Choosing the colors for siding, flooring, cabinets, etc!

Decisions, Decisions!

So, this past week has been interesting! We are still in the process of getting our loan closed. The loan officer called to ask for verification of closing funds and that came as a surprise! We really thought we had until our closing on Dec. 18th to gather the funds needed but it turns out that the underwriters needed verification 2 weeks before! We scraped together the cash to deposit into our savings account only to learn that you cannot use cash for closing funds! There has to be a paper trail...

I thought I was being smart and asked if I could give the cash to my parents to write a check and we were told that you may also not accept gifts for closing funds!

I HAVE ALL THIS CASH....PLEASE TAKE IT!

So, do your homework while saving your down payment, don't expect to roll into the office with a bag of cash on closing day :)

We jumped that hurdle and our closing is still scheduled for the 18th (God willing)! During this time, we also had to ensure we had the proper insurance before we could move forward.

I do realize that most people have sold a house and actually walked away with money (unlike us) so this isn't a major problem for most. We started 7 months ago with literally NOTHING!

So.....tonight we met with Jeff, our sales rep and picked out all of our options! I was super excited for this meeting and luckily, Kyle and I are on the same page design-wise so this was a piece of cake! Here are some poor photos of some of the items we picked out. It is important to note that we started our plan with the Valu line that TK offers and we added options to that in order to keep the cost manageable. We did choose to upgrade our cabinets and carpet.

 We chose to go with Flint for the vinyl siding along with black panel shutters. You have the option to choose the panel or the louvered. The louvered are shown here, we decided those may be a pain to clean and we all know we don't want to be cleaning shutters all day! Flint is more of a gray, it was one of the darkest options in our price point.

This dark cabinet is what we chose to go in each bathroom. To the left of the dark cabinet, you can see the corner of the kitchen cabinets (Cabinet Upgrades (Schrock Brand) Princeton Maple Glaze Style-Arch Color-Amaretto Creme) I originally wanted all the cabinets in the house to match but the standard bathroom counter options are cream or white so the white cabinets would look awful! This is the same style as the kitchen cabinets with a different glaze. No biggie! I also have no idea where my kitchen counter top/cabinet picture went! We went with a black-ish laminate counter.

The brick was the absolute hardest option to choose! There were a lot of choices but this is what we went with. I think it's Tudor Grey, I may be wrong. We also chose the darkest stain to go on the mantel and beam on the vaulted ceiling in the living room.

We upgraded the carpet and padding so we went with this carpet, it will be throughout the house except in the bathrooms, kitchen and laundry room. It is more brown than the photo shows and it has black scattered throughout. Our dog has black hair so...

Again, my vinyl floor choice is missing but there were a lot to choose from!

I'm not really a vinyl/carpet fan but we figured money was better spent upgrading the cabinets now and we can do the carpet/vinyl later.

These are the coach lights that will go outside at the garage, porch, back door and garage service door. We went with black because we chose black shutters. We could have chosen, bronze or nickel as well.

We decided to go with bronze fixtures throughout the house. The bronze dome light shown here is what will be in each bedroom. The two light fixtures above the dome is similar to what will be in each bathroom except ours will have 3 lights and it will be bronze. They place these over each sink bowl.

This is the entry way light

This is the dining room light but it will be bronze. The kitchen will also have 4 or 5 recessed lights.

This is the fan that will be in the living room.


The only thing that was slightly annoying was that all the door knobs come in nickel. In order to have the door knobs match the light fixtures, we had to upgrade which cost an extra $300.

We did ask to make one minor change. Kyle suggested shrinking the laundry room so we could stretch our master bathroom just a bit. His eye for design is so helpful!

The options have been chosen and it was pretty painless!

Our next step is to wait patiently for closing while our sales rep gets our permits. We scheduled our pre-construction meeting for Dec. 23rd, two weeks from today! If everything goes as planned, we think they'll start digging around the first of the year!