Goodbye to 2013

As the year winds down, the house is starting to move into painting phase. All they have left to do for trim is finish up our stairs, which means I really need to choose some paint colors, and fast.

They have primed the exterior. Our sweet neighbors, who we met up with recently for dinner, cautiously asked if that was the house's final color. To say the primer is blinding is a bit of an understatement. She was relieved when I told her it was just primer!

They also finished the porch ceiling detail. The flat panels will be a Benjamin Moore color called "Palladian Blue" so it will stand out much more once fully painted.

On the inside, they have been making slow progress. The kitchen is almost fully complete:

 A week or so ago:

This week, our counter tops went in! They are covered up at the moment but we are really pleased with how they turned out.

 I am beyond excited about this sink:

They also finished our center brick wall, which is looking really amazing. I can't wait to see it once the mantel is painted.

The counters in the other downstairs rooms are from the same slabs as the kitchen counters, so they look pretty similar. The upstairs baths have honed absolute black, which turned out to look a lot like soapstone:

We have to pick paint colors soon - my painted samples are on this wall. The cream-ivory color looks much too yellow. The big white square above it is Benjamin Moore's "Winter White," and the gray to the right of the marble sample is Benjamin Moore's "Gray Owl." It looks different in the photo than it does in the house (of course) but unless something drastically changes, the Winter White will be the cabinet/trim color and Gray Owl will be the living and kitchen wall color.  

These are our bedroom options. The color on the left looks best with the drapery fabric we chose, and it's Kevin's favorite, so we will probably go with that in our bedroom.

I'm still agonizing over the study and the dining room, but I will post drapery and wallpapers later if I can get a good photo. It's very hard to get a photo of the sample that does them justice, and I'm tempted to wait until they are installed to share!

Merry Christmas to everyone :)

The 5 Month Update

We officially broke ground on the house on July 1st, so it's been almost exactly 5 months since everything started. We stopped by the house today to find brick layers and tile setters working, so we didn't stay too long, and progress has been slow. They discovered an issue with our stairs that was simple enough to solve (something had been framed incorrectly and it just wasn't obvious until they started to put in the stair banister) but it set them back about a week.

Whatever, it's not like I was going to make that December 2nd paint selection deadline anyway.

The kitchen is looking really beautiful. I'm so thrilled with our decision to go with open shelving and very little upper cabinetry.

South side of the kitchen, looking over the back yard

North side of the kitchen. The very top set of shelves will have doors, but the other two remain open.

West side of the kitchen range wall (a range hood will be in between the windows eventually)

Mudroom cabinets. The brick is so dusty and mortar covered you can't even tell what color it is! 

The pocket door going into the mudroom and pantry area

Starting to hang doors 

The butler's pantry. I actually thought these drawers were going to be longer and there wouldn't be any cabinets with doors, so fingers crossed that these don't turn out to be useless. 

The biggest surprise - OUR CLOSET! SO EXCITED!

Other side of the closet. No light in there yet so the pictures aren't very good. 

And finally...the brick is going to look great. I am so happy with this fireplace, and I love it more every time I see it.

I can't wait to go back in a few days when the whole wall is done!

We have Trim!

Well, our Tigers may not be having a great month, but at least we have a lot of house progress to console ourselves with. Sort of? At least it's generally a fun place to visit on Saturday! 

The construction fence was removed about four weeks ago to allow dirt work in the front yard to start. Then, the rain started....it took a good long while to get the driveway in, but luckily didn't hold up anything inside. 

We got a garage door, which will eventually be painted white like the rest of the house:

And finally, about three weeks later, a driveway!

Our brick walkway was completed just this week. Paint is the next big item for the exterior. 

Still my favorite spot. I'm so glad we made this porch so deep!

We decided on "Snowbound" as the color for the siding and trim. I didn't even sample it. After buying NINE SAMPLE POTS of white (which by the way kids, after nine sample pots? It's all just white, dammit) I picked a color we hadn't even brought home. I was at my friend Lina's house, said "hey, that's a pretty white." She e-mailed her for me and we're rolling with it. 

Our shutters will be Sherwin Williams/Duron "Historic Charleston Green" and the porch ceiling will be Benjamin Moore's "Palladian Blue."

Our interior brick arrived about 3 weeks ago and has been hanging out on the curb. Silly me thought "Old Chicago" was just a brick color. Nope. Literally from old buildings. In Chicago. Well then. 

We have also made some great progress inside - we could not be more excited about how everything we chose is turning out.

Sure....come on in.

 The study has bookcases and the seat I affectionately call the Cat Seat, on account of the fact that it's a super small seat. Given our lack of tiny humans at present, the cats are the only ones likely to sit there. But I still think it's cute!

