New house-week 1!

Hello everyone! So this weeks mark the start of a new weekly blog post chronicling our experience of building our first home with Ryan Homes!  I am hoping to keep a weekly post about our journey from start to finish of building our first house.  So far, it has been stressful, but exciting. 

On Sunday, April 14th 2013, we put in our official purchase contract with Ryan Homes!  We put in a contract on  Palermo floor plan and added in a morning and bonus room above the garage.  With those two extra rooms, our house will be about 2800 sq. ft, 4 bedrooms, and 2.5 baths.  We plan on keeping this house for the next 10-15 years and wanted it to be big enough to grow into, which I think we accomplished.

Here are two pictures of the floor plan:

 
We plan to use the home office as an office/play room for Landon and myself.  The dining room will be one of the rooms to sit empty the longest until we eventually find a nice table in there (years down the line =)).  Upstairs, the bonus room will be turned back into Logan's man cave, until Landon is old enough to want to use it as well.  We designed our dream master bathroom with a shower only, with a seat and two shower heads and a double vanity.  The closet in the owner's suite is huge and we are very excited we will get alot of storage in there.  Landon's room will be the bedroom in the back left corner.  It is the largest of the bedrooms and will be a perfect room for him to grow up in.  The middle bedroom next to the bonus room will be the guest room, and the last bedroom will be for future baby Brokaw.   We absolutely love this floor plan and think it will be a great fit for our family.

During the process of putting in a purchase contract, we had the challenging task of deciding on various upgrades throughout the house.  This is everything from flooring, cabinets, lighting packages, extra rooms, knob finishes, etc! From what we have learned, everything can be upgraded for a price!  I have had many sleepless nights over trying to decide what to upgrade vs. leave standard to eventually replace later once we are settled for a few years.  We upgraded most structural things that could not be added later and then added a fireplace, upgraded cabinets, a large kitchen island, morning room, bonus room, spindles on the stairs, and windows in the office!  We have two weeks to make any changes that we want to before everything is set in stone with our contract. 

Over the next few weeks we will visit a flooring/tile specialist to help us make our final decisions for all the flooring insides the house.  We also need to decide on tile colors for the master bathroom and Landon's bathroom.   Additionally, we will see a separate wiring specialist to decide where to place all the outlets and random other plugs in the house.  This is somewhere where we need to be careful not to spend extra money since they will wire for surround sound, alarm systems, etc.  It can add up quickly! 

So stay tuned in the coming week to see some of the coloring options we end up selecting for the interior and exterior! 

Finally, I wanted to share some pictures of the model of the Palermo we walked through and our coloring choices as of now. 

Our official lot!

Logan standing on the property line in the back

What our front of the house will look like with the stone

Stone on the front of the house

The great room with a fire place and going into the office/play room

Looking from the great room into the kitchen

Looking from the hallway into the morning room/kitchen

We are going for this color combination in our home-this is the model home.  Tahoe Cherry Cabinets, Saint Cecelia granite, and oak colored wood floors.

Not the best picture-but for now silver mist siding, black shutters, and red door, with black roofing. 

Stay tuned for the update next week!