I just looked back to my previous posts about our house and realized I haven't really said a thing about the process we've gone through. Since I'm so far behind, I don't know where to start...
Originally we were hoping to be moved in around Christmas, but thought January was a more realistic time table. Our builder was even happy with that as a completion date. But, things didn't go as planned as I guess they often don't when building a house with a deadline and we currently are still renting our house from the new owners in West Fargo. The upside, we have a closing date set for February 27...just 13 days before Baby 2's due date. Yikes! What was the hold up? First, it was the trusses. There was a mix-up and the wrong trusses got ordered so we had to wait for OUR trusses to come in. Then, when they came in, the weather turned bad! It was too cold and snowy to work, so our builders were out a few days work due to weather. Once this happened, our move-in date was changed to January. Two more smaller things that have gone "wrong" have turned out to be things we both think we'll like in the end. Our roof line in the back was measured wrong and we will now have a covered deck in the back. I wasn't excited about that to begin with, but now that it's there, I think it will be great. We are putting a fan out there and it should provide some shade and shelter on those warm summer days. We also originally planned on having the corners of our house be the same color as the siding, but they didn't get ordered and the only color they had in stock was white. We have white trim and garage doors too, so we decided we didn't want to wait any longer and that we'd make white corner pieces be fine. I actually think it looks awesome and breaks up the green color of our siding.
Since then, things have gone pretty smooth. I have to brag and say our house is HUGE! The square footage isn't crazy big, but it looks big with a walk out basement. We have just over 1700 square feet on each floor. Our basement will be unfurnished right now and Nate will be finishing it when he can. There will be 3 bedrooms up and 2 down; 2 bathrooms up and 1 down; a mudroom with locker system and laundry room off the garage. We have a large 3 stall garage. Our master bedroom is on one side of the house with the other bedrooms on the opposite side. We realize this means we will have to walk across the house in the middle of the night right now, but will like the separation as our kids get older. Our master bedroom leads into our bath that leads into our closet. We are not tiling anything right now, partly because of the cost and partly because we didn't want to pick our tile right now. Nate has said he wants to learn how to tile, so he will either do it down the road sometime or we will have someone else come in and do it. We wanted our TV mounted on the wall in the living room and decided to have builtins put in there around the TV so it wasn't just a big wall with a TV on it. Our kitchen has a huge, 2-tierd island that opens into our living room. We will have a screened in porch right off our dining room too. This part won't get finished until this summer.
Picking our finishes... Flooring: We are doing wood laminate in the kitchen/dining room and foyer; carpet in the living room and bedrooms; and vinyl in the mudroom, laundry room, and bathrooms. Picking flooring was pretty easy for us other than it took us a long time to find our laminate. We knew what we were looking for, just had a hard time finding it. We chose a hickory flooring that's a little darker than our hickory cabinets. It has a distressed look and looks like real wood with the cracks between the boards. Carpet: We didn't need anything special here, just wanted something with a nicer cushion and fuller look and feel than what we currently have. I don't really even know the details of our carpet, I just picked one. Vinyl: We chose one vinyl for the laundry room and a different one for all the bathrooms. Both look like tile. The one we chose for the laundry room has browns in it and the one we chose for the bathrooms is grey. We really liked the dark grey tile my parents put in their bathroom and decided to do something like that. Our bathroom vanities are also hickory, so hopefully it all goes together in the end. Countertops: We originally wanted to do quartz throughout the house, but quickly realized that once we got into the colors and "design" we liked, the price sky-rocketed. We went back to the drawing board once we figured that out. We found similar granite's to what we had liked in the quartz. We are going to do one color of granite on all surfaces in the kitchen except the upper tier of the island which will be different. We saw this done in a show room in Fargo and thought it was pretty cool. That same granite used on the upper tier of the island will also be in the bathrooms, drop zone in the mudroom, and laundry room. I think that's all the major finishes we've picked. Lighting for the house has come from a smaller store in Grand Forks and Menards. We are doing a brushed bronze finish for our sink and bathroom fixtures and cabinet pulls. We have also picked a stone that will be put on the house this spring when it's nicer outside. It will be on the front of our garage, part of our house and our front porch.
To date: The outside of the house has 3 complete sides with siding. They are waiting on some warmer weather again to finish up the siding on the front. Obviously all windows and outside doors are in. Garage doors are on. The inside now has walls that have been taped, textured, and painted. We have chosen to keep similar paint colors in this house as we have in our current house. Our kitchen will go from being red to green and everything else will be the same. I'm not doing anything with the bedrooms right now. I like painting and I didn't want to make any more decisions...just wanted to get the house done. They are putting in the cabinets today and started on the flooring today! It's really coming together and so exciting to see. Today is exactly 3 weeks from our closing day! I wish I had pictures to share, but they are all on my phone and I'm too lazy to load them to the computer.
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