I Balled My Eyes Out!

My husband and I have not been inside our house since the pre-drywall meeting. That was on Monday,  July 9th. I visited the house last Thursday but I never went past the garage and our brick was only partially done. Our PM told us that our brick and siding would be finished by the end of this week. He also said our vinyl floors, first coat of paint, molding, doors, and cabinets would go in this week. My husband and I challenged ourselves not to visit until today because we wanted to be shocked with a ton of progress all at once and we totally were!! I closed my eyes on the drive up to the house. I didn't look until I got out of the car. I literally broke down in tears. I was full out ugly crying. I was doubled over and my whole body was shaking. Why? BECAUSE MY HOUSE IS THE MOST BEAUTIFUL THING I HAVE EVER SEEN!!! See for yourself!

The missing shutter is broken. Imagine the door painted black!

The back. Love the siding! It's called Georgian Gray.

Close-up of the siding and a peak at the cabinets that are in the morning room!

French doors to the study (taken from the inside of the study)

Free tray ceiling in the study!

Coat closet in the foyer

Love this! The railing will continue up the wall.

Check out that cased doorway to the dining room, the tray ceiling, and the chair rail! Too much awesomeness for one photo!!

Close-up of dining room tray and a shot of the second cased doorway leading from the dining room to the kitchen!

More chair rail! SO GLAD we got the trim package!

Another cased doorway. This leads from the hallway on the first floor into the kitchen and family room area. The door on the left is the powder room.

Powder room on the 1st floor

Some of the cabinets installed!! I cried when I saw the cabinets too! Seriously...
In case you are curious, these are the Wyoming Square Cherry Spice cabinets.

Cabinet above fridge. My wall oven and more cabinets will be to the left! We thought there would be drywall above this cabinet like in the above picture over the other cabinets. The ceiling comes down like that in the model and in both of the other Yorkshire bloggers. Weird.

Cabinets waiting to be installed! 

Can't wait for the stone to go on the fire place! I forgot to ask when that will happen!

I love the windows in the family room. They are HUGE!

Laundry room with vinyl installed and trim waiting for installation.

Can't wait to see the railings installed!

Food pantry? I don't remember and my husband took the pics.

Bedroom #3

Other side of bedroom #3

Attic access in bedroom #2

Bedroom #2, looking from the back wall. This is the biggest of the spare bedrooms.

Hall bathroom. That's not a double vanity. I opted for the counter space instead.  This bathroom is much larger than we thought! There is a big space between the vanity and the shower.

Hall shower.

Bedroom #4. The smallest of the spare bedrooms.

Another view of bedroom #4

Linen closet inside the water closet in the master bath. It's a closet within a closet! It was too hard to get a pic of the water closet itself.

Shot of the master tub and shower. We went with fiberglass and a vinyl floor, not because we are cheap, but because I HATE cleaning grout and tile!

Master shower. This will have a pull-out door instead of a slider. Good thing too since I hate sliding doors almost as much as I hate tile!

My new tub! It's deeper than the original one but not by much. I still think it looks a TON better!

Double vanity in the master bath! My side is the left! I love how tall this vanity is. So does my super tall hubby!

A shot of the master bedroom with the old garden tub chilling in there and a workshop for cutting the molding!

One of the two walk-in closets in the master bedroom. It's so hard taking a picture of this. It's about twice as big as it looks!

Tray ceiling in the master bedroom! Yep, that makes THREE total tray ceilings in the house!

My favorite window! Can't wait to see the chandelier hanging in front of it and I can't wait to see the railing installed!

We went back to the kitchen after walking around the rest of the house and found more cabinets!

A close-up of the front. So beautiful! I still can't believe it's mine!

Here are the two houses going up across the street. They look great! 

My only concern from today's visit is that the cabinet doors were a little crooked in the kitchen. They didn't line up at the bottom. I didn't look too closely at the ones in the bathrooms because there were people still working in those rooms. I hope this is something that gets fixed. If not, I will mention it to my PM after my next visit. We didn't take any pictures of the basement. It was super dark down there. I can't wait for the lights to get installed so that we can see it better and so that we can take pictures. I'm sure they had fun installing the vinyl in the basement powder room with just a portable light! Oh, and we opted not to get the shower in the basement bathroom so we got a closet instead. This closet is HUGE! What am I going to store in such a big closet that is located in my basement powder room? Any suggestions?

