More building, more pictures

Hey Everyone!

We stopped by the house again yesterday to check out the progress.  Here's what we found:

The front of the house

The garage is still a little covered by house wrap.  The two windows on the 2nd floor are the Master Bedroom, and you can see the framing for the screened-in  porch on the back side.

Look!  Our stairs!

After getting a tip from a friend (thanks Rebecca!), we also stopped by a furniture store in downtown Augusta called Merry's Trash and Treasures on Saturday afternoon. We browsed for a while, then decided we needed snacks.  As we were driving away, we discovered they have 2 other stores on the same block!  Needless to say, we have a lot more browsing to do!

Let the building begin!

Steve and I stopped by the plot last week before we left town to check things out.  We were very excited to see that brick laying had begun. Seeing the bricks come to life confirmed our choice of color for both of us. We drove by again today to see that the first floor has been framed.  It it very exciting to see  progress being made.

Our driveway, yay!

From the very back of the cleared portion of the lot.

Our forest (180 degrees from the picture above)

The wetlands at the back corner.

Our bricks, before the building began.

Our bricks... as OUR HOUSE!

Ladies and gentleman, the first floor has been framed.

We also had a meeting last week with our builder's wife to design the color scheme for the rest of the house. Wall colors, wood floors, tiled floors, carpets, counter tops, cabinets, siding color, outside tim color and shutters... oh my!  I think the only things we have not picked out are the lighting fixtures. For that, we make an appointment at the lighting gallery and hash it out them.

We've also been busy looking for new furniture. Specifically dining room furniture, kitchen table/chairs, living room furniture, and possibly new office furniture.We've seen some things that we like, but not anything that we LOVE... yet.

It'll be hard not to stop by and check things out now that the structure is going up, so I'm sure we'll have plenty more pictures to put up in the future. So stay tuned!

Appliances

A couple of weeks ago we stopped Ferguson's, showroom, who will be handling all of our appliances.  We talked about what we wanted and need for our kitchen, and ended up narrowing it down to a few select models for each appliance in the kitchen.  They then send us this really great little .pdf file that contained all of our selections, so we could make the final choices.

To check out our appliances, go to http://provisionsportfolio.com/output/13604761601279891368933.pdf

It was a very professional little presentation that they put together, I would say going above and beyond.  (And almost made up for them closing their showroom early on the first day we tried to stop by).

We made our selections and forwarded them on to Mark Herbert, our builder.  As it turns out, appliances are one of the early decisions that has to be made in the process, since the cabinetry has to be structured around them.

We didn't have any real desire to make sure all of our appliances were one brand, simply to get the best we could without going overboard on costs (at lot of our choices were based on Consumer Reports ratings and other online research).  But even though it wasn't by design, all of our kitchen appliances with the exception of our range hood came from the Whirpool Gold line.

Bricks!

We submitted our top three choices of brick to our builder last week.  No word yet on which one we'll actually be using (he asked for multiple choices because apparently availability is often a problem), but hopefully we should hear sometime this week.

Here's what we came up with:

Our first choice, Spanish Moss

Our second choice, Scarlet Oak

Our third choice, Briarwood

Floor Plans

Another picture dump, this time it's our floor plans and the house elevation:

Front and Right Elevations.  The house is going to be mostly brick.  The areas on the second floor of the front elevation that you see are going to be vinyl siding.  We briefly considered a wood shingle, but we felt the maintenance would be too much for us.  I'm not a huge fan of vinyl siding (or not a fan at all, really), but since it is such a small area of the house (and one that you can't see up close, since it's only on the second story), I think we can live with it.  I do believe we are going to try to choose a siding that has as much of a wood look/feel as we can manage.

Rear and Left elevations

First floor.  The room marked "Living Room" is going to be our home office, and "Bedroom 2" is going to be our guest bedroom.  The idea is that our guest bedroom should be on the first floor in case we have overnight guests who have a hard time getting up and down stairs, such as an "aged P" (kudos to anyone who gets that reference).

The second floor.  What used to be the 5th bedroom now has a doorway to the master bedroom.  This is likely going to be a hobby room of some sort.  One change, the door between the two rooms is now closer to the bottom of the master bedroom, in order to break up the space on the master bedroom's left wall as little as possible.  The two bedrooms on the left are intended for future children.  In the meantime one is probably going to function as a second guest bedroom, the other possible an exercise room.  The "Play Room" is probably going to be either a recreation room of some sort, or maybe a home cinema.

Also, in case you haven't noticed, we are doing our posts in two different fonts.  The posts in Arial are Patricia's, the posts in the stately Courier font (i.e. this one) are mine.