One more finish, and some other tentative choices

Above is the kitchen tile. We compromised on the standard size tile and glazed ceramic, although I definitely envision us going with stone tile that we will install ourselves in the future. We wanted to go with different sizes but the standard options are limited to single size and ceramic or porcelain. Since we feel we can probably replace an existing floor without too much difficulty, this is an upgrade we will perform when the time is right. 

This is a basic idea of what we want for the front of the kitchen eating counter. This isn't what the island itself will look like, but we just wanted a reminder that we want wood paneling and not stone or brick facade. We've discovered that while the stone/brick facade looks nice, it also can be hard on knees and toes if you're not paying attention. 

This is the basic idea for the cooktop we want to get. We will try to stay within our appliance budget, but I think the cooktop is the one item we may go for a bit higher option. 

This is in the zipcode of what we want to do with the outdoor fireplace. We want a ledge that's conducive to sitting, as well as small firewood storage area next to the fireplace itself. We haven't decided on how much brick and/or stone facade will use. The material will be the same as the choices for the house. 

Finishes

Above are the countertop choices. The top left granite with the red flecks and copperish streak will be the kitchen countertops. On the right the slightly darker flecked granite that continues the copper color will be all the other countertops in the bathrooms, home theater, and outdoor kitchen. The white sample on the bottom is cultured marble that will be used only in the laundry room. We managed to get colors we were happy with within our allowable choices.

The stone tile above will be for the kitchen backsplash. We're going to use the darker tiles on top in the larger size with the lighter color in the bottom picture for smaller tiles so it will be sort of the accent color. Many of our finish choices are lighter since the cabinets and hardwood floors will be darker.

I'm also looking at getting a custom painted set of tiles for behind the cooktop. We're trying to see if we can get this asian floral/tree pattern that has similar colors to the countertops and would look nice and understated. We have to see if the company in question will expand the image across multiple tiles.

The Gold tiles (not to scale) are the choice for the bathroom floors and wall/shower tiles. These are ceramic (or maybe porcelain?) but they have a variety of textures as seen above to give them more of a stone feel.

That very descriptive and interesting picture above is the wall color. We ended up settling on a fairly neutral beige that is really similar to the wall colors in our last two houses, but it's a compromise that's unavoidable when you start considering the other colors and the need for some contrast so we're not overwhelmed by dark colors.

The chateau brown (as used in chateaus, apparently) is the choice for the home theater walls. We were given two paint color choices and we could have used them however we wanted, but we decided to go with beige in every other room. It's all flat paint, not counting trim colors. The home theater walls needed to be a bit darker to absorb reflections.

The 3 pictures above show the hardware. This is a pretty standard material & color in home construction now, it's almost identical to what we had in our first Carothers home in Killeen. We like the color & material both, so why fix what isn't broken.

We had multiple options for the interior doors but we ended up liking what Royal Crest had in their office so we chose that, as well as the trim colors.

The old world texture on the right (not the color) is an option for two rooms in the home where they will go ahead and manually apply the texture when painting. We chose the two biggest rooms, the living room and home theater.

We didn't find the specific door we wanted. The two doors above represent what we hope to combine. The door on the left is a bit too "prison doory" to use Aeyong's real estate jargon, and I agreed. The door on the right's glass insert was bigger than we wanted. We're asking RC to give us the door on the left with the upper pane all glass so we have a half door sized glass insert (with a pattern to be chosen later). We really like how the wooden planks in the door evoke the hardwood floors we hope to get. That's another finish you won't see yet, because we're trying to find out if it will cost us more for our preference. We were quoted for scrubbed hardwood floors in the office, dining (library), and living room, but that was for 3 inch planks. We definitely prefer the 5 inch, so we're going to try and get them to change to those. We originally envisioned those being a really dark stain, but we're starting to think a little less stain will be preferable since we have dark furniture.

Yes, we actually got to choose the roof color. We went wild and chose the weathered wood, which is apparently what every other home in Mustang Creek already has (or close to it). We just couldn't see having some bizarre roof color that would call attention to itself. We figured the pink elephants and flamingoes next to the car on blocks would take care of that.

Blueprints

Just in case you were curious, here's the basic layout. The media room was actually smaller than requested so they tweaked the dimensions so it's 15x25 "in the clear" as they say in buildspeak. In other words, the interior dimensions are 15x25.

The Dominion?