I still can't believe how far our house has come in such a short amount of time! It feels like just yesterday that I was whining about the framing taking forever! Our house actually looks like a house on the inside and on the outside! We never got to see a model of our home since the closest one is eight hours away. We did see one under construction in our neighborhood though. We just keep noticing things that we didn't know we would get, like extra recessed lights for example. Walking though the house just feels so surreal for us. I feel like the house gets bigger every time we visit!


I can't remember everything my PM said would be happening next week. There was so much! He said our walls will get another coat of paint, our plumbing fixtures will be installed, our hardwoods would be installed on Friday, and our carpet on Saturday! He also said our driveway will be poured. I'm assuming this means our sidewalk too! I wish I would have asked him when the stone will be put on the fireplace and when I will get to see my granite countertops! How could I forget to ask about the granite?!? What's wrong with me?!?! I'll have to text him on Monday! 


I just want to let everyone know that I read every single entry that you post on your blog. I have literally read every single post from beginning to end that every single person I am following has written. I haven't been commenting as much as usual lately because things have just been super crazy. I just wanted to make sure everyone knew that I am still an avid reader! I remember when I felt like I was the only blogger that hadn't even broken ground yet. Now there are so many others in every stage of this process. It's great to be able to relate to everyone!

Not Enough Brick

Our brick was supposed to be finished by the end of this week but turns out they don't have enough bricks to finish the job. The rest should be delivered on Monday. The drywallers started today and I saw boxes of siding in the garage! I told my PM to let me know when the brick and siding are both done because I'm going to try my hardest to not visit until then! It will be hard but it will be great to see the brick, siding, and drywall all completed at the same time!

My husband and I almost bought some insulation today and we were planning on going out to the house and finishing the two walls that RH doesn't do in the garage. We got approval from our PM to do so. After doing some online research, my husband changed his mind. He read that the insulation will only make the temperature of the garage 5-15 degrees different from the outside. So unless we put a heater out there, the extra insulation would be pointless. Our garage will literally just be used to park our cars and store some stuff. It didn't seem worth the effort or money to finish the insulation ourselves. I still feel like RH should finish it though. The cost is very low and their workers could finish it in no time. I will still be mentioning this on my RH survey. I need to start a list of things to include in this survey. Does anyone have any other suggestions? What are you disappointed with so far?

More Brick!

The brick sure is going up fast on our house! They are doing such a great job too! Drywall was supposed to start yesterday and it still hasn't. I wonder what the hold-up is?

My house isn't crooked....I just suck at taking pictures apparently!
They were working on the middle section when I left! Garage is next!

Close-up shot. I always go at the worst time and the sun ruins my shots!

Even closer shot of the brick. It wraps this much around the side of the house instead of stopped at the edge of the front. If you're curious, it's called Virginia Vintage. We LOVE it!

I also learned today that the ceiling in our garage is insulated. That's great since our master bedroom is right above it! Now if only they would have just insulated the entire garage..... I might mention this on my RH survey. How much could insulation really cost? Would it kill them to put it on two more walls? This feels like a shortcut to me. At least they drywall the whole garage. There's that.

Garage ceiling insulation.

Final Selections

Today we chose the locations for our hosebibs and spotlights. We also looked into getting a rough-in for drainage and a waterline for a sink for a future wet-bar in our basement. It ended being too expensive so we decided not to get it. A bar without a sink it will be! We are ok with that though because our kitchen is at the top of the basement stairs. Not too far to travel if we need a sink. We also have a powder room in our basement with a sink. We weren't dead-set on a location for the bar so now we can always decide that later.

We decided to have them "delete" the shelving in the laundry room. I want to be able to put in cabinets instead. I got that idea from another blogger! He said that they use drywall anchors and it is pretty difficult to remove on your own. I don't want to have to patch any walls! More on the laundry room later.....

We chose our brick, siding, shutters, and door colors. We originally picked a different siding color, but we weren't able to get the color shutters and door that we wanted with it so we changed it. I'm glad we did. I like the color we ended up with the best.

Brick = Virginia Vintage Tudor
Siding = Georgian Gray
Shutters = Black
Door = Black
Trim = White

Now that all of our selections are locked-in, we are ready to just sit back and wait for them to finish building our house! Can't wait! Our tentative date for breaking ground is May 9th. I thought she originally said April 25th. Doesn't matter either way I guess. The "delivery" date is still the same.

