Building our Home- The First Decision

The process has officially begun!  We are building this house.  I am super excited, but a part of me is still not letting myself get to excited/attached until we know for sure what we are doing with our current home (Dear Lord... please send the right buyer to buy our home as soon as possible).

Anyway, in order to stay positive and excited, I want to document the whole building process.

A little bit of background....We have been eyeing this neighborhood for a couple of years now.  Our best buds have lived in the neighborhood since it started being built about 5 years ago.  Over the years we have considered buying at least 5 different properties in the neighborhood, but for one reason of another, all of the other homes have fallen through.  In May, we saw the listing for the property we are now in contact to buy/build.  A builder came in and bought 4 lots and was building a custom home on each of the lots. 

On May 7, 2013 we met with the builder and fell in love with the basic home they were offering... and even better, the price was right.  As we all know, that was the same week I found out I was pregnant.

Anyway, to make a long story short.  We went into contract in May but it was contingent on the sale of our home.  On September 1 we removed the contingency and gave them a go ahead to start the process.  It took about 6 weeks to go through all of the different permits and they officially broke ground on  October 18.

Here is the lot before anything was touched. 

 

 

Here is the lot the day after they started clearing.

 

And here is the lot as of this week... its hard to tell but the basement is dug our for foundation.





So now that the process has officially started, we need to start making some decisions.  The first upgrade we made right from the beginning was for a deeper basement.  We want to make the space very usable, so we upgraded for an additional few blocks of basement.

We met with the builders again 3 weeks ago to start picking out some of the options.  They went over things like exterior siding, roof, kitchen cabinets, floors, etc.  At this meeting we also approved the home design and added any changes we want to the structure of the home.  For the most part, we stayed with the design.  Two changes we did make were 1.  We are not going to have a wall that separates the living room and the dining room, instead we opted for the open floor plan where one room just flows to the next.  2.  We added additional cabinets to the kitchen to include a pantry.  This make the kitchen a little bit bigger and the dining room just a little bit smaller.  For the most part we can make a lot of these options decisions as we are going along, but we do have to pick out the exterior choices now.

Siding, roofing, shingles, and stone-  This is the first official decision we have to make.  Who would have thought it would be a hard one.

Since May, I kind of had my heart set on a darker gray siding for the house.  Here is an example of what I had in mind (this is not our house, just and example of the color I found online).

Buttttt of course, that color is not one of the basic options.  We have about 20 colors to choose from, but the darker gray is not one of them.  We quickly decided and upgrade on the siding color was not something we wanted to do (we would rather save that money for the kitchen and bathroom upgrades).  I needed to get past this color and pick one of the basics.

Our top two choices were the "Sterling Gray" and "Natural Clay". 

At first I was leaning towards the lighter gray color, but the more I saw example of it, the more I was leaning towards it being to light.  I really want some kind of color to the house, not a super light, blah color.  Here is an example of the "Sterling Gray".

 

 

That left us with "Natural Clay" as the winning siding color.  We like that it is not too light and still pretty neutral.  Here is the color  and an example of a house with the siding.

 

 

 

Lets hope we made the right decision once it is done.  Pictures to come in a few weeks.

 

After we picked the siding, the shutters and roof were pretty simple.  Because of the layout of the front of the house, we only have two windows with shutters.  That made it easy, because if we really hate what we pick, its not an expensive change in the future.  We picked a very dark brown/taupe kind of color.  Its sticking in the neutral families but a nice dark contrast against the house.  Then, I let Mike pick the roof color because I am pretty clueless.  He went with a darker brown/gray color... again to give a contrast against the siding.

 

 

I can't wait to see it all put together.  We still need to pick the stone color for the little bit of stone that will be on the front of the house, but we need to go back to the sales office to see the options first. 

 

Phew... glad step one is done :)