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