...or perhaps the demesne? The seat of House Hightower? The Dominion of House Hightower. Adequately pompous and douchey if I do say so myself. And I do be do be do.

Now that we have that out of the way (for today, at least) on to updates. This part will be really short. There aren't any to speak of, not really. We did have a meeting with Ben the Builder on Monday to discuss changes to the back patio. Our original request was based on the home theater extending towards the backyard and thereby providing a longer wall to put the outdoor kitchen/fireplace against. When we changed the direction of the home theater towards the left side of the house, we lost about 10 feet of wall. Unfortunately no one (including RC) thought to have another look at the outdoor kitchen and what affect the shorter wall would have.

With only about 10 feet of wall to work with now (there's a door in the corner), it would have been ridiculously tight to have the countertop, sink, barbecue top, and fireplace all in that space. We settled on having RC create a square pad at the outer border of the covered patio to place the fireplace, giving us 10 feet of space for the sink, countertop, and barbecue grill. That way we will maintain the view (for what it's worth) out of the living room and keep everything flush (ish) against the left wall. The fire place angles out at 45 degrees to cover the main seating/table area that we intend. Our porch isn't overly spacious at the moment, but it will be adequate for us two and the dogs, and it should be okay for entertaining.

We envision expanding the patio size outwards and adding some landscaping features over time. These are mostly upgrades that we intend to tackle ourselves. If we do expand the patio with concrete or equivalent, that is one exception where we might hire someone because we hear it's more cost effective if you are going to pour a large amount of concrete. I'm not sure how expansive we will want to go at this point. We will definitely want more space, and we're thinking about a hot tub at some point in the future as well. I don't see a pool happening, neither one of us would use it enough to justify the expense.

That is one nice element of having the one acre plot and well water. We can see eventually adding a koi pond and some japanese/asian influenced landscaping (I'm especially fond of their minimalist approach that engenders multiple interpretations) but still being able to maintain a big enough yard for the dogs to do their thing.

The other "update" is that we will meet with RC on Saturday morning to discuss finishes/colors (brick, flooring, countertops, cabinets, paints, orangutans, breakfast cereals, etc.). We have a good idea of what we want, now we just need to find out if we can afford it. Our price already includes granite countertops in all areas except the laundry room, and hardwood floors in the office, library (dining room), and living room. The relative quality level of the finishes will affect the price however. I don't think we necessarily care about the fu fu level (real estate term) on the cabinets, but we do want nice countertops and ideally we would like one of the more visually striking very light (almost white) colors to offset our dark cabinets & floors. I have a feeling that won't be available in the level 1 list. As I understand it there are 3 levels of granite countertops (at least for RC) and we were quoted the price for level 1s as part of our overall home price. Hopefully we can find something we like without adding to the budget.

The Framing...

a new TV series from CBS, possibly. John Deter was a honest cop, and in this town, the life expectancy of a honest cop is about, well, let's just say it's less. Less than normal. Because honesty is not valued as highly in this town, is what I'm saying. Because, criminals, obviously. Anywho...

In the context of this post it's considerably less dramatic as I'm talking about 2x6's and home construction. RC put out the frames for the foundation and they will ensure it's up to atomically precise standards with ye olde surverory rangefinder things on legs here in the next day or so. Aeyong had dropped by and snapped the pics (including the future home theatre, and yes it's spelled theatre, because I said so) and we'll go back and make sure the numbers match up with what we requested. The home theatre (see, you're not even noticing it now), is really the only critical room as far as precise measurements go. If the other rooms are generally close to what was promised we'll be fine.

I'm still working on a title for our home. I've read too many epic fantasies and played too many video games to not have a formal name. If I can't have a moat and a drawbridge I can at least have a pretentious title with a seal or something equivalently douchey.

Oh kids...

how ya doin? Anywho, not much new here. We're going to drop by the property (I haven't come up with an appropriate title for it yet, but I want it to be palatial, majestic and rocking, so I'll probably go with "our place") this evening to check stake placement. I got a voicemail from someone with RC, I think it was the dude who went over the blueprints with us (I should probably remember his name), and they need us to approve the positioning of the stakes so they can proceed.

I'm not sure if they got the updated blueprints, so before I give them the approval I will ask whether this factors in the correct home theater dimensions. I'll probably take our rangefinder with us to shoot the stakes and see if it matches up with the dimensions we're expecting. We wanted to go last night but we had an ill timed thunderstorm sweep through and I didn't particularly want to go four wheeling in the mud.

