Build - Day ### - October 15, 2011

We haven't posted a lot recently mainly due to a lack of time in decision making processes, travel and health issues, but the progress on the house has not slowed down.

Since our last post the walls have been dry-walled and primed, the ceilings have been finished and all the electrical and plumbing is in as well. Next week we'll have regular power in the house as well and can say goodbye to the temporary pole in the front yard. Oh yeah, the drive way has also been poured, the furnace installed and with the installation of the glass block windows in the basement the building envelop is now sealed.

The items that haven't progressed much have been around cabinets and flooring. The quotes we've gotten were close to double the allowances so some soul searching and cost cutting methods had to be applied. We are very close in finalizing all of those items now though. We'll meet one last time with our kitchen cabinet supplier on Monday so he can get started and we'll meet with the supplier of the rest of the cabinets early next week.
Next Thursday morning we'll also meet with our 'trim guy', the master carpenter who will put the finishing touches on  the walls, windows and door openings.

So, here are a couple of pictures of the build as it stands this week.

Back-porch with the stone columns

Basement window, our manor stone and the back-filled electrical connector.

The walk way to the front door is elevated to one step only. A simple, removable one-step high ramp will be created  later to give us wheelchair access.

Good shot of the front of the house with more of the manor stone and the driveway.

Back-porch with the beautiful fall colors in the background.

Rainy day, but good shot of the house.

Close-up of our manor stone selection.

From the kitchen into the great room. More indoor pics to follow.

Color Selection

This is a bit of slow season in our build as the electrical/plumbing/HVAC finishes up. There's been a little bit of insulation blown in and then we're see the drywall going up. At the point, our house will really start to look like a home.

We've handed off our flooring selections, and the folks from Charis will do a little research so see if we can get the costs in line with our allowance. 

The other big batch of decisions we made this week was selecting the colors for our soon-to-be walls. Sue, from Charis, came over with her big book of Sherwin Williams color swatches and we got to work. Our allowance is for six colors, though we could always pay more for additional colors if we wanted them. Our current house has five colors (mostly one outside the bedrooms), so we figured six was plenty.

In our current house, our base color is what I call "chocolate milkshake." When we put in on almost 5 years ago, it really reminded me of a Wendy's Frosty. But as we've been looking at models and watching HGTV, we've been won over by gray as the new neutral. It works with our modern bent and our steel appliances and fixtures, so we think it will look nice. 

Thanks to the Sherwin Williams Color Visualizer, we're able to get a large scale sense of how the colors will look.

We'll use the darker gray as the base on the first floor for the kitchen, great room, dinette (maybe, see below), foyer, mudroom, office and maybe in-law bath (if we don't go with the room color). We'll  use the lighter gray upstairs in the guest bedroom, hallway and our bath, with a transitional treatment using both hues on the stairway. 

SW Classic French Gray

SW Light French Gray

The next decision was the in-law suite. We knew that it would be the same (or Sherwin Williams equivalent) or our current master bedroom colors, which is sage green and chocolate. I was happy to keep those colors (since we have all the accent decor) for our new master until my awesome hubby said we could use plum: my most favorite color! So here's the color for the in-law suite (and laundry room)

SW Dried Thyme

So, our room will be this pretty plum color! Our wedding colors were platinum and plum, so of course, I love that subtle reminder in our bedroom. What can I say, my husband is the greatest!

SW Expressive Plum

Just for giggles, I did this rendering for the dining room. It looks a lot richer/deeper than the rendering of our bedroom. Interesting. Our dinette will be very bright because it has windows on all three sides (and open on the fourth), so I think we could play with a darker color if we wanted to be crazy with it.

SW Expressive Plum

Our 2.5-year-old son's favorite color, for quite some time has been yellow. When we asked him what color he wanted his new room to be, he has quite consistently requested yellow. However, yellow is not really the calm nap/deep sleeping-inducing color we have in mind, so we're sticking with blue like he has in his nursery, but more of a "big boy blue. We saw this particular color in another Charis home and we feel in love with it.

SW Bracing Blue

So that leaves one last color. We had to decide between the vibrant orange Dutch bathroom I put off in our current house because we needed to be neutral or yellow for our amber-obsessed son. After looking at pictures of my Dutch decor, we decided that the yellow would work, so this is the yellow for our powder room and D's bath. The power room will have orange tulips for accents, and D's room will have blue accents.

SW Bee's Wax.

We made all these selections in our home, at night, under warm lights. Sue, our interior designer, is ordering larger samples that we'll bring to the new house to view with natural light. If needed we can adjust the tones.

I can't wait to see it all come together!