New Home Update

Sorry, it's been a while, we've been spending our time concentrating on our new house. We're doing our best to save up as much as possible so we've been spending most of our time inside the home (thank goodness for Netflix and snapchat, am I right?!). Anyways, we've officially made all our decisions as far as what the home is going to look like and I'd like to share that with you now (prepare for a long post, sorry...kind of).

We chose our exterior stone, stucco body/trim, siding body/trim, soffit/fascia, and door/shutter colors. In the picture below the darker stucco and siding (above the stone) will be the body colors, the lighter will be the trim. The blue square you see above the stone and between the stucco and siding is our door color (you can't have a white one, but I love the idea of having a pop of color!). Our garage door and shutters will just be white. The light color swatch above the light siding trim is our soffit/fascia (it will go under the peaks of our roof). Our roof will just be black, it's called Moire Black.



Exterior Options

Our countertops in the kitchen and master are going to be the granite below. I wish I had a better picture of it, but I'm sure you can use your imagination. It'll look great with the dark (Knotty Alder brand) cabinets below. I'm so excited for those! We decided on darker cabinets from the beginning. It'll be easier to keep them looking clean and then we could choose a lighter flooring, which was a big thing for us.

Granite Countertops

Cabinet Options

We didn't feel the need to have granite in the two extra bathrooms so we decided to do a laminate that would be close to our granite, that way it wasn't too different (we have no intentions of updated that unless we sell the home and I'm too OCD to have them be too different).

Laminate Countertops

 

We went into this meeting saying we both hated laminate flooring. We wanted tile and carpet throughout. We did an upgrade package with our builder to include tile and granite and that's what I expected. When going through our meeting our design rep, Stefeni (who I'm so grateful for, she made decision making so much easier), kept insisting we pick a laminate even though I  must have told her 3 times I don't want laminate, I want tile. She said it was okay, to just pick a laminate for now and we'd get to tile later, and boy am I glad she did. We found the laminate below that I felt went really well with our granite and cabinets. They even had a faux kitchen set up with the flooring and I really liked it. I kept tile in mind, but after looking at the tile selections I kept going back to the laminate. We also thought having a laminate go throughout our main floor would make it flow much better than having a carpeted living room that would chop it up a bit (and I was not going to have tile in our living room). I also included a visual representation of our flooring below, because I need to look at that constantly, I constantly picture it to be horrible in my head (I have all these photos saved on my phone too just in case haha). Also, we will have tile in our bathrooms and laundry room, but I don't feel like adding those pictures.

 

 

Laminate Flooring

Visual of flooring

 

You know what my almost favorite part of this is? Our new kitchen sink! Since we first moved into our condo I've told Larry I wanted a bigger kitchen sink to help clean our skillet and other big items. I hardly ever use the side without the disposal and I hate not having the room. I get water everywhere and it's annoying! So when going into this meeting I told Larry I don't care how much a bigger sink will cost, it's going in. I don't remember how much the sink was, but I know it was worth it. Plus having the granite so that the sink is installed below it and we won't have that awful "lip" above the countertop so we can just sweep things directly in is a bigger bonus! It'll look a little something like the below sink (only we won't have a cool faucet).

 

Kitchen sink

So that was the bulk of our decision making. A few nights ago we got to meet with the reps for the SmartHome options. We got to see all the exciting things our home will have, talk about getting the house ready for Fiber and cable, and play with the app we'll have for our home. I wish I had anything to show for this, but just know it's cool. We even got to talk about setting our basement up for a home theater in the future (it's going to be really awesome!). We aren't doing that just yet, but it will be something we do eventually (you can't own 1,000 movies and a 6 ft. floof without needing a theater room).

Tonight we got to sign our last papers, pay our construction deposit, and they finally have our road set up so we drove down it to our lot. Below is our future home site and I could not be more thrilled at this point.

Deciding to move was a big decision, one I was nervous to make. We got so comfy in our condo and I hate making huge financial changes, I stress thinking if we can make it work (only because we live really comfortably right now). We must have run the numbers 10 times before even looking at houses online, let alone talking to builders. Once we talked to builders and settled on Candlelight we then had to talk to mortgage companies. Getting the numbers we did I knew we could make work, but it's a big change still and I may have freaked out a little more. I ran the numbers 10 more times before feeling comfortable enough to push through. Our Design Center meeting also freaked me out. It was very intense and, of course, added more money to our total, but in the end we were really good at sticking to our budget (for the most part). Now that we have our final numbers, a good idea of what our home will look like, and a plan on how the next few months will work I could not be more excited. It's funny because I have a home board on Pinterest and almost all my home design pins turned out to be Candlelight homes, how perfect is that? I feel it's a great sign I'm going to love this home even more.