It's been a while

Sorry for the hiatus...life has been busy and in the free time I've had, I've been lazy. Quite a bit of progress has been made although we are behind schedule. Rainy weather has us a few weeks behind where we'd like to be. We should still finish before our lease is up though toward the end of August. Here's a look at what has happened over the past couple of weeks:

Tubs delivered

Upstairs before framing/roof



"Dried in"...although every time it rains it still gets soaking wet. Haven't understood why they call it "dried in" at this point!

Probably will need a window covering of some sort there!

So as you can see, we now have windows and some doors! They are LoE rated windows and after going to the window place, it is amazing how energy efficient, but cheap feeling windows are these days. They feel flimsy (if that is a word) to us. But some of the most expensive windows there felt like that. These are all energy star rated and supposed to help keep the costs down. Wish I could have budgeted for some of the windows with Argon in them, but these are better than what we have now and should be good for our first home.

Plumbing and HVAC guys start tomorrow and Wednesday while the framers finish framing the basement and a few other small jobs before they move on. Tomorrow we are also doing an electrical walk through. Any suggestions? I plan on doing dimmers throughout most of the house. Going to make sure where we plan on putting the Christmas tree has an outlet controlled by a switch. Making sure there is an outlet on the island in the kitchen. Putting outlets so I can run under cabinet lighting. Outlets where our night stands will go. If I can budget, I will have outlets on the roof for Christmas lights if we do them, but I think that will push my budget. I'm sure I have other ideas written down, but feel free to comment with any suggestions!

We finalized the kitchen plans today with our designer. That is a huge relief! We had been working with two different designers and I basically had them competing against each other. Both started off about $2000-3000 over our budget. After all was said and done, one of them basically gave us everything we wanted, plus bumped us up to 42" cabinets throughout the kitchen and came in right on budget. We didn't have to drop anything we wanted, gained stuff we hadn't even thought possible, and got them to come down between $2000-3000! Our builder was impressed. He said he has never seen them come down quite that much. Finally one of them dropped out of the race today and said she couldn't go any lower, so we finalized with the other guy. Here are the drawings:

The cabinets will be a very dark "espresso" color and we have selected this hardware (in brushed nickel):

We will have granite, but haven't selected that yet. We want something in the low-mid level price range that is very light. Jenny likes anything with as white of a base as possible to go with the dark cabinets. My next house will definitely have the Cambria stuff in it! That stuff is amazing. I know...too early to think of the next house!

We also have our appliances picked out. We had the refrigerator ordeal (will never buy from Sears again), but finally got it sorted out and got a great deal when Best Buy price matched so we could return the damaged piece of garbage Sears tried to dump on us. We will be doing all stainless steel appliances. We are doing a slide in range with smoothtop electric. Everyone says go gas, but we really don't like it for some reason. Our microwave that will be an OTR unit also has a convection bake capability (up to 450 degrees), and will serve as a small, second oven. We didn't even know that existed and are excited about that!

That is about it for now. I will try to update this more frequently! Take it easy everyone.