The roofers are on fire!

Ok, well, they aren't really roofers, but I wanted a catchy blog post title because I wanted you to read this:

WE HAVE ROOF!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I walked around in my house for the first time.  I got to see what the view through the windows looked like.  We met the neighbor, who has a snow blower, a tiller, and two lawn mowers.  All of which he offered up to us!  He's already the best neighbor ever.  We also took my mom to the model house for the first time so she could finally see what we've been talking about for so many months.

I wanted to post daily pictures, but had a really busy week.  I missed a couple days, and now, I've got a whole house!!  We went up this morning to check it out and met my mom there, then took her to the model house.  I hadn't seen it all week, and was pretty excited to see this.

Gradall delivering plywood

From the back, with another nice shot of the neighbors
awesome garden.

We ran some errands, and were close by around the end of the day, so I drove by again.  There had been workmen in the house before, and I wanted to stay out of their way, but really, really, really wanted to go in.  When we drove by again, this is what we saw:

Its a roof!  Its a whole house (except for that weird hole in the roof.
What is that?)

So, of course, I went in.

Living room, viewed from the family room

Kitchen

Living Room. 

Morning Room

 I was really excited to be able to see the place with windows, and see what our view will be.  I love that I will be able to sit on my sofa and look out the window and see trees from the living room.  The view from the morning room won't be quite as good, but we'll fix that pretty quickly.

Our rep said that once we are under roof, we can start looking at locking in.  So, I guess that's as of today!

Final Selections & Neighbors too

We had our final selection meeting with our sales rep yesterday afternoon, and I was in agony the entire time.

BF and I sat in the choices room for a good 30 minutes with the floor sample, the cabinets and the countertops, going round and round in circles about colors and laminate v. Corian.

And around, and around and around.

What we finally decided was to upgrade the cabinet from Maple Cognac to Wyoming Cherry Spice.  Neither of us was really thrilled with the way the Maple looked with the cherry floors.  Or any of the floors, actually.  It was an 800 dollar upgrade, which, in the long run I think will be worth it because it will reduce my anxiety that I might not like how it looks.

In the end, we also decided not to upgrade the countertops.  I'd really, really, really like a solid surface countertop, but just can't see spending over $3000 to do it.  3 grand will buy us almost of of the materials we need to build a deck - or a tiny countertops.  I guess its a no-brainer, but...

So, the laminate color we choose was Brazilian Brown.  It was between that and the Jamoca (?) color, which I know a lot of you have picked out.  Anyone have Brazilian Brown?  It looked slightly lighter, and less busy.  But again, how can you tell from a 3" sample?

And finally, <drum roll> we picked the vinyl color.  If we had any stone or brick on the house, this would have been WAY less of an issue for me.  But, the look of the entire house rests on (again) a tiny little piece of vinyl sample.  We choose Delray Sand, with dark green shutters.  The Delray sand looked really yellow in fluorescent light, and more tan in the natural light (obscured by thunderclouds).  I'm still unsure.  In the past couple days, I have been really liking white houses with black shutters.  Boring, traditional and safe.  I think I like it because it looks like my grandma's house.  But BF thinks that the white will get dingy.  And I would like a little color.  I don't know, we'll see.  I don't have any pictures - it was pointless because it looked so different in different lights!

If you are interested, the colors available rom the new vinyl company is here:  http://www.variform.com/VariformCommon.nsf/ColorSiding?OpenForm&Refer=HO.  I think the ones that are available to us are in the Vortex Collection (not all of those colors were in the samples I got at the model house).

And, finally, I met our neighbor at Lot 5 while agonizing over the countertops at the model home.  He is also building a Ravenna, and was showing it off to one of his friends.  Definitely a nice social guy, but much younger than us.   He is getting granite countertops, and a finished basement.  Grrrr.  I had house envy for the first time - even though I don't even WANT those things!

Looking forward to seeing everyone's choices with the new vinyl selections...