MORE INSIDE PICTURES!

So we took a drive by the new house yesterday and couldn't resist the urge to see if we could get in.  Half expecting to have to hoist one of us through the window we took a chance at the front door and surprisingly it was unlocked....yay for us!!

I just can't stop admiring the progress.........most of our excitement comes from the kitchen.  In our last house the kitchen was adaquate for a family with no kids and just starting out in life....but for a busy family it was extremely un-user friendly, had very little cabinet and counter space, and in general was pretty much the one and only thing we hated about our old house......but those days are soon to be forgotten as we are eagerly awaiting to move into the heaven of kitchens.......so thus all our excitement and love over our new  kitchen space!!


Our awesome kitchen!  Its huge......I'm already day dreaming of hosting parties and making Christmas cookies where I can spread them all out to be frosted and decorated....and most of all the storage space!!   Our old house had three drawers total all placed inconveniently in the kitchen.  Now we have at least 11 Full sized drawers (I think it may even be 15.....I lost count after 3...ha!)!!!!!  We also love how the cabinet color compliments the butter rum granite counter tops. When we noticed we were to have a single bowl sink in the kitchen we were a bit nervous as I envisioned a very shallow small sink....however to my surprise I think it will work great!!  Its much deeper and bigger than we had anticipated.  Our other major love is the crown molding on the cabinets.  It just gives it that polished finished look.....something we almost overlooked but we are so glad we sprung the extra cost for!!!

In our old house we changed out all our light fixtures for the oil rubbed bronze/black look.  We were so nervous we wouldn't like the brushed nickle and it wouldn't work with our decor but its actually really nice and a bit refreshing.  I'm so glad we went with the upgraded light package as we got a nicer chandelier.....which to my surprise I LOVE!  The other thing I'm glad we added as well was 3 pendant lights over our gourmet island (I'm sure we'll have pictures of those when they are installed in the future).  So far to our surprise all the lighting looks great!!

First floor powder room.  Love that little window and oval mirror.  In so many new builds you usually get that dreaded square piece of mirror....the oval one just gives it a bit more home feel and less institutional, cheap, builder feel.....another plus in my book!!  We can at least live with it for a while without that nagging feeling of "I can't wait to re-do/change the bathroom".

So looking forward to having the double bowls in our bathroom....my husband and I will no longer need to take turns in front of the sink/mirror to finish our morning routines.  One thing we will be changing right away is the shower curtain rod.  In our old house we had a one of those curved shower rods that made our tub feel much bigger so we'll be getting one of those again.  When we were picking out our options for the Master bath I hemmed and hawed over getting the upgrade with the garden tub.  Not because I wanted the tub but because I really wanted the window in our bathroom.   Then it was brought to my attention that in all the models we went through none had a window in the bath and it didn't bother me.  I'm guessing because the lights above the shower bring in so much light it feels like you have a window in the bathroom.  Love it!! 

I love our new entry......specifically I love the molding detail above it!  Eventually the door will be painted black to match the shutters.

So one of you had mentioned how good for the soul it has been to sit in the morning room while drinking your morning coffee and that has brought such a wonderful image to me.....keeps me dreaming!!  I so LOVE the morning room!!  I love light and windows so this is probably as close to a sun room as I'll be able to get.  However, the best part of the morning room is it will be a lovely place for all of our family meals and it is out of the way so we won't be tripping over our kitchen table all the time to get to the living room or crowding up the flow of traffic into the other parts of the house when we have parties....it has a designated spot right out of the way yet still accessible to see TV, the kitchen, have conversations etc. while preparing for big family parties or events......entertaining is going to be 1000 times better in this house.....I CAN'T WAIT!! 

 DING DONG!! So there is my very handsome husband testing out the doorbell and to our surprise it worked......so fun to discover new things working in the house!!

OK...so maybe its a bit strange but I love our stairs.....I love the railings (so glad we upgraded those!!...if you're debating it just do it....so worth the money!).

Seriously....can you believe this house!!  I don't know what it was yesterday but for the first time it really hit me that this is ours...its all the things we said we wanted if we ever moved from our old house and we got it and more!!  I just can't get over the space.....its way more than we ever could have wished for.  Our last house was 1500 square feet and really our only gripe was with the kitchen and how far away we lived from family, friends, and our work (roughly 80-100 miles round trip).  We always said just a little more space would be nice, basically all we wanted was a 4th bedroom and maybe a little more space in the kitchen and living room......who knew we would move to a place that the 1st floor alone is the size of our entire last house.....its just beyond belief and we both feel so extremely blessed that this is all happening for us.  Its just way more than we ever could have imagined!!  

