It’s a Whirlwind

Things have been crazy since our closing on 5 Nov! Now I know why people disapear from ever posting again. Add to that the fact that I had all of our household goods delivered in one day since we moved from overseas, and that my sister would like to have Thanksgiving at our house, and I have been one busy woman!

Closing….. is wonderful. The stress that melted away from my shoulders just made everything better. Not to mention that you get the keys and that moment you have been anticipating for months on end is finally a reality. Our closing took a super long time. At least, it seemed that way to me. 3 HOURS!! So if you need childcare, make sure you make solid arrangements. My husband was also not available at closing so I had to sign not only my name on hundreds of documents, but his name plus a little legal statement after each signature. Yes. My hand hurt afterwards.

The house is slowly but surely coming together. I was really looking forward to slowly getting to know my house, making sure I took the time to decorate each room just the way I wanted it, accepting the fact that it may take months or years to get the look I want.
Fast forward to the panic and axiety I feel at having an incomplete project and in just two weeks time, the unpacking of my house is almost complete.  Of course, I have a long way to go, but even I can’t believe what I’ve accomplished in so little time. This, coming from a girl who has never used a drill in her life before this major event of purchasing a house.

We have really large rosewood furniture so I was nervous at not having the morning room, but I am just in Love with my kitchen.

The living room is coming together nicely as well. I originally wanted to put our massive couch downstairs to use as the primary TV room, but…. Plans change when you can’t get your coach down the stairs. Note to others: think about that when you’re envisioning your home. Upstairs you have a bannister you can lift things over, but downstairs is a wall!

I was really torn about the initial room when you walk in the house. I didn’t want it to be our main living room, it wasn’t big enough. I didn’t want it to be a dining room because to me that’s just too far from the kitchen. What I needed was an office, but We don’t use an office enough to dedicate an entire room to it. So….. I made the area a comfy study/game room. Laptops are stored under the table, computer and printer are there, just more hidden, and the ottoman opens up to reveal our board games, etc. I’m really happy with it.

Going up the stairs…..

I’ve finished the Boys’ bathroom ….

And going down the stairs, I’ve finished the bar area.

No….. This is not the finished product. I don’t have pictures yet:(. I only have 2 days to finishing everything up though so I will post agin soon with updates.
I will leave you with proof that I’m not forgetting about the garage nor am I stacking everything in there LOL

Oh oh oh! And one more “proud me” moment.
I put these up all by myself! And let me tell you, they were a PITA!!!

2weeks and counting!

Two weeks until we close. Finally everything seems within my grasp. It’s been a really long, difficult move so the relief I will feel once I’m in the house will be so very welcome. Time to finally get settled.
I stopped by the house with my sister and it was being polished up. I can honestly say everything uncovered and polished really sort of took my breath away.

Before Being Polished

Here are some photos of my last walk through of the house before it’s polished off and we have our pre-settlement tour. I’m so, so happy. Now everyone Pray for calm nerves for me until the closing:)

These are pictures of the outside and the landscaping they’ve completed. It also shows our neighbor’s house. At first I thought since they had the brick, our mere siding wouldn’t really ‘stand up to it’ but with our colors and elevation, I think the house definitely holds its own. The rest of the siding had to be ordered because they were short, and our door will be a darker reddish brown. Very nice indeed.

This is walking in the front door. Not sure how I’ll set up the room. It is bigger than I originally thought, but so is the rest of the house. Here I could get enough light to catch the hardwood flooring and the carpet. It makes the wood seem a bit darker than it is but what are ya gonna do without a proper camera.

Next are photos of the kitchen and family room. I was trying to picture our dining room in there etc, so I got a lot of angles. Where the cardboard ends is where our hardwood ends so I’m glad our big country dining table seems like it will fit. I was really excited to see the appliances in.

Next I wanted to share some photos of the finished basement because the lighting was in so I could actually take decent pictures. Our thoughts are to eventually finish the storage area to use as a spare bed and finish the bathroom down there, but that will be some time in the future. I’m really excited to use this space as more of our family/ living room and the area next to the bathroom is going to be perfect for the bar.

