Living Vicariously

We are patiently waiting for our house to begin construction and to tide us over we are living vicariously through our soon to be new neighbors. We went out to the site today and the entire house is finished with framing, it has a roof, and all the rough in plumbing work is done as well as some gas lines. I took several pictures because the house has many of the same features as we will have. Take a look below, one of the things I was really excited to see in real life was all the arched entry ways. I didn't get a shot of the house from the outside, but I will update this post with one after the next time we are out there.

Looking into the great room from the kitchen

Looking toward the basement steps from the kitchen.

Standing in the downstairs hallway looking into the entry from the garage.

standing in the great room looking into the kitchen.

Standing close to the front door looking down the hallway and into the dinning/kitchen area.

It looks like someone hates plumbing as much as I do.

I went for a climb in the attic.....

The house across the street

So we are in a slow period right now. Waiting on our pre-construction meeting next monday and for all the designs to be finalized and approved by the city. But we have gotten a little taste of the action from the house being built across the street.

When we first decided to build, their lot was just grass like ours, but the next weekend there was a foundation.

After about 2 weeks it looked like this:

And 1 day after we took these pictures the second story was nearly complete as well. I would expect the house to have roof on it before the end of the weekend probably.

This house does not face the cul-de-sac, but it is the other corner lot on the cul-de-sac. It is also the same floor plan as us and has a 3 car garage and many of the same features, but no sun room. It will also have a different elevation so it will look pretty different from the outside. The first picture is the great room and you can see where the fireplace has been framed in and there are windows on both sides.  That is the same layout as we will have and the those windows actually face our lot.  The next two picture are from the second floor where you can see that nothing has been framed out yet. and the last picture kidahn took of me standing on the second floor. She is in the general direction of where our house will be. I also took a picture from that spot looking at where our house will be, it is below:

We will go back out to that house either today or tomorrow and update you on the progress. We also got to meet the people who own it last night. Very good people and a lot of fun. And, we have gotten to know another couple in the neighborhood who are just a few houses down from us. Also great people!

-Jacob

What it will look like from the outside.

Ok so i'm going to do my best here to give you a visual of what the house will look like from the outside. There isn't a house built (yet) that has all the things we want, but there are some that have bits and pieces. The brick we chose can be seen on this house...

And our house will have a three car garage like this one...

That house is actually the same floor plan as we will have as well so the outside is very similar to what we will build. However that elevation is called European Romantic and we are building something called a Craftsman which looks like this...

For the most part they are the same thing, but there isn't brick on the second story to the left. Also our house will be flipped from this, our garage will be on the left. Our siding will be a similar color to what you see the last picture, but a little darker.

So...if you mash all the right parts of these pictures together in photoshop, you get something like this:

And that's our house.

-Jacob

Ok....so here are our actual selections!

Ok sorry for the fake post....it was too hard to resist.

Here is actually what we decided on.

There will be hardwood flooring throughout the entire first floor with the exception of the mud room which will be vinyl for now (but we will tile it after we move in). The floor is 3 and 1/4 inch wide oak in a color called coffee bean. In some of the photos it looks a little red but it actually isn't at all. It is more like a kona color in real life.

The upper and lower cabinets in the kitchen as well as both bathrooms upstairs will be maple and stained a similar color to the floor (Kona) and the doors will look like this:

The island cabinets in the kitchen will be white.

We went with a granite called New Venetian Gold. This granite will be in the kitchen as well as both bathrooms upstairs. The color in the picture is more gold than in real life, its better in some of the pictures coming up.

The granite on a similar style and color of cabinets is here:

Below are a few pictures of everything together, including the carpet that will be upstairs.

Granite chose is on the top right.

