House Update #11

Now that the ball has begun rolling, things continue to progress rapidly at the new home site. A lot of work has been accomplished in the last couple of weeks. The exterior siding is now complete, and all of the drywall has been installed. On Monday they started spraying texture on the walls, and starting this morning, the interior has been painted. On Monday they also poured the slab for the garage floor. The driveway and walkways will be completed later, once all of the drainage pits have been dug and the gutters connected (the gutters will drain into a giant collection tank that will sit, buried under the driveway, and the water will percolate from there, into a surface retention pond in the front yard, as per city code). The exterior is the next thing to be painted; likely in the next couple of days.

With regards to the painting, we did have one little hiccup that has since been resolved thank goodness! It turns out that for most new homes, the standard for interior paint, is that they paint all the walls, including the ceiling, all the same color. Because of this a lot of new model homes have light color walls. I however wanted a somewhat darker taupe color for the walls, and thought that it would be way too dark to have that on the ceiling as well. It would look like a freaking cave in there! But it turns out that its actually pretty expensive to have things painted. They were going to charge us $10K just to paint the molding for instance! So when we asked the builder to give us an estimate for painting the ceiling, we were expecting that that would come back with a ridiculously high number and that we would have to paint the ceiling ourselves to save money. It was a source of worry for me for weeks! There is a lot of ceiling area in this house, and more likely than not, we would have to do more than one coat to make the paint look uniform. It would have meant MONTHS of painting for us (not to mention smell and overall disruption). Thankfully they came back with a cost estimate of "only" $1500. That was a much more palatable amount, and considering how much work that would be potentially saving us, we decided to go ahead and pay to have the ceilings painted white. I could not be more relieved!

Michael and I have been busy picking more things out for the house: cabinets, flooring, tile, counter tops, lighting and paint colors to be exact. There has been endless amounts of online research, price comparisons and visiting store after store to see things in person. Its exciting and also exhausting. But we are just excited to finally be at this point. The finish line is in sight at last! The builders wont give us a concrete completion date, but they said that the house will likely be done sometime around the end of May, and we will likely move in sometime in the first half of June, assuming everything goes according to schedule. We will see! Below are some progress pictures, as well as some pictures of some of the things we have picked out for finishes around the house.