These photos are headed back upstairs. The standard chandelier in the stairway was on back order so they installed a fancier version and said I could keep that one in if I wanted. I think we’re sticking with it ☺️
The rest are brief bedroom shots of Ethan’s room and then Corbin’s room with the carpeting down.

Last but not least are the upstairs baths. The boys’ bathroom has standard everything minus the flooring so I took a photo of that with the cognac colored cabinets.
I love all of our selections for the master bath though. It looks just beautiful.
I think I might have to install a bench in that shower 😄

Soon I will be toasting to receiving our keys!

Pictures Galore

The drywall is up and not only that, our personal cabinet, countertop, bathroom tile, etc selections are being brought in. This post is nothing but pictures to show off the progress.

A Month and Counting…

About 2 weeks ago I posted on our pre-drywall walk through. I am just so pleasantly happy and excited over how quickly things move along after that.
One of my peanut heads has soccer twice a week near the house so after the practice that’s later in the week we usually do a drive by.
Last week during our twilight “peek-in” I saw the drywall was up and all of a sudden everything seemed within my grasp.
I have to say this has been the hardest move ever and we are definitely enduring some hardships that are beyond the normal difficulties of moving so we welcome any and all positives. I just felt myself beaming as I lifted up my little boys to see the inside of the house. It was a really great feeling.
I didn’t get to take them inside because everything was locked up, but they are going to see it soon enough.

Today I actually squealed out loud in my cubicle when I got an e-mail from our PM with a few updated pictures from our shelving being put in. It is truly the best feeling I have had in weeks.
This is such an exciting time, and the progression of the house means I’m that much closer to reaching all my families’ other goals since settling in here.

Plus, you have to agree, even though the flooring and kitchen countertops aren’t in yet, my husband and I have great taste.  I can’t wait to follow up with more pictures in the days and weeks to come.

Falling in Love with My House!

Monday morning I did the pre-drywall walk through with our PM.
I have to say that it’s the first time I actually started to feel like the process was real, it was MY house, it was going to be MY home and I just fell in love with everything about it.
That feeling is so important because I gotta say, buying a house is scary! It’s new and it’s overwhelming and it makes me cry from stress half the time. So moments like this, walking through a house that I am falling in love with makes the whole process seem worthwhile.
I’m going to attach a lot of pictures below, primarily because my husband isn’t here to see the process. If you don’t know what it’s going to look like things may be hard to picture but I was able to envision it all and I’m so excited!

So this is as I was walking up to the house.

Approaching the garage entry door.
We’ll have 2-3 steps up to it.

After walking in that’s the view of the garage entry door, and the little coat rack/mudroom area.

All the kitchen outlets! I am loving that!

The kitchen window that will be over my sink, and the sliding doors that will eventually open up to our deck.

Looking down towards our family room where the fireplace will be, and then down by the fireplace looking back towards our kitchen.

Looking through to where the front Door and living room/whatever room you want it to be area.

Entry room from the front door.

Going up the stairs!

Master bedroom! And I’m so glad we had the custom window added. It lets in a lot
More light!

Master walk in closet

Shower in the master bath

I believe this is Mason’s room, the smallest of the four. Corbin’s is almost as big as the Master!

The master bedroom

One area of what will be a finished basement. I’m thinking bar….. Or office 🙂

Bathroom for finished basement

Larger room section that will be finished in the basement. I love that we got a large window to let in light even though there will be recessed lighting. I thought we would only get the little slit windows at the top.

Another large storage area that will be unfinished, but I think we’ll finish it later on.

Last but not least, I walked the house signing out whose room was whose and hoping some messages would bring us good luck and happiness in our house.

More Pictures!

These are actually from about a week ago. They had our windows and doors on. I contacted our PM cause I thought our door was the wrong color but I didn’t realize that they paint it at the end 😁
I e been out since and the shingles are on the roof but I’ll get pictures of those during our pre-drywall meeting next week.

Fingers Crossed

The stress of buying a house you are having built does not compare to the stress of moving your family from overseas back to the US after 11 years of being gone.
Couple on top of that establishing two households while you are trying to settle one state and your active
duty husband is stationed somewhere else and you feel like you’re gonna reach a breaking point! Where are friends and wine when you need them? — wait… Do I even have the money to buy wine?
Everything will come together in the end, I know it, but nothing helps waiting like not visiting your house site for a while and then seeing the progress.
Today, I was so happy and excited to see this!