Also, we went with a deep single basin sink and a faucet that has the integrated pull out sprayer (not the same as the one in the picture below)

Around the fireplace and on the floor in front of the place will be a natural marble:

The tile in the bathrooms upstairs will be a cream color, also we added a frameless glass shower door in the master bathroom:

As for exterior features....we are going with a brick called petosky which has a fair bit of color variation in it. It is difficult to tell from the sample below. I'll try to get a picture of a house with that actual brick on it up soon. The siding will be a dark gray and we will do the cedar shake shingles  that sit in the eaves (in the last picture you can see an example of these) in a lighter gray color as well to provide some contrast and depth. The front door color is also sitting on top of the bricks. The shingles are dimensional and a color called pewter.

Cedar Shake Shingle a shade lighter in gray.

And that's it.....except for all the electrical...where to we want can lights, where to we want ceiling fans, where do we want light switches...outlets...speaker wires etc? That will all be done in our pre-construction meeting on June 1st!

-Jacob

Update on the Sunroom

It was really hard to get good pictures of exactly what the sunroom would look like. But our sales rep at Lombardo managed to find a few. Ours would be very similar to this I think, but the footprint of our house is wider so it won't look so much like it takes over the back of the house. Also it will have a brick exterior and on the interior it will have a cathedral ceiling, a ceiling fan and 4 can lights around the perimeter. Also the entry way will be arched.

Oh, the options!

As Jacob said in the previous post, there are A LOT of options available with the Lakeland floor plan we chose. You might think it’s a relatively easy decision to make. I like this floor plan better than that one. So you choose that particular floor plan. Done. Bu then you  have to decide which structural options you want to purchase. Sunroom. Check. Arched entryways. Check. Luxury kitchen. Check. You get the idea. I was kind of proud myself for making those decisions with little trouble and frustration, but boy was I wrong to think that the decision-making stopped there! I figured out quickly why I was proud of myself for making those decisions so quickly. It’s because those were the EASY decisions!

When our builder’s sale rep scheduled our selections appointment and recommended that we come in the weekend before to get a head start, I thought to myself, I don’t think that’s necessary, but it sounds like a good idea. So we did. And we were there for two hours! We would have stayed longer but the sales office was closing and I certainly didn’t want to make anyone work late because I couldn’t decide what color I wanted the grout in the shower to be! So that leads us to all the selections we have to choose: Siding color, brick color, shingle color, hardwood floor (style and color), carpet (style and color), tile color, grout color, countertops (style and color for kitchen AND bathroom), cabinets (style and color for kitchen AND bathroom), door color, and hand rail color for staircases. I feel like Jacob and I had a bit of a “is the dress blue and black, or white and gold” scenario, which made things a bit more difficult. Not to mention that we thought we had made all our final decisions and then took all the samples from the basement where they are displayed up to the living room and noticed we hated half the colors when you look at them in sunlight rather than the harsh fluorescent lights in the basement. Crap. I felt kind of defeated, but instantly felt better when I realized we had saved ourselves from having the biggest, ugliest house in the neighborhood.

After we left the sales office we decided to go cruise around the new neighborhood and look at the brick and siding color combinations other people chose because of course we hadn’t decided that yet. I felt like the paparazzi taking a picture of each house as we slowly, and admittingly creepily, drove through the neighborhood. Afterwards Jacob cut elements we liked from different photos and mod-podged them together. He’ll share that in aother post.

So, for now we *think* we know what we want. Our selection appointment is this weekend, and we’ll share what we finally decide on.

-KiDahn

What are we building?

There are several different floor plans available and for each one there a ton of ways to customize it. We ended up settling on the Lakeland floor plan below.

We wanted an open floor plan on the first floor and that is hard to find unless you are buying a house built in the last 10 years. Unfortunately there have been little to no houses built around Detroit in that time frame due to the recession and the people that do have them, don't want to get rid of them. So....we build one our selves. You can see the that kitchen, "nook" and great room are essentially one giant room. This will actually get bigger because we added two feet to the house which makes the 'nook' more of a dinning room area. We also added the optional sunroom of the back of the house. This is something that we are pretty excited about because it isn't like what most people think of as a sun room, something like this:

But more like this:

It is more like a second living room with a vaulted ceiling and a lot of windows. Additionally it adds the same square footage to our basement.

