think we're still pretty happy with our decision.  Building a house has certainly been an experience and it's one that I think I'm glad I've had an opportunity to experience in my life.

Yes I realize I used "experience" twice in that last sentence.  I spent literally 3 minutes trying to think of a better way to phrase that and came up blank, so I'm settling for bad diction.  Deal with it.