Advice for people making their exterior decisions: Drive around and look at what your neighbors have. The brick samples look nothing like they look on an actual house. Some of the samples I consider to be ugly actually look really great on a house. It's hard to look at something so small and try to imagine it on a house.

The Details

We are building the Yorkshire! After looking at several different neighborhoods and pretty much every Ryan Home model, we decided that the Yorkshire has the best floor plan for us. The neighborhood we chose also has the biggest lots (1/2 acre!) than all the others. When we visited, there were only four lots left and we only really wanted one of them. It has neighbors on each side but there will never be any behind us! There is a line of trees at the back of our lot and then a non-busy road. This was very important in making our selection. I know that I will never have to worry about looking out my back windows and staring at someone else's house. Our view is beautiful!

Each Ryan home had something about it that we loved but none of them really had EVERYTHING. The Yorkshire is the closest! There were two things I had to give up: #1 was a second floor laundry room (it is on the first floor). #2 I wanted a two-story great room but I can settle with a two-story foyer instead. The media room in the basement isn't really as big as my husband was hoping for. We aren't going to have that part finished, so that we can finish it ourselves and extend it more into the storage area.  We really wanted a 3-car side-entry garage as well but our house is very wide and the lot isn't wide enough for either.

Here's the house! Ours will have a front garage instead of the one on the side. There's no actual model in our area. We did get to walk-through one under construction though.

FIRST FLOOR

SECOND FLOOR

BASEMENT

What We Got

First Floor
2-Car garage, facing front
Service door in garage on the back wall
Garage door opener
4' Extension in family room
9' Ceilings
Stone fireplace (Buff) with two "eyeball" lights above
Optional window on back wall of family room
Morning Room - my favorite room in the house!
Recessed lights in kitchen
Gourmet Island
Granite countertops (Brazil Black)
Gas cook-top
Stainless steel appliances (no fridge)
42" Wyoming square cherry spice cabinets
Upgraded pull-out faucet
Double wall oven
Crown molding, tray ceiling, chair rail, and cased door openings in dining room
Crown molding in study and foyer
Study with 15-light french doors
Hardwood floors in kitchen, morning room, foyer, and powder room
Carpet in study, formal dining room, and family room with upgraded padding
Ceiling fan rough-ins in morning room and family room
Upgraded toilet to be taller

Second Floor
4 bedrooms, 2 baths, open foyer
Crown molding in foyer and second floor hall
Luxury Owners suite - comes with double doors & with 2 walk-in closets!!
Tray ceiling in master
Luxury owner's bath w/double doors, soaking tub, separate room for toilet, & double vanity
Ceiling fan rough-ins in all 4 bedrooms
Upgraded toilets to be taller
Carpet with upgraded padding

Basement
Finished with recessed lights
Powder room with upgraded taller toilet
Carpet with upgraded padding

 Stone for fireplace - looks better in person!

Wide-plank Oak Saddle Hardwoods and stair railing
(Foyer, powder room, kitchen, & morning room)

 Bathroom floor, cabinet, & countertop

This floor will also be in the laundry room

 Dark carpet for basement, light for everywhere else there is carpet

 We were having a hard time choosing between the left & right options for the kitchen. We went with the right!

Wide-plank oak saddle hardwoods

Brazil black granite

Wyoming square cherry spice cabinets

Everything all together!

We have an appointment next week to pick out the brick for the front of the house and the siding for the rest of it. I haven't put much thought into what I am going to choose yet but I really love the colors in this brochure:

Guardian
We got the networking package. We also had the home audio speakers installed. One in the great room, one in the kitchen, and two on the second floor. We are very excited about this! We love to listen to music while we clean. We got the security system that also monitors smoke and CO2 detecters. It comes with a motion detector in the main area and censors on all exterior doors. We also added some window censors. We upgraded the security system so that we can turn it on and off from an app on our iPhones!


Current House
My husband and I currently own our condo. We plan on renting it out once we move into our new home this summer. Fortunately, the mortgage is low enough for us to be able to afford both. That means less stress when it comes to moving time. We also want to fix this place up a little bit before we start showing it to potential renters. It will be a lot easier to replace the carpets once we are out! We are going to use a property management company. It just seems like the best way to take some of the stress away from ourselves. Has anyone else had success with using a property management company?

Well, that was A LOT for one post! Let me know what you think!