A Pit Never Looked So Good!

If you recall (I say this like people are reading my blog) in my last post I was concerned because ground had not been broken as we expected.
We were assured that it would happen that Thursday and when we visited the site on Friday, sure enough, there was our pit! Our wonderful pit that shall become our home!
Not only had they broke ground, we were in the area again just a few days later and the forms for our basement had already been poured and dried! We took advantage of being in the area and spent time at a beautiful park just down the road. I can’t wait until the house starts to take form!
Below are pictures from the ground breaking, the basement forms
and pictures of what will be our neighborhood.

Couple days later 🙂

Putting it All Together

We’ve finally arrived back in the U.S.A !  After living overseas for 11 years it is going to be a major adjustment but that’s another post on a different blog.

First on the agenda after arriving was meeting with the design team to review and select our cabinet, granite, wood flooring, laminate and tile selections.  We met with both our realtor and the design rep and for anyone who hasn’t thought of it I totally recommend inviting your realtor to come with you. If they are great, like ours is, they think of all kinds of questions and possible requests that you might not. Especially if it’s your first time buying a house.

We initially scoped out the area and lot of our new house and were really bummed to find that ground had not yet been broken when we were told it would happen about 2 weeks prior to our visit.  The visit to the design center was exactly what we needed to lift our spirits and feel the excitement of building a house all over again.

Now for the selections!  We picked dark cherry cabinets, and when we arrived and saw them they were darker than we expected. We had stayed away from the espresso because those looked a bit too dark for us, but the cherry is quite dark as well.  As you start to move around the show room though, you get different lighting angles and it was then that we could start to see the red hues in the wood which lightened the look as we had expected.  When we presented with our oak wood options, the colors were lighter than we expected. We wanted to darker wood, with our granite counter tops in Celia to be the lighter braking point in the room. We asked for darker, which of course was an upgrade, but at only $250 more to get the color we wanted it was a must.  Below is a picture of our cabinet, counter and flooring selection

 

After that we moved on to carpeting.  Here’s a not so eloquent picture of me testing out whether or not I actually feel a difference in the upgraded carpet and padding.  You shell out quite a bit more cash to upgrade here (of course, if it’s covering the majority of your house).  We decided to stay with the basic carpet, but we did upgrade the padding underneath.  I’m telling you, the difference in the padding is a difference in feeling like you are actually walking on a hard floor when there is carpet or feeling like it’s actually carpeted.  My boys rough house on the floor a lot so we definitely needed something to absorb a bit of impact.

We selected the darkest shade of carpet in our basic category and really, next to stark white it seems dark, but it is just a nice grayish that’s still fairly light considering how dark you can go with colors.  In the picture below, you get an idea of everything together along with our slate grey selection for our fireplace.  It will have a white mantle surrounding the slate and we went with the slate over the granite because we liked a “flatter” look for the fireplace if that makes sense.  Too much granite starts to remind me of a bathroom, Ha!

Last but not least we made our bathroom selections. You are going to want to upgrade here unless you want your bathroom to look like a hospital or public restroom or you planning to update yourself later on.  We did stick with the basics for our boy’s bathroom but upgraded the floor tiling. You can see below that they have the Cognac cabinet colors, will have the standard white counter tops and wall tiles, but the beige (esque) tile shows what we upgraded to. This was only like $150 or so to switch to so we felt well worth it.  We shelled out a bit more for our bathroom because, as our realtor mentioned as well, I have to love my bathroom and want to go in there every day and have it be my haven in conjunction with my bedroom.  We changed the granite counter top selection we originally had after selecting the floor and shower tiles we wanted.  Our cabinet selection here is the espresso and I can’t remember the name of the granite but it was darker as well with flecks of caramel brown.  I’m so excited to see how this will turn out.

That’s all of our selections for now! Next will be a meeting with the Ryan sales rep for other selections like lighting and faucets, etc.

We are heading up to our site tomorrow and hopefully I will then be able to take pictures of the ground breaking! Whoop Whoop!