Sunday, July 26, 2015

Color Selections, Change Orders & a New Kitchen Plan! Oh My!

What a crazy meeting! In today's meeting with Danielle (a truly wonderful soul who clearly knows how much help we really need), we submitted a slew of changes, picked our colors and completely changed our kitchen layout! More about all of them in a few moments, but suffice it to say that we are thoroughly exhausted!

Color Selections


We finalized all of our decisions about exterior color, interior paint, exterior finishes, kitchen and bath cabinet colors, counter tops and vanity tops. If that sounds like a lot, it felt like a lot more! We're feeling pretty good about our colors, let's hope that's true we we see them live!

Exterior Colors & Finishes


Here's our front elevations to help figure out what is going where...I hope!


For the stone on the front, we chose Dakota - it's the bottom part of the shown in the front elevation above.

For the sides and back of the house, there's a brick wrap that goes all around the first floor. This won't be showing anywhere on the front of the house and it isn't shown in the front elevations above - only the sides and back. For the brick, we chose Falls Canyon.


Here's the two of them shown together (as if you were looking at one of the front corners of the house from the street):


For the colors, we had to choose a primary and secondary color. The primary color is used on the clapboard (anywhere you can see the horizontal stripes in the front elevation above - in additional it will extend around the sides and back of the second story, above the brick on the first story). The secondary color will be used for all of the board and batten shown (the vertical siding) shown in the front elevation above. Believe it or not, Ryan Homes does not have have color/finish simulation program - for either exterior or interior choices. It seems like such an oversight not have one to use for comparing all of the options!

Our primary color for the clapboard siding is Monterey Taupe and our secondary color for the board and batten is Cobblestone,

Monterey Taupe
Cobble Stone

All of the trim will be white, which we think will dress everything up a little. The roof over the porch will be a black tin roof, the shutters and front door will also be black. 

Interior Colors


Probably just as nerve-wracking were the interior color choices we made. We upgraded all of our counter and vanity tops to granite and picked out the colors. For the kitchen, we chose the Rushmore in Painted Linen with Uba Tuba granite counter tops.
Kitchen
For the bathrooms, we choose the Scottsdale in Maple Expresso with Burlywood granite vanity tops.
Bathrooms


Whew. That's a lot. Are you tired yet? I sure am, but there's still more! I haven't even gotten to the new kitchen layout!

New Kitchen Plan


When reviewing the electrical blueprints, we came across an alternate kitchen layout that wasn't include in the initial list of options we considered when putting our Dunkirk together. The new layout redesigned the kitchen to include a butler's pantry and made the kitchen flow into the morning room, giving everything a much more open feel. We asked about it during today's meeting and discovered that it was added as an option two days after we initially signed our contract!

We think that we'll be able to add it and possibly the hutch that extends into the morning room, but we're waiting on some final pricing to be sure. Tentatively, it looks as though removing the gourmet island will cover the cost of the butler's pantry, so we're very optimistic we'll be able to move forward with the new kitchen! And only days before our deadline for structural changes!

Have I built the suspense enough? Are you ready to see what we're so excited about? Here's the sketch from the electrical blueprints that has us all giddy on the inside!


Other Miscellaneous Additions


We're finally down to the mundane additions that we added thanks to reading many of the other blogs that exist about building with Ryan Homes. Many were things that we didn't think of, so I'm adding them here in the hope that they help other consider them as well!
  • Electric Outlets
    We're a pretty tech-heavy family and that means that darn near everything needs to be plugged in sooner or later. So we added seven new outlets that weren't part of the original plan. The most notable inclusions are:
    • Additional outlets in the unfinished storage space in the basement. We have multiple computers we use for file, photo and media storage. They don't need to be seen, but they do need to be plugged in! My hope is that I'll be able to keep them in one of the unfinished storage areas and tie them into our home network so we can continue enjoying Kodi for streaming video and Subsonic for streaming music throughout the entire house!
    • A switched outlet in the tray ceiling in the master bedroom so that we can add ambient LED lighting. Apparently, adding an outlet in the tray ceiling moves the crown molding down so that a rope light can be placed behind it. How cool is that?
    • An outlet in the master bedroom closet for ironing. (No, not my closet, the other one - I don't believe in ironing. And for $150 an outlet, I can always sneak into her closet if that ever changes.)
    • Added an outlet in the Great Room and in the Morning Room just because I didn't want to have a wall that only had one outlet on it.
    • Added a double duplex outlet on one end of the kitchen island (a 2-gang box for a total of 4 plugs) because it seemed really convenient.
    • Added a hot tub circuit to the rear exterior corner of the Morning Room in anticipation of needing it either for a hot tub or pool equipment.
  • Natural gas line to the rear exterior corner of the Morning Room in anticipation of using it for a natural gas grill and/or a swimming pool heater.
  • Added a rough in light in the Morning Room for a hanging light to be purchased at a later date and also added a switch to control it from the hallway leading out of the kitchen (mostly because I'm lazy and don't want to walk across the room to turn it on or off).
  • Made the front porch lights and the exterior garage lights be on the same switch. We couldn't think of time that we wouldn't have them both on at the same time and the garage lights were initially spec'ed to only have a switch inside the garage. That seemed odd to us.
  • Added the comfort-height toilets because I'm tall. 
  • Added a ceiling fan rough-in in the Study so that I can keep cool while I'm working.


Waiting on More Info


There were a couple of questions that we are waiting on some additional info about. One is about adding a 100A sub-panel in the garage for future expansion. Hopefully we'll be able to add one, but we'll see what the experts say in a couple of days.



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