Well I hope all of your housing journeys are continuing to go well.  I'm starting to pack our rental house up in anticipation of moving for a second time in the last 3 months......can't believe in about 3 weeks we'll be in our new home!!  AMAZING!!  We'll continue to keep you all posted of our progress and I'm sure we'll have a siding update for you all soon as well.  It has been positively and I feel fairly resolved but we don't want to go into further details until it is actually resolved and everything has been handled.

The inside is not PINK!

We have been so worried about the siding we haven't posted what they have done inside! I got inside a few days ago when the trim workers were there and was very suprised about all of the inside progress. The cabinets, counter tops and floors were all done in the Kitchen and bathrooms. The railing are up and the doors are hung! The mirrors are up and so are the light fixtures. I really like our chandelier. I thought I wouldnt like the brushed nickle finish on the fixtures but it looks really nice. I LOVE the Railings! So glad we upgraded them from knee walls. Very happy they didn't have to make the soffit go all the way through the family room. It makes it look so nice and big (the nine foot ceilings help!)





Our PM is on Vacation this week so we are dealing with our sales rep for the siding issue. Let me just tell you she is great! It seems like she is realy going out of her way to make us satisfied with our siding. We are making good progress and we'll have an update when we feel it has been resolved.

"So....what do you think?"

That seems to be the common question we are asked the last couple days since our siding went up.  All homes aren't without hick-ups along the way, ours just happens to be with the siding unfortunately.  We had originally picked Cobble stone wicker as our siding color, which is like a taupe color with a greyish or olive undertone. At the end of June we got a message saying Ryan had changed siding suppliers and we needed to come look at the new "comparable" color for our house. So we drove an hour to the model home and took a look at the "comparable" color, Autumn Beige.  I have to say inside it looked "comparable" it wasn't like it looked brown versus grey or extremely light versus dark or anything.  But lighting changes everything, so we took our keychain size siding sample outside to see what it would look like in the sun and noticed it did have a different tone to it.  We asked if we could pick out a different color and they said no pretty much we have to stay with the "comparable" color....so without being allowed another option we took the color.

Monday the siding arrived and unfortunately we happened to go out of town Monday to Wednesday.  Thursday was the first opportunity we had to see the house and what a shock!!  As I pulled up to the lot my heart sank and all I could think was......"oh no, I have a pink house!".  All our dreams of planning the perfect house had just shattered.......and we were devastated.

My neighbors came over and said...."so....what do you think?" and I said ..."well...I think it looks pink", and they laughed and said "we were just saying the same thing"........oh great, now I know I'm not the only one who sees it, so now I'm assuming the whole neighborhood will wonder why in the world would we pick this Pink color for our house.  Soon the neighbor from up the street walks by (who ironically lives in a house with the cobblestone wicker siding I was originally supposed to have), and says..."well.....what do you think?".......and I say, "well, I'm not sure yet......it looks pink to me".   Then I explained it was supposed to be the color of their house and they were shocked.....not even close....and they said theirs has a cooler feel to it and our siding has more of a "warmer....red undertone to it".......oh no!!!  My parents came by and were equally disappointed and shocked at the color, and also thought it looked faded pink...not at all what we all were expecting!!  

So naturally I contact our sales rep and explain our disappointment and ask for our options at this point.  They came back saying because the siding had been completed it would be way too costly and delay closing to replace it.......I'm now up in arms.....what do we do?  We were hoping by the grace of God maybe the color would grow on us, perhaps the light during that particular time of day made the color look pink, or perhaps when the shutters went up it would make it more tolerable.....but without luck it wasn't any of those things and it still looks pink!  UGH!

Yesterday the PM in charge while our usual PM is on vacation was to go review the color to ensure it was the correct "comparable" siding color, and our sales rep was also going to drive by and take a look herself as well....but basically we have been told the siding will have to stay unless its an order error, and what can Ryan do that would make us happy with the siding.......well if it can't be changed what options do I have is my question?  We hate the siding and its not the color we picked and its not even a "comparable" color.....

My husband and I spent weeks driving around Ryan home developments looking at houses that had siding colors we liked and that were available for us to select.  It was so hard for us to visualize a housing color from a keychain size swatch and an unrealistic computerized example of what the color may look like on a house.....we needed to see the real deal to determine if it was what we liked.  Even at one of our pricing meetings with the sales rep we took a drive in the middle of the meeting through the complex to determine which trim we liked better with the siding color we selected.  We really took our time to make sure it was what we wanted and we would be happy!  THEN they turn around and change things and there was nothing we could look at but the swatch and we didn't have any other options other than to take the new "comparable" color.....I feel so disappointed now that its up and we hate it and there's nothing that can be done to change it.......this is the first impression someone has of your home.....PINK is not the impression I want someone to have looking at our house.  When building a house you take your time to make sure it is all you dreamed of because you have the option and opportunity to make it what you want.  I feel that has been taken away from us a little bit and now we have to live with it for the next 30+ years or until we move (which we were hoping not to have to do until the kids are done with college) or change the siding ourselves which would be $$.......

