Lifestyle

December 27, 2021

Building our Home

We signed the contract on our home in December of 2019 with a projected closing date of July of 2020. If I am being honest, building a home was absolutely terrifying because we had never done it before. I had so many questions running through my mind–“Is this going to be entirely too stressful?” “Can we afford to do this?” “What if I don’t like it?” I think it was just fear of the unknown.

Our home builder is somewhere between a custom builder and a track home builder. I like to call it semi-custom. We went to the design studio and picked out all of our finishes and made any adjustments to the floor plan that we chose. I say semi-custom because we could customize most things for a fee, but we could not source our own finishes. Thankfully, they had tons and tons and tons of finishes for us to choose from!

The Design Studio

The base price of our home included the standard selections. For example, some standard selections included:

-stained kitchen cabinets
-4 granite options for kitchen cabinets
-tile flooring in hallways and kitchen and carpet in living room
-2 color options of floor tile
-2 color options of carpet

We stuck with the standard option in a lot of instances to save some money, but we did upgrade things that would be harder to do down the road. Some of our upgrades included:

-painted cabinets throughout the house
-wood floors in common areas, hallways, and master bedroom
-wood wrapped island
-quartz counters
-pendant lights over the island
-recessed lighting in the living room
-fireplace tiled from floor to ceiling with upgraded tile
-lots of added electrical outlets, lights, and CAT6

When we signed our contract we had to submit any structural changes to the floor plan. We chose to extend and cover our back patio and we added a door to the backyard from the master bedroom.

The day of our design appointment.
These were their kitchen models to give a visual of the different types of upgrades.
This is where the flooring, cabinet, and counter selections were. All of the flooring and counter displays were double sided so we had lots of options!
The drawers were full of small samples you could take to the tables to view all of your selections together.
They had 3-4 of these double sided towers full of floor tile and LVP options. In the center of the studio they had small scale tiles in drawers.
This is where we picked our exterior selections. Brick, Stone, Paint, Stain, and window color.
Our interior selections
Our exterior selections

The Building Process

Thankfully, we had a fairly easy building process. We broke ground the month before the *you know what* hit. (February of 2020) We were fortunate that we didn’t run into any supply chain issues and we stayed on target for our projected closing date. I absolutely loved the building process and I would go check on the progress just about every day during nap time or when Kyle got home from work. It was so fun to see our lot go from dirt to home in about 6 months.

Plumbing and Rebar are complete and we were just waiting on concrete! February 2020
We went from concrete to vertical in just about a week. This is when things got really exciting!
March 2020
Finally looking like a house!
All drywalled! April 2020
So, so glad we decided to upgrade our fireplace and do floor to ceiling tiles. We did a black fireplace at our Dunn Street house too!
May 2020
We were so excited to see our floors! We pulled back some of the cardboard. Honestly, I didn’t like them when I only saw a small section. I was so nervous! Thankfully I loved them once all of the cardboard was removed! June 2020
Once landscape was done we knew we were almost to closing! July 2020
HOME Notice we had a baby during out building process! He was born about the time they were doing framing and drywall.

So Would We Build Again?

Absolutely! We have now experienced remodeling a house, doing a major master suite addition, and building. Want to know what we did in our previous houses? Be sure to check out this blog post! I personally enjoyed the building process a little bit more. Have you ever built a home? Have you ever remodeled? Let me know in the comments!

Much love, 

Hannah

  1. […] selection our builder offered–you will notice those are all of the PPG paints that I list. Click here to read about our building process and our time at the design studio! Now, let’s take a look […]

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