WOW! Too much progress to cram into a clever headline!

First of all, Happy New Year!! I'll be honest, it's not my favorite holiday. New Year's Eve always makes me a little sad. While others are out celebrating over bubbly, I'm usually feeling anxious about another year gone by, being another year older, the KIDS being another year older etc.  It's terrible to live with all this angst!  And while that was still true this year, I can't deny we had an amazing year of major life changes - a healthier lifestyle for sure with major weight loss, packing up and moving across country, enabling our kids to spend everyday with their mammy who loves them more than the air she breathes... and we have another amazing year to look forward to in 2014 with the completion of our new home! Speaking of which...

I think we all were bracing for a month of extremely slow progress in December with the holidays. With our first build, all the trades just seemed to disappear the week before a holiday and didn't come back until a week after the holiday so everything came to a screeching hault. Not this time!!


BRICK 

In spite of a major ice storm that held up delivery of our sand for the mortar, the brick guys got to work a day earlier than expected. They disappeared on Christmas (fair enough), but they haven't been back since.  Boo.  Hopefully they are back and ready to work later this week! They've nearly finished our house. They haven't started mom and dad's house yet, but once they've got a full crew I think they've got less than a week of work left to do on the brick.

 We were really freaked out about our brick choice because we only saw it on a couple houses, and the rest of those houses weren't our taste, and they had a different color mortar which makes a HUGE difference. We wanted brick that looks really old, like it could have been built on a french countryside 100 years ago. From a distance you should wonder- is it stone? is it stucco? is it brick? We wanted it light, but not white Miami Vice brick.  And there just aren't that many options! So we took a chance and went with our gut, or with our gut post-photoshopping the heck out of it.  This is called Silverado by Hanson brick, and we chose an offwhite mortar rather than the standard gray or buff which creates a grid-like pattern. We also asked for a messy installation, meaning, they don't clean out the joints to a smooth pattern. if they get mortar on the face of the brick, even better.  It's photographing extremely light in the sun!

I should also mention that the front will have lots more embellishments and the finished product won't be so plain jane.  We're doing board and batten shutters stained a french aqua color. There'll be cedar window headers stained dark gray.  And we've got decorative collector box downspouts in a charcoal finish metal.

It seems they've either had trouble getting the mortar to match across batches/sections, or they forgot to add whatever makes it white (lime?) or something.  That said, it looks like they're going back over all the joints and making it look messy, so if they can get it to all match like the top here it'll be PERFECT and we'll be so happy with our choice!

Love the top, hate the bottom!

WALL TEXTURE

I'll keep this quick.  They sprayed the walls and did the knockdown texture on Christmas Eve-eve.  I think it looks terrible now, but am confident it's just the color difference from where the tape and mud is.  Once it's primed and painted it will look fine, or at least I'm trying not to panic yet.  :)

This was right in front of a window with the blue plastic protectors on, hence the blue tone in the pic!

HARDWOOD FLOORS!

We found out on Christmas eve that the hardwood floors "might" start on Thursday (the day after Christmas) but we figured there's no way.  Sure enough, done on Friday.  The floors really make it feel more like a home, and the wood they used is beautiful.  Originally we thought we were getting 2" red oak boards, which wasn't super exciting to us, but given the amount of wood, it wasn't something we wanted to spend money to upgrade.  But our builder switched flooring suppliers, and surprise - wider planks!!  Yay for us!  These won't be finished until the very very end so none of the trades get to walk or drag equipment on the finished product.  :)

standing in the office doorway

Mom and dad's house

Mom and dad's kitchen/dining looking towards living room and front door

I spent a lot of time playing mad scientist mixing different stains to try to come up with a custom blend, and never came to a conclusion, so I think we'll be on site when the guys are back to stain and we'll just do a lot of blending and sampling on the floors themselves.


CABINETS

Again we were told, the cabinets "might" start on Monday (Dec 30th), and again we figured no way during a holiday week would they start another project.  Well, imagine our surprise on Saturday the 28th when we were up checking out our beautiful new hardwood floors and the cabinet guy started unloading our cabinets from his trailer!!  I guess there are 2 loads worth so the cabinet installers would be bringing the second trailer when they start work installing on Monday as planned!  Yippee!

here are our cabinets pulling right up to the front door!

and just randomly placed throughout the main living area - even some of mom and dad's cabinets!

But today is Wednesday, and yes indeed, they came, they installed, they left!  Both houses!

We chose a shaker style door, and mom and dad opted for the cottage v-groove for theirs.  The cabinets will be painted when the rest of the house is painted.  These are completely custom cabinets.  Custom, as in, instead of visiting a kitchen designer (any place that sells cabinetry) to draw up our cabinetry plan using standard size cabinets like 18", 24", 27" etc, they drew up the plans in the field based on our preliminary wishlist.  For example, I wanted a trash pullout in the island, and then the rest of it to be entirely deep drawers - no doors.  More drawers flanking the stove for pots and pans.  I also wanted glass mullion doors on the upper cabinets flanking the range hood.  I was skeptical because I'm a visual person and I like all things tangible!  But, my wariness disappeared when the cabinets arrived.  They are solid maple, like super, duper, solid... the solid-est cabinets I've ever seen in my life.  The drawers are full extension, but we didn't do the "quiet close" because we had them in the last house and they were more annoying than helpful.  Did I mention these things are so solid?

