So we got our awesome news that they should be breaking ground next week on our home. I can't wait to get the call to have our pre-construction meeting! We'll finally get to put our down payment down and be done with any and all deposits/down payments and finally can focus on the home.
I spent the day with Andy at the zoo today and Cindy walking around the mall and Scheels with a couple of her girls so by the time I got home Larry decided it'd be fun if we spent the night walking to our lot. We knew it was close, but I wasn't sure it was "walking" distance close. But I was almost to my step goal by this point so I figure why not.
Turns out our house is VERY close. Total time walking there and back was about an hour and twenty minutes, and that's including walking our lot for a bit and snooping around the other Silverton that is being built right now (we just looked in the windows...no one freak out about any crazy criminals walking through your home).
I love how close it is, I love our lot location, I love that they have a ton being built right now so I can see what it looks like as it goes....I just can't wait for a dang hole to be in the ground already :)
That's all the house update I have for now...we're just trying to be as patient as possible.
Mar 19, 2016
Mar 9, 2016
In the Life of a Cat Owner
If all these weren't our cats to a T I don't know what is. I got a laugh out of them so I'm sharing here in case anyone out there wants to know what it's like to own a cat (or three):
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| This will be our fridge when we finally move |
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| Oscar Every. Single. Time! |
Mar 3, 2016
A Little Lesson in Love and Murder
Whoever said you can't have fun seeing a play is mistaken! Larry and I took a risk and went to see " A Gentleman's Guide to Love and Murder" at Kingsbury Hall last night and I have to say it's made me want to see many more plays!
If you recall, we went to see a fun Christmas one a couple years back and we really liked it, but it was different than I expected a play to be. The Thanksgiving before that play I had been watching the parade on TV when they played a snippet of a play that seemed really interesting. I didn't remember the name of it, but when I saw the below picture this year I knew that was it!
I looked it up and text Larry to see if he'd be interested in going. He said since it was a "comedy musical" he'd be open to it. We made it fun by deciding to take Trax up to the event center...there are some weird people who ride Trax! I love how convenient that is though, it makes for good people watching too.
As for the play, it started out a little slow. It worried me when we were there and people were laughing at the beginning. I was wondering if there was some sort of inside joke or if people had seen a movie/read a book version of it so they knew what to expect. I worried Larry would hate it already. Once they started killing people it became a lot more entertaining and funny, surprisingly. By the intermission Larry was telling me how he found it pretty interesting. He had the same thoughts I had, it was a slow start and we were both worried it would be more stupid than funny. By the end though we spent the rest of the night talking about which parts we liked and why. I was so glad he liked it, I know I REALLY liked it. Enough that I hope they come out with a movie version or a book version because I'd buy it in a second!
After that experience I definitely want to find more that we can do to make for fun date day/night ideas. I hope they have Wicked or Beauty and the Beast come this year, I've been wanting to see either of those for a while or. I do see Book of Mormon and Cinderella are coming so maybe I can go see one of those.
If you recall, we went to see a fun Christmas one a couple years back and we really liked it, but it was different than I expected a play to be. The Thanksgiving before that play I had been watching the parade on TV when they played a snippet of a play that seemed really interesting. I didn't remember the name of it, but when I saw the below picture this year I knew that was it!
I looked it up and text Larry to see if he'd be interested in going. He said since it was a "comedy musical" he'd be open to it. We made it fun by deciding to take Trax up to the event center...there are some weird people who ride Trax! I love how convenient that is though, it makes for good people watching too.
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| We were looking pretty good |
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| View from our seats...wasn't too bad |
After that experience I definitely want to find more that we can do to make for fun date day/night ideas. I hope they have Wicked or Beauty and the Beast come this year, I've been wanting to see either of those for a while or. I do see Book of Mormon and Cinderella are coming so maybe I can go see one of those.
Feb 16, 2016
President's Day Weekend
Oh...and I guess it's also Valentine's Day Weekend. I love three-day weekends, who doesn't right? But getting an extra day to try and sleep in is bliss to me!
Anyways, Larry and I decided to start a new V-Day tradition. Since I hate buying anything Valentine's related, but it is about spending time with your loved ones, I figure we should still do something together. This year the idea was to bake our first cheesecake. We are both very avid cheesecake fans, but we've always gotten them store bought.
This yearwe Larry found a pretty simple recipe, we got all the ingredients, had Alexa (Amazon's Echo-bot) put on a good radio station, and went to work. It was really fun baking together, we've never done that before and it made me realize how much I genuinely love hanging out with Larry (not to say we don't ever hang out, but we've gotten into a routine with our date nights or do the same thing each night, so to do something new with each other was more fun than I expected). The best part was we had extra filling so we went and got stuff for another crust and a different type of topping (we went with strawberry on the first one and blackberry/razzleberry topping on the second one) and got to make two cheesecakes!
I also learned Larry is a bit of a perfectionist when baking, I had to make him let me help (instead of dancing in the kitchen watching him haha) just so I could say I had a hand in it. Unfortunately we had to chill the cheesecake overnight so we had that one chilling on Saturday night and then made the second one Sunday and had that chill overnight into Monday. As impatient as I am, they were worth the wait. Both were really good, but the strawberry one was the better one if I had to choose. We had too much though, so I brought it in to work to share and it got some pretty good reviews...success!
We ended Valentine's Night with the movie Valentine (yes the "scary" one), because what's better than watching an anti-valentine's movie? Also, I watched the cutesy one (Valentine's Day) the weekend before so I didn't feel the need to watch it again...but I do love that one.
Anyways, I hope you all had a great three day weekend as well...or at least a three day weekend to begin with haha.
Enjoy this little silly video I made of the important parts of the process.
Anyways, Larry and I decided to start a new V-Day tradition. Since I hate buying anything Valentine's related, but it is about spending time with your loved ones, I figure we should still do something together. This year the idea was to bake our first cheesecake. We are both very avid cheesecake fans, but we've always gotten them store bought.
This year
I also learned Larry is a bit of a perfectionist when baking, I had to make him let me help (instead of dancing in the kitchen watching him haha) just so I could say I had a hand in it. Unfortunately we had to chill the cheesecake overnight so we had that one chilling on Saturday night and then made the second one Sunday and had that chill overnight into Monday. As impatient as I am, they were worth the wait. Both were really good, but the strawberry one was the better one if I had to choose. We had too much though, so I brought it in to work to share and it got some pretty good reviews...success!
We ended Valentine's Night with the movie Valentine (yes the "scary" one), because what's better than watching an anti-valentine's movie? Also, I watched the cutesy one (Valentine's Day) the weekend before so I didn't feel the need to watch it again...but I do love that one.
Anyways, I hope you all had a great three day weekend as well...or at least a three day weekend to begin with haha.
Enjoy this little silly video I made of the important parts of the process.
Feb 10, 2016
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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| Exterior Options |
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| Granite Countertops |
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| 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).
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| 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.
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| Laminate Flooring |
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| 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).
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| 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.
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