Below is a laundry list of the things that we have selected so far. We have final selections on the 9th...more on that later.

• Sunroom
• A 16" transom window above the sliding glass door to go outside from the sunroom
• Fire place in the great room
• Two foot house extension
• Box out extension of the kitchen with a luxury package (makes the island bigger)
• Double wall oven (electric) and separate cooktop (gas)
• We added a window on either side of the fireplace
• Added a window in the downstairs bathroom and also in the family entry
• We opted for the study instead of the formal dining room, this means that there will be a set of french glass door to the left as you enter the house that goes into the study
• We add the family entry off of the garage which also extends the house out 6 feet in this area
• We had them finish the stairs going down to the basement and put in rot iron spindles and big heavy railings which will match the floors
• 9 foot ceilings on the first floor and most of the entry ways from one room to the next will be arched at the top
• Three car garage (two plus one configuration)
• There will be dark (kona) hardwood floor through out the entire first floor except for the family entry which will be linoleum, but we only did that because I want to tile it and it doesn't make sense to pay for anything more when you are just going to tear it up.
• On the second floor we didn't change too much from the base floor plan actually with the exception of the layout of the master bathroom and the addition of a window in there as well.
• There will be an hdmi, component and power outlet above the fireplace for mounting the tv. Additionally the great room will be pre-wired for 5.1 surround sound speakers so I can mount them in the corners and you won't see any wires.
• Granite counter tops in the kitchen as well as in the bathrooms
• We added recessed can lighting in a lot of places through the house and also had each room fitted with a ceiling fan prep so we can put them where we want when the time comes.
• We went with dimensional shingles and a 25 year roof
• We upgraded the kitchen cabinets to some of the best that they have. The main cabinets will be a Kona color and the island will be white
• Stainless steal vent hood which is actually vented to the outside
• The entire first floor will be brick and we upgraded to a thicker siding on the second story
• Double pane, low-e single hung windows
• recessed tray ceiling in the master bedroom

there are probably more things, but that's what we have at the moment :)

-Jacob

The Neighborhood

The subdivision was actually started back in 2006 when a home builder called Pulte bought the land. They built up about half of the neighborhood before the recession hit and the housing market in Detroit crashed in 2009. They suspended all construction in the area at that point. Last year a company called Lombardo Homes bought the property and they are who we have contracted to build our house.

Below is the site plan. We have chosen lot #179. The areas that are in darker green are houses that were built by Pulte several years ago. The ones with numbers are in development now and the areas to the west are future development areas which will also be run by lombardo.

We chose lot #179 mainly because it is the only lot available which can fit all of the things that we want. I'll get into the specifics of the house in a later post, but we added extensions to the house in both directions which increase the square footage and we also added a sunroom off the back of the house and a three car garage. With all of these things lot #179 was the only one which had a "building envelop" big enough for us. 

We don't have a detailed site plan yet, but I found the property's master deed and attempted to figure out the orientation from that by drawing a mostly scaled foot print of our house and just setting on the site plan. Below is the result. The dark lines are the property lines, the dotted lines denote various easements from the city for things like sidewalks or where underground utilities are and so we cannot build on those areas.

-Jacob

We bought a house...that doesn't exist.

So here's the thing. After watching the real estate market in Ann Arbor for a long time we realized that if we were to buy another home, we would have to make some major sacrifices. Either the location, the size, the features or the price was going to leave us with something we didn't love. And that is less than ideal for us because we have a policy in this household that we don't buy ANYTHING unless we both love it. 

So, we decided to just build what we want! After looking at a lot of new construction areas we settled on a neighborhood called Prospect Pointe just to the east of Ann Arbor in a township called Superior. We bought a corner lot on a cul-de-sac and you can see the location here, or from google street view here.

It is going to be a long process to build this house that will take somewhere around 8 months. We thought it would be easiest if we posted on here how things were going along the way so that anyone who wants to know can find out and see plenty of pictures. Lots more to come!

-Jacob