So when I heard the cabinets are going in, I immediately thought of the kitchen.  And what a difference in the main living area with the cabinets defining the kitchen space now!!  This is our home!!!!!   But then to walk in and see all the bathroom vanities, the cabinetry in the laundry room, the mudroom, the kids homework alley... it was amazing!!  This is just so exciting!  ok ok, here are the pics..

Maybe some of you can relate to this, but our biggest peave in our last kitchen was there wasn't enough room between the kitchen perimeter and the island.  You can't see the numbers from this photo, but it's 58"!! 

9.5' of  uninterrupted island glory!  Think of the size fondant I could roll out on this island!!

Homework alley!

Laundry room - those are 42" tall cabinets with a giant trash pullout.  The w/d obviously go to the left there, and then we'll have one long granite folding counter running the length of the room.

Looking into the private potty room :)

Master bathroom view from bedroom entrance

My vanity 

I'm so psyched we remembered to do this - electrical outlets in our linen closets to charge our electric toothbrushes out of sight!

Our mudroom bench right off the garage

Mom and dad's kitchen

FIREPLACE MANTEL

So the next two updates are cheating a little bit.  They're not installed in the house yet, but they were custom products made just for us, and we got the email with photos of the finished products on the same day which was so fun.  The fireplace mantel is from a semi-local company in Sunnyvale, TX.  As with almost everything, my "request" for the rep at the mill was "kinda like this but without that, and more of this, and maybe a little more...."  you get the idea.  And he delivered!  We ended up with a douglas fir beam with a nice aged barn beam finish.  I'll be staining it on site once everything else is in.  I'm thinking I'll go just a little darker than the floors.  :)  If it just looks like a block of wood to you, close your eyes and picture it surrounded by all that beautiful stone we're hauling in from new england for the fireplace surround!

RANGE VENT HOOD

Originally, we had priced out a range hood from the same place where we're getting our appliances.  That hood was from Vent-a-hood, which is a very nice product, but the way you go about designing and ordering it was annoying to me.  Basically, I have to know exactly what I want, and then I go and describe it to the appliance salesman, who then telephone games that into a request for the Vent-a-hood sales rep who goes to someone else down the line, and a month later they come back with a quote.  It's a single price and I have no idea if it's so high because of the material I specified, or the size or what.  So the price was what it was, and after we picked our jaws up off the ground, we decided to suck it up and get that hood.  It was pretty simple.  Stainless, in a fairly commercial shape with the apron done in polished/mirrored stainless.  Our range has chrome accents on it.  Then as we continued to play with all the elements going into our kitchen and recognizing that our kitchen is part of the open living area... we want the whole space to feel aged, not shiny and new.  So our kitchen started morphing a bit, and we decided to go in a radically different direction with the hood.

I priced out hoods with several metalsmiths?  is that the right use of that word?  These hoods are outrageously expensive.  I'd love to see what the construction entails just based on the prices!  The highest quote I got was $16k.  Yikes!  It's not even one of those huge ranges.  It's 36"!  We politely declined that company.  lol  We chose a guy who's in Indiana, which is obviously more challenging than going with one of the 3 local companies I spoke to, but when I sent him my request, he immediately called and we chatted about all our options.  And he ended by saying he would send me a quote for the hood constructed in a fancy way ( i forget the semantics) but that if it's too high, he could also construct in a more traditional way and priced that out.  Both ways were still even more than the original Vent-a-hood, but the new design is Zinc, not stainless, and it's got a custom patina finish, and lots of black steel strapping and rivets.  It's glorious, and we're so happy with it!!  I really feel like this is going to be the antique jewelry in our kitchen, and if anyone out there is reading this considering an investment in a range hood - DO IT!  But prepare yourself for the price ahead of time!!  I feel like we got a very good deal on this relative to other custom hood suppliers, but it still cost us more than our 36" 6-burner commercial range.  (gulp)  But isn't she pretty?!  Tres french, oui oui!

I'm told the granite guys will be out soon to measure and template and start the manufacturing process.  That blows my mind that we're at the granite stage all of a sudden.  The "trim" is being delivered tomorrow, and I'm not sure if that means all the crown moulding, baseboards, and all the beam material for our coffered ceiling, or if it also means hardware for our interior doors because our construction manager definitely referenced our black handles.

And just for fun, some shots of the little helpers.  Daddy was shaking the spare change out of doodle's pockets here.  And the nugget was hard at work on that saw horse.  I don't know if you can tell from the photo, but his Auntie Cindy handmade him the most beautiful (handsome?) toolbelt for Christmas!

I'll close with another milestone photo of the family at our front door now that the brick is up!  We're standing there, I promise.  

Wasn't this a fun update??!  Something for everyone.  ;)  Do I look forward to the next one?  You betcha!  (That was for you Gretchen B!)  back to work DR blog stalkers.  hehe