So below are some pictures of the house....they truly don't give a good representation of the actual "pink" we see but I'll let you form your own opinions.......what do we do now is the answers hopefully we'll get soon!

Let me know what you think.....

On a good note, all our drywall is up and primed.  Our cabinets have arrived. And our PM gave us our tenative closing date of August 12th.......somehow before I was so much more excited about that date when my house wasn't pink, but it will all work out (I hope).  Its not life or death....its siding....its just such a disappointment when you had something you liked picked out and it was changed to something you hate but apparently will have to live with.

No Need to Worry....we are now locked in!!

So with all this chatter lately about raising the country's debt ceiling its made me a bit nervous about our mortgage rate.  The more the discussions continue and the closer we get to August the more I have been worrying about how this all will impact our rate in the end, especially if we wait until the last minute and things don't turn out well with the government's decisions.  So I thought why wait.....lets just put this whole worrying thing to rest.....so today I made the call to our loan officer and made it a done deal.  Honestly, these days anything under 5% really isn't that bad and everything has been hovering between 4.6% and 5% these last few months anyways......so we just took the deal and locked in at 4.875%.....ahhhhhh....feeling so much better now that we don't have to worry about that anymore!

I think we failed to mention in our last post that like many of you we too were affected by the siding changes Ryan has made.  A week or so ago we had to go re-select new siding.  Basically they just showed us the comparable new siding to what we had originally picked. We went with the same color as selecting a new color didn't seem to be an option and we liked what we originally picked anyways.....well so we think from the 1 inch swatch they showed us.  It will be nice (we hope) to see what the whole house will actually look like....yikes!

Something else we noticed that I wondered if any of you by chance also had happen.  In one of our housing spec sheets it shows we were to have a double sink in the kitchen, which is what we believe we were told we would have as well, now it is crossed out and written over it is "single" bowl sink in the kitchen.  I guess when it comes down to it a sink is a sink and I'm not sure I'll care double or single bowl, but we've always had a double bowl sink in the kitchen since I was a kid as well as since I've lived on my own so it will be an interresting change if it truly ends up being a single bowl. Have any of you had that happen or like/dislike one over the other?

Hopefully we'll have some more pictures for you this weekend......if we haven't been locked out that is!! Getting so excited as I day dream about being in my new house in about a month.  Guess I need to get on the ball with my decorating plans.......been in such a debate over new furniture and paint colors and curtains etc....seems like what I really want won't be kid friendly which is our life right now so it creates a bit of a challenge!!  We would love a new living room set, family room set, and kitchen table/chairs in the morning room, plus I'd like a headboard for the guest bedroom and my daughters bedroom etc.......but for now guess I'll just keep day dreaming!

Let there be lights and walls!

So  it seems a lot has happened since our last post.  Electric is in and ON!!  Yes we have lights now ....well in the basement anyways.  All the wiring is done in the rest of the house but the fixtures obviously have not yet been installed.  The plumbing is in, the furnace has been installed and the egress window has also been installed.  We had our pre-drywall meeting on Tuesday.  Everything seemed to go very well.  We had a couple concerns but they appear to have been taken care of or are being looked into.  We had asked for the access panel that goes into the space above the garage to be dry walled over since visually we felt the access would be an eye sore in the master bedroom, and most likely we wouldn't want access to the space above the garage anyways (if we do we'll install the pull down stairs in the garage like we did in our last house).  Literally as we were standing there they drilled in some safety brackets, insulated it and it was ready for drywall.  I guess ask and we shall receive right! Our PM also gave us our 10 day closing date window......August 10th-20th.....woooo hooo!!  We are so hoping sooner than later as we need to be out of our rental home by August 19th.  Our PM said he thought it would be the sooner time frame but he didn't want to give us false hope at this stage of the game.  He said early next week though he could give us a time frame within a 3 day window of the expected closing date.  The drywall was delivered Tuesday afternoon.  I thought I'd take a chance and see what was going on today and they were putting up the drywall.  I think I surprised them with my visit but it was nothing short of amazing to see them work!!  They are so fast and focused with a clear system as to how they install everything.  My mom had also just stopped by the house literally moments ago and said they were still there working as of 7:45pm!!  I'm hoping thats a sign they were trying to finish it all up tonight.  The Pm put a lock on our door and said our days of being able to pop in are getting limited.....yikes.....I was enjoying my freedom to come and go as I please!  We still continue to meet neighbors in the neighborhood and are so excited that everyone is so nice and we seem to have a lot in common with them.  It is definitely making moving just that much more exciting for us.  Well I'm sure we'll have more pictures soon as this race to the finish is underway.  Only one more month to go!!  :-)