Tiles, Carpets, Tiles & Carpets & Flooring...OH MY!

On Friday we had our second appointment with Fashion Flooring, time to get within our allowances, since we DID NOT stay in our allowances for the kitchen. (I promise I will do a post about the kitchen as soon as we finalize our choices).

So I stayed at an amazing hotel this week in Savannah, The Bohemian, I wanted to do grays in my MB, low & behold, this bathroom was amazing! I believe that Gray is the decorator's new Tan/Beige. Check out these pictures from the bathroom in the room!
This one is from the hotel's website, mentioned above:

Now some close-ups from my Phone Camera:

Amazing Shower Floor Mosaic:

I am happy to report that we choose our wood floors! Hand-Scraped Asian Walnut! When we went in to work on budget, they had an amazing special on this particular floor! It is beautiful! I can't wait for you to see it!

We also still liked all of our choices for the master bathroom, powder room, and laundry room! We made the tile in the guest bath darker and choose a less expensive "frieze" for the upstairs bedrooms.

And guess what? We are almost in budget now!!! Yay!

We got DIRT!

Wow, a lot of progress was made on our house this week while I was out of town. The way my work & travel schedule looks our house should be done by the end of February! Right Brian?

At any rate, my husband was great and stopped by the lot every day to take pictures!

Monday:

Monday afternoon:

Monday Night (these are blankets to keep our ground warm...hey whatever works)

Tuesday the ground breaking was complete

Wednesday footers were poured, I deduct that footers keep the house in the ground :)

I flew home Thursday night, so guess what? You got it, work was stopped and no work was done Friday either, something about letting the concrete set... C'est la vie

Well I'm headed out of town Tuesday, so I'm guessing all sorts of stuff will be completed! Stay tuned, we received our kitchen, flooring, and bathroom quote, I may need to do a fundraiser to pay for all of the upgrades. Feel free to send me any extra change you have laying around :)

10 Ten Reasons I can't wait for our house to be built!

10. Get our crap out of storage-it has become a running joke in the house, every time Dave or I say we need something, I reply, "I have it, but it's in STORAGE" I guess it isn't a joke, but it is our sad reality, I have not seen some of my belongings in almost 16 months. Dave is even worse off as when he moved from Philly he thought he would only need a couple of things, so he literally has been rotating between 2 pairs of shorts for working out, one of which we bought :)

9. My new washer and dryer! We bought a steam LG Washer & Dryer during the ridiculous Holiday Appliance Sales.

8. A Garage! Currently in the house we are renting, the garage is used for our builders office. In Chi-town I had a heated garage, I forgot how much of a pain in the ass it is to have to scrape windows off every damn morning.

This will match our front door nicely, I'm sure it won't be an upgrade!

7. Not having to live in a house that may have a showing at any minute. In the last 16 months I have been living in month-to-month rentals that are up for sale. Realtors always want to do showings when the house is the messiest. I'm pretty sure I'm bad luck, because the places I have lived in still have not sold, except my condo which sold in 34 days, thanks ANNA!

6. We can finally put our STYLE into OUR home. I think our living room will look something like this:

5. Save SOME GAS-My husband drives from Valpo to Crown Point at least 15-20 times a week. Is his office there you ask? Well NO, he works from home! He drives there to see his family, have lunch, dinner, take dry cleaning, go grocery shopping, pick up his mail (yes his address is technically still his parents), workout, and socialize, to name a few. (I'm in so much trouble for this post!)

4) 2 televisions-I love watching sports LIVE, can handle watching ESPN and other sports, but 12 hours a day..not so much. Also, Dave loves his PS3...

Where is your other TV you ask? I give you one guess...

3) Murano Glass-We bought a beautiful piece of artwork in Italy and I can't wait to place it somewhere in our new HOME!

2) Permanent Address: I have changed my address on my airline & hotel reward programs, my credit cards, my license, my insurance, my iTunes account, bank accounts, and my magazines more in the last 16 months than I ever have in my life! Add a name change to that = BIGGEST PIA EVER!

AGAIN!

1) Wedding Presents-we received many, many, many beautiful gifts for our wedding in August and guess what? You got it, they are all in storage! I can't wait to have matching silverware, plates, china, crystal, new pots & pans. I am still using the
same housewares I was GIVEN (as hand-me-downs mind you)for my first apartment in 1998.

I'm pretty sure I will have a dish breaking party with all my "borrowed" bar pint glasses, dishes, and anything else I can find..

Then I can start entertaining again as well! Look for some type of invite once our house is completed! I can' t wait to throw our first shindig!!

Stone, Brick, or both?

We have been told that the "digger" will be digging by Monday...I'm not going to hold my breath, BUT if it happens we have to make some quick decisions. We originally thought we would want a brick and stone front for our home. However, now we may want just stone, so we need to quickly decide: brick and stone, just stone, or just brick? If we decide brick and stone, the builder has to pour a brick ledge, if we don't want brick and he pours a brick ledge we are essentially throwing moola out the window...

Here is our inspirational color combo photo

Granted this house only has a little stone but we LOVE the siding color, too bad this type of siding is 3x the cost of vinyl siding. At any rate, here are some types of stone we like, keep in mind our siding is light gray, with black/gray shingles (similar to the photo avove). The stone/brick company can customize the stone to basically be any colors we just need to choose the type we like best!

1) Stone Type: Mountain Ledge

2) Cobblestone/Lime Combo

3)Not sure what type of stone. This was recently done

We like the dark gray on this post.

4) Cut Lime-This is their custom-colored stone-you can see the home owner used colors from the brick color in the stone!

5)I believe this is Limestone- (sorry to pic is crooked, I refused to get out of the car for fear someone would see me being a stalker)

Entire House

6) Another Limestone and this house is ridiculous!

We saw a LOT more homes, brick, and stone. I like all of the 6styles. I believe I AM leaning towards #6, but it could be because the house was GORGEOUS. It's crunch time, I leave Monday for the week..looks like we should make an appointment ASAP with the Brick & Stone company! What do you think we will do?

I think I heard...

At 11:30 pm after being asleep for about an hour, I heard, "Brian got the stamp of approval today in the mail, Are you excited?" The only thing I was excited about last night was my pillow. Now that it is morning, my only comment is, "I will believe it when I see the excavator digging in the ground."

"Whaddya doing while waiting to break ground?"

Picking out STUFF! Here's the crazy list from our builder...You don't really think about how much you have to pick out until you build your own home.

The list looks like this:

So have you broken ground yet?

The short answer is NO!!!!! We aren't happy about it..

Here is our lot on November 21st:












Here is the lot on December 6th:


Progress right?! If you look really closely those are flags marking the walls of the house. Yippee!








Here it is on December 13th:



This is my personal favorite picture so far! I am psyched we will have a home soon!

And finally this is what we saw when we drove up on January 2nd:


You are seeing correctly, no more digger. We have regressed people...

However this is not the fault of builder, or us, or really even the city..it is the State of Indiana's fault! Thank you! See our building foreman went in to the city's permit thingamijiggy office and they told him, that he needed this one last seal of approval from the State. So, I guess it kind of is the City's fault as well. Our foreman sent it to the state December 20th, they told him 10 BUSINESS days...well with the holidays, that brings us to January 3rd, yes ladies and gents that is today! And guess what??? Wait for it..

NO stamp/seal of approval letter in the mail today. However the state did send an email to our builder letting him know it is on it's sweet way via snail mail! What is this 1981? Who uses regular USPS mail?

In the meantime, pray for warmer weather so we are able to break ground when we finally get the f'ing permit...

Stay Tuned...