We are within the two week mark! Things are starting to get finalized in the house. Our house is finally locked up. We had to go to the office to get the keys to the house. It was funny, the guy was like oh yeah you're house is really coming along. I haven't been up there in a few days, but I know things are really coming along. Cody and I were laughing afterwards, because Ryan Homes does not have a Palermo model in Ohio... or I guess I should say they won't in about two weeks! I'm sure they are walking everyone and their mother through our house to look at what the Palermo model looks like. I'm sure people from all over Ohio are looking at it. They walked us through our neighbors house as it was going up, when we questioned what a Palmero looked like. Oh well... all I have to say is that they better take their shoes off on my carpet!!!
Which by the way... is now installed! Or at least almost all of of it is down now. I like the color we choose in the great room. It will hide any dirt really well.
Our dining room still needs to be completed, but other than that all of the carpet was down throughout the house.
Here I am rocking out a green shirt for St. Patricks Day in the kitchen.
This is the carpet in the office. You can really tell the difference between the carpet in our great room, which was a premium upgraded carpet, and the carpet that came standard with the house that we put into the office.
We upgraded almost all of the flooring in the house, except the office and the dining room.
This is our basement. The carpet color is grey incase you can't tell.
The entire basement has grey carpet. Except our unfinished storage rooms of course.
It looked like Tim had been in our house since we had been here on Friday. There was blue tap marked across the house. I assume those are places that he is intending to have fixed.
Cody in his sanctuary.
I'm loving the basement! I can't wait until we get everything painted! Which... if I haven't mentioned it before... we are looking for recruits to help!
I was pleased to notice that all of our doors have locks on them. NO SNEAKING ON ME!! Cody loves to sneak into my office right now and scare me. He won't be able to in our new house!!
This is the tan colored carpet we have for the entire upstairs.
I took pictures of every room, but I'm only going to show the master bedroom, because the carpet is all the same. It is very comfortable.
They also put it in our closets. That will be nice for the mornings.
I was very annoyed with how dirty our house still is. I know that they still have a week and a half before we close... and I assume that time will be spent on touch ups and cleaning, but seeing all kinds of dirt everywhere really drove me nuts!
You can see how dirty our floors are currently.
After the guys installed our floors and walked all over them... they put down stuff on top of them. It seemed too little too late, because it was already dirty. But I'm not too concerned about that, I'm sure that will clean up just fine.
What I'm really not happy about is that water got onto our floor by our hot water tank. When we were at the house on Friday we did not have water. Today we did, so I assume there were people working in the house yesterday and they hooked up our water. (Plus the guys at the model home told us a bunch of people were working on our house yesterday.)
The issue is that they let the water get onto our BRAND NEW carpet! You can see in this picture where the water dripped right from the hot water tank right into our carpet. I'm going to have to call Tim about this tomorrow. I'm not sure if he knows about it. We only happened to discover it because we were walking in our socks downstairs and Cody stepped in the water.
You can see that there was some water in our storage room too. We think that the water came from the pipes above the water puddle. We're hoping that it's not coming from the foundation... Cody touched the pipes above it, and it had fresh adhesive on it. So we think that it happened as they were testing/hooking up our pipes yesterday.
Another thing that I wasn't happy about was that the water guys clearly didn't take their shoes off in our house. They walked right down into our basement with their dirty shoes and tracked mud all over. I'm not sure if you can tell in this picture, but there is mud all over. There shouldn't be any brown tints in our carpet. I was quite upset over this, but Cody has been guaranteeing me that they aren't going to leave it like this. He is sure that Ryan Homes will steam clean it before we move in, but it irritates me none-the-less.
The workers have been working hard at the house, but Cody and I have been working hard too. We are slowly but surely starting to pick out everything and set up installation dates for the rest of our appliances. This is our garage door opener, it has two garage controls and a keypad. Cody bought it online at Sears and we had to go to the store to pick it up. Sears is going to be installing it on Good Friday.
When we went to the store, we parked in the front of the store. The guy that gave it to us didn't give us a receipt, put a paid sticker, or anything on the garage door opener. So we walked out right at that door, and walked clear around the store to our car. Cody was carrying it the whole way.