The butler's pantry, aka The Bar. Those middle cabinets will have wine glass holders so we can hang the glasses upside down (woohoo).

 The butler's pantry, 2 weeks later! It's really fun to see everything change.

The mudroom! The tall opening at left was specifically designed for my polo mallets. Why yes, I am a source of entertainment for the builder. Why do you ask?

The living room (I took this when the carpenters had their lights on, hence the shadows)

Our mantels beginning to be built! Each side matches but we are going to decorate this one, probably with a mirror. I got talked into putting the TV above the mantel on the other side. For now. I'm still not convinced.

 And, my "baby" is coming along quite nicely. The kitchen, approximately one week in:

And about two weeks later:

Our brick floor went into the utility room! It takes a while because they have to slice the brick to the thickness of tile. Nope, didn't really think that one through either. Thanks guys!

The entrance to our bedroom:

And, our bathroom! These cabinets are much further along now, but they actually messed up the floor in the bathroom and had to re-do it, so I haven't gotten a photo of the new floor with the cabinets back in the room.

And, my favorite "happenstance" decision yet. When we decided to put wood floor in the bathroom, I decided to change the pattern to herringbone just to change it up. WE LOVE IT. I wish I'd put it in the dining or living rooms too!!

 We don't have much to report upstairs yet but they are supposed to start our stairs tomorrow. The tile guys are also starting work on the upstairs baths, so that should be fun too.

October Progress

This has been a big month. We now have trim on our columns and above the construction doors. Our real doors are currently being made in a shop here in town.

We also got a porch floor this week, which is really nice. We are going to paint it dark green to match the shutters.

Speaking of paint, we've been asked to select exterior paint colors already!

The house will be white, but it turns out that there are a LOT of "colors" of white. Exhibit A:

 They all kind of look the same on my monitor. I'm hoping Charleston White works, on account of the fact that it has the best name. Why yes, I DO tend to buy books based on their covers!











This is fireplace wall looking into the kitchen from the living room. The walls are primed and the floors are down!

The study's pocket doors are finally going in. Not sure what took so long on those.

View from the front of the house in the mid-afternoon. I swear the camera is making this far worse than it is!

Wasn't there a scene like this in The Shining? 

View at the top of the stairs, no railing yet!

Master bedroom. 

We will start trim really soon, which is pretty slow, so the next few updates may take a while but they should be fun to see. 

In other news, we FINALLY found countertop material. 

I've been stopping by Houston stone yards since this summer, because I'd been told it's very hard to find white Carrara lately. Everything coming in has been gray almost to a point of looking blue. Omni Surfaces here in Houston told us that the fabricators (the people who actually make countertops from the slabs) have been buying Carrara marble by the container straight off the ship without even seeing it. We can't exactly compete with that - we only wanted to buy 6 slabs! Colors of the Rainbow, which is about 3 minutes from our apartment, had over 100 slabs of white marble (a mix of Calacatta, Carrara, etc) and could not even find 6 slabs from the same block of stone that were unsold.

I started looking into alternatives and found a place that we hadn't been to before. Our builder didn't have an account there but they had stone from some places (like Vermont) others didn't have, so we decided it was worth a shot. Lo and behold, they had some Carrara that wasn't dark gray, and they had EXACTLY 6 unsold slabs. 

We snapped this up right away:

For comparison's sake, everything else looks like this, and the lights are skewing it at the top: 

The slabs are polished, but we are going to have the kitchen slabs honed and sealed. Honing the marble will lighten it up, but it's mostly to hide etching. Marble can be sealed so that it won't stain (the stone is porous, so it will stain if you aren't careful and don't seal, but the flip side to porosity is stains tend to lift out after a while based on anecdotal evidence from people we know with marble counters). However, anything acidic will etch it. Our favorite restaurant in Houston has a marble bar. With the amount of food and alcohol spilled on that thing on a daily basis, we decided if we still loved that counter, we'd be just fine with marble. 

We also ordered a bunch of lights this week. I don't have a good photo of the dining room chandelier, but it's an antique that reminded us of the fixtures in our favorite palace in Germany, so we are beyond thrilled with it. 

As far as other fixtures, my sweet grandmother bought us these for our master bathroom mirrors:

Our interior designer helped me pick out the rest of the downstairs fixtures. These are going on the wall going up the stairs:

 She chose this for the entrance hall:

And she picked out two of these for over the island. They are iron like the fixture my mom bought me for my birthday, which will go in the room adjacent to the kitchen right next to the fireplace. Nicole is going to have that fixture "antiqued" by refinishers she often uses.

Now if I could just pick out a paint color or three we'd probably be good to go.