Clean Slate

At the site of our future home!

After almost a year of planning and dreaming, our house if officially under construction.  It was a hectic few weeks in the States and now that the jet lag has ceased, I can breath a sigh of relief knowing our part of the job is done...for now.

We knew going into the design center that our style would be too modern for Drees' typical home.  We had a priority list of what we just had to have and what could be completed at a later date.  When we were negotiating the price for our home, we included a design center budget that we were adamant that we were not going to go over.   We had to remind ourselves that a fallacy of building a home (at least through a corporate builder) is that the design is done as soon as you are handed the keys.  There will be a lot of interior design work as well as possible upgrades down the road to make our house a home that reflects our personal style.

I knew it would be a stretch to even ask, but we couldn't do the cable rod staircase that I showed in Pinspiration.  We instead chose a simple square antiqued bronze vertical balister with an Arts and Crafts style newel post.  The shaker style cabinets were a huge upgrade expense since they switch out the entire cabinet and not just the cabinet front. We stuck with their standard one and will invest in some modern hardware to accent it.

Since we were planning on upgrading those two items originally, we had some money left over that we were able to add to the actual construction of the home.  We squared off the end of island in the kitchen to make room for a built in wine fridge.  Where I was planning on doing a micro/oven combo, we turned that into a micro/DOUBLE oven combo (perfect for hosting parties).  Another fun surprise was that when the builder was looking at our blueprints he noticed behind the shower in the master bath, was dead space.  A couple of walls will be expanded into an ultra huge shower with a double shower head. Completely unnecessary but why the heck not.

Our awesome Design Consultant took some pictures of our selections.  Oh, and just in case you are keeping tabs, we went with the Modern Nature inspiration for our exterior (note to self, look into xeriscaping).  Missing is the accent tile in the kitchen which we chose after discussing our selections at our celebratory dinner at Bob's Steak and Chop House (which by the way, if you are in the DFW area...a must).  We also changed the carpet (upstairs and in master) to slightly darker.  A home has to be livable after all despite how perfect I want it to look 100% of the time.  Working on that whole realistic expectations thing.

During the next 6 months we'll get updates from our market manager and my father-in-law of the entire process including photos.  We're trying to decide if we'll actually look at the photos or just wait until closing for the big reveal (can you tell we watched a ton of HGTV while we were stateside?).  In the meantime, on to the next project...decorating ideas!