The most tedious part of this process, for me, has been trying to pick out paint colors. There are just SO many options, and it's so hard to know what will look good. I don't really have any designing experience so I feel a little bit lost during this process, and it tires me out! Cody and I have been the most snappy at each other during this part. Before we agreed on everything, but we do have some differences of opinion when it comes to picking out exact paint shades. But after MUCH contemplating, searching, and reviewing numerous paint colors... we think that we might have selected our colors. We are thinking about the middle color for most of our first floor. We wanted a tan color, but not too brown, but not too light, but then not too dark. It was hard to find the color we actually some what settled on. Then we were going to do a bright blue in the morning room. I was planning on buying some blue accents for our living room. I wanted to look at some curtains. I'm hoping to find some blue ones that will go good with it.
We also saw a blue back splash that we liked at Home Depot. We were thinking about putting it up in our kitchen. You can see the white space inbetween the cabinets and the counters in this picture. We are hoping that this will tie it all in together.
We are thinking about doing a silver color for the basement. You can see that we circled the middle color. Again... this was another hard color to settle on. I can't tell you how many shades of grey we looked at before we decided we liked this one.
Our master bedroom was the hardest decision. I wanted a peach, cream, or yellow color... Cody did not want that at all. We were at the store for quite a while debating colors, and we finally decided that we both liked this tealish blue color above. However, after all of this debate Cody went in to turn our keys in to the office, and he mentioned that we were looking at paint colors. And the guys told them that they have paint templates, or guidelines that we can look at. Which would probably be similar to how we picked out the colors for the outside of the house. So when we go to the house on Wednesday we are going to stop in and talk about paint schemes with the guys. I'm torn on how I feel about this, because I feel like it could cause us to go back to the drawing board and do all this all over again. But at the same time I'm happy to do it because I feel like we could use some help or at least some more ideas. I don't want to settle on paint colors we don't really like, and have to live with them forever. I'm most worried about the master bedroom. I'm not 100% sure on these colors. I'm sure it will end up looking fine, but I'd still like to look at some more options. I'm going to be looking at pictures of Ryan Homes models online too. They have "walk through" tutorials online. That was how we got the idea to paint the morning room blue, because we really liked how it looked on the online model. So... we'll see what ends up happening paint-wise in the house.
Here is our long awaited dishwasher. It was finally installed!
My first reaction was a little bit worried, because it seems a little bit small.
I think that the dishwasher we are used to is bigger, but hopefully this one will work better. Brooke told me that this is the one she has in her house, and she likes it... so hopefully it will work out.
The numbers for the front of our house are in!! I can't wait to see them up!
After we walked through the house I really wanted to go to J C Penny's at the Strongsville Mall to look at curtains. However, when we got there it was closed. So we decided to go Bed Bath and Beyond to look at their curtains. We quickly realized that there wasn't anything that we liked at Bed Bath and Beyond curtain wise at all. Best Buy was across the street so we decided to stop in to browse at appliances. It turns out that they had a GREAT sale on washers and dryers! We ended up buying a pair on the spot. We told them to install it on Good Friday.
Now we have our couch, washer and dryer, and garage opener. Our list of everything that we need is starting to get smaller! Our big ticket item is still the refrigerator. After looking at about 1,000 fridges, I think that I like french door GE fridges the best. Of course those fridges are the most expensive out there, around $3,500... I am hoping that we can find one for a decent deal. I'm hoping to find a nice looking floor model at Best Buy. The Best Buy that we went to today had one for $1,900, but it had a scratch on the front of it so we passed on it. The Sears Outlet store gets them in every so often... I'm just hoping we'll get lucky. I can't see us spending more than $2,000 on a fridge. I don't mind getting a floor model, or one with a scratch or dent on the side. I'd just rather not have a scratch or dent on the front of it. We still have to buy our paint, dehumidifier for the basement, and a backup sump pump battery. Not to mention any decorating things that we want to buy... Lots of shopping for us still!
