Ground Breaking News + Selections Day Part I

Hold on to your hats, people--it was quite a day! We had selections today plus we broke ground! Woot! There was way too much today to put into one post, so we'll break it into 2 more reasonably sized posts. Up first, part 1 of our selections!

This morning Eric and I left the house at 7:30 to head up to the cities for our selections meeting.  (A huge thanks to my mom for watching the kids while we were busy deciding a million, kazillion house things.) We arrived at this place at 8:15am and got started right away. I was so excited!

The fabulously talented Marilyn greeted us and assisted us throughout the whole appointment (4 hours), and we were thrilled to have her expertise and knowledge.  One of the builders, Mike, was also there to help us for the major decisions.  We started with one of the biggest decisions of all-the exterior colors.  Nothing like jumping right in! The type of siding we'll have is Hardie, which is painted, so Marilyn told us we could literally choose any color we wanted, which sounded a little daunting. Luckily, I had pinned a few ideas to my houzz ideabooks to get us started.  This is the one Eric and I liked the most and we used as our inspiration for our home on the Lane:

 

We really love how the cream trim pops with the darker siding color. This house also has siding and shakes, like ours will, and we like how they're the same color in this photo.  Plus, no other houses on our new street have this siding color, so it makes it a little more unique.  With all that in mind, we began the task of sorting through the hundreds of exterior color options.

Marilyn pretty quickly realized what we were going for and pulled out that large swatch you see in the middle.  We then started comparing it to all the other colors you see in the pic, just to see if there was anything else that caught our eye.  We really liked a similar color that was more gray, called Dolphin, but in the end, we decided to go with that color in the large swatch.  While it's a really pretty taupey-brown color, it has an awful name--Texas Leather by Benjamin Moore.  All four of us joked about who picks out the names for paint colors.  Seriously, there was Weimeriner (it's just 3 swatches away from the large one up there), Dolphin, and of course the ever-creative, Grey.  

Once we had the siding color chosen (Marilyn recommended we use the same color for the siding and shakes, which is why we ended up with just one main exterior color), we could then zero in on a trim color.  Marilyn pulled out a ring with about 200 swatches of off-white. No, really--it was about 2 inches high and the woman flipped exactly to a few she knew would look good with Texas Leather.  Pretty quickly, we decided that Navajo White (Benjamin Moore) was the perfect exterior accent color--not too yellow, or too gray, or too greenish.  With that decided, we moved on to the stone accents that will be on the columns on the front porch.

We chose the rock above because we like how the rock picks up the dark and light tones of both exterior colors we choose.  You can also see the roof swatch sitting on top of the rock sample so this is really all the exterior colors except for the front door (we're staining it to look like wood, but we'll choose that color later).  I am completely head-over-heels for this color scheme and can't wait to see it on our house!

After all that was decided, we moved on to the interior selections and the kitchen was up first.  Long ago, we'd decided we wanted white cabinets and white trim throughout the house.  However, one cannot simply just choose "white" cabinets.  Again, there were several types of white to choose from, but we ended up going with Linen White, again by Benji Moore. It's a creamier white rather than a crisp white, which we think will give the house a bit warmer, more inviting feel. Here's the pic with cabinet/trim color in the background, although this photo reads more yellowy than it is in real life.

The granite slab you see in front of the cabinet is the granite we chose for our kitchen counters.  Now, some explanation here.  We don't love this granite, but there were only about 10 options in our price range and this truly was the best one (again, it's not this yellowy in real life) for us.  Upgrading would double our granite cost and that simply isn't in the budget.  However, on a positive note, we both like this okay--we just don't love it. And, Mike told us that granites can have a lot of color variation and we can actually go choose the slab of granite that will be in our house.  We like that idea because then we can choose a slab that has less yellowy undertones and more brownish ones, if that makes sense. Also, we talked about adding a backsplash tile, but based on Marilyn's recommendation to wait, we'll be installing that after we've lived in the kitchen for a few months.

The other sample in the above photo (besides the granite and the cabinets) is the hardwood flooring, which will be in the kitchen, and other places on the main level. Originally, we leaned towards a darker wood floor, like in this Houzz inspiration photo I marked.

Reilands had let us take home these flooring samples last week, so we stared at these all week and had narrowed it down to a couple of options. We also spoke with a few people who have really dark wood floors and generally heard the same thing from most of them.  The floors are pretty but every speck of dirt shows up on them so you have to be meticulous in cleaning (so not me!), plus they're harder to fix if they get scratched.

At the selections meeting, Marilyn and Mike also steered us away from the really dark colors, so that, along with the other advice we'd received, helped us select this as our new hardwood floor color. 

Jacobean (how do you pronounce that? we had some fun over that, too!) is the winner! It's a brown color, but not too dark.  The wood will be oak so the grain will be slightly darker, which still gives us that rich color we were hoping for, while avoiding the negatives that come with a really dark floor.  The floors will be site finished to give them a more seamless look, and this also means there are no tiny gaps between the individual planks of boards--it'll be one huge smooth surface.


And that ends part 1 of our selections.  We won't leave you hanging on the breaking ground thing, though, so here's a quick peek at what's happening at our lot on the Lane as of 6:45pm this evening!

We'll be back tomorrow for bathrooms, interior paint, carpets, and more! Nail-biting excitement, I tell you!