Once we approve the stakes they should be able to proceed. I guess foundation is next, although we don't know the precise schedule. We'll be meeting to discuss finishes and colors in the near future as well.

On the gear front, Winter NAMM was recently held in LA and although there's plenty of new gear to be had, I haven't seen anything especially interesting that I want to drop some plastic towards. The most important upcoming event is the impending release of the new version of Axe Edit for the AxeFx as well as firmware 10.

This firmware is supposed to employ a newer approach to analyzing and tone matching amps and cabinets and it apparently has resulted in more precise and accurate models. I honestly thought they couldn't get much better about 4 firmwares ago, and after being proven wrong four times in a row, I've quit setting limits on what they can achieve with that magical black box. Another plus is that Cliff Chase (owner and lead designer of the AxeFx and Fractal Audio) just bought a mint Dumble 100W Amp (at a hefty price, enough to get a new Corvette if I understand correctly) so I expect that to be modeled and added with FW 10 or a later update.

The Dumble is one of the all time most sought after boutique amps, used by guys like SRV, Robben Ford, and Eric Johnson. It will be interesting to get a chance to try it out, so to speak. There are no other big gear events or purchases on the horizon. I'm trying to limit any expenditures until we're settled in the new home and get an idea of where our budget is at. Plus, we're going to be paying back the loan we took on my 401K for the 2.5 years, so that's a significant deduction from my monthly take home pay currently.

Blueprints discussed

We met with them yesterday (a day later than planned thanks to a long day at work courtesy of our perennially absent examiner, no names mentioned), and went through the blueprints and discussed our changes. They seemed surprised by the home theater dimensions but we were able to show them we requested 15x25 on the original documents, so they're going to fix that. We are waiting for an estimate on the cost of the bar, but they predicted it could be done for around $3K, so that's definitely worth it for us. We were able to move some lights around as they had recessed lights in several places that we didn't really care about so we changed four of them for in the home theater. We also got them to agree to install an equipment shelf on the left wall of the theater that will open up to the guest room closet and give me access to my a/v rack from behind. That should eliminate the frustration of installation and upgrades to my a/v gear in the future.

We made a few other modifications here and there but it's fairly close to what we originally requested. They predicted 10 days to get the blueprints back, so that means they'll probably not break ground until the first week or so of February. That will push us into an August completion and most likely a September closing date. Maybe they'll be able to build faster than predicted, but I'm not holding my breath. We will be having ongoing meetings with them to choose cabinets, counters, and other finishes and colors. It's nice to be involved in each step, but we always have the feeling we're missing something critical. We at least have the experience of our first house to know a little better about our preferences.

No house can be perfect because there will always be little tweaks and changes you want to make, but this house is shaping up to be really close to our ideal. This house gives us a slight case of deja vu because the front layout and kitchen area are really similar to our first home. The foyer, office, dining room, and kitchen are almost identical with only a slight difference in kitchen design. The locations are all the same, so we get the same feeling walking in the front door of this house as we did in our first house. It's probably not that uncommon because there are only so many basic home designs among all builders. Things can get decidedly different with custom builders or in other countries, but in Texas at least, the home builders only have so many stock plans and they just make tweaks to separate themselves.

Hallo there...

Not much new happening here in strumville. We did go ahead and sign the build contract and we're moving forward with the home in Mustang Creek. We've done the preliminary design and we meet with them tomorrow to see the blueprints, to which we're already going to make some tweaks. We asked for a 15x25 home theater (we now have a 13x20, and it's a decent size but needs a little more elbow and furniture room) and the blueprints are showing a 16x22 which is dangerously close to a bad ratio with the 10 foot high ceilings. I don't profess to really know what I'm talking about, but in acoustic room design you never want to have a size dimension that's half/double of one of the others. This creates standing sound waves which I think is equivalent to feedback which can be a serious detriment to good sound mixing. 19-21 feet is a no fly zone with the 10 foot ceilings, so we're going to insist on the 15x25 that we requested (the inner dimension, not the outer walls).

We're also asking them to add a bar to the rear of the home theater and I have a feeling that's going to add another $5K to the price at least, but if they can do it for that much, we'll get it done. We're hoping to make this home a true turnkey experience where we don't have any sense that we should change things substantially. There will always be tweaks over time, but we're hoping they'll mostly be cosmetic diy projects that we can handle and not major home renovations. We're hoping to get our dream home that we'll be satisfied with in the long run.