We want to see this project start to look like a house, but geez, who knew there was so much infrastructure... This week they have been working on setting up the plumbing before pouring the concrete into the basement floor. I haven't been out in a few days to see how the place looks, but when I checked on Thursday, all we saw was a bunch of trenches with pipes in them.
Decisions we are working on now....
Plumbing fixtures --- Very annoying that I made one change to our plumbing quote (switched to a faucet that was about $200 more) and the quote price went up by over $4000 --- grrrr. So then I say, forget it and revert back to the old quote, price up $3000+ still. It took me a while to figure out exactly what happened, but it turns out Delta took a price increase in July and our original quote was before that and now every single item went up, resulting in a fairly big added expense. To try to get the expense back down to the "budget" amount for plumbing, I have to cut some stuff. This is not that big of a deal --- we can reduce the faucets from an 8" widespread to a mini-widespread and it saves the budget....I like how the widespread faucets look best, but the mini-widespread savings is great.
Appliances --- This is another area where there have been some price increases. Luckily, we have seen a couple of price decreases here as well, so the budget is on track. While working on the cabinetry design though, we thought it would be nice to have a beverage center in the "butler's pantry" for stuff like beer for the adult crowd and drinks for the kids. It would keep them out of the main fridge. The problem is, this got us over budget by about $1000 for a undercounter fridge, more if it is to be fridge drawers - with our current plan we are under budget by a few hundred dollars. While it would be great to have, I really want to not creep up everywhere. How to solve the problem? Gotta get creative to squeeze this "optional" appliance into the plan within budget. I start scouring the appliance stores and craigslist for closeouts, or models that are being phased out. I hit the jackpot with an appliance store in Charlotte that had a U-Line Fridge / Freezer drawer for $599 I do a little research and discover this appliance retails for over $3000 because it also has an icemaker ---- Whooo hooo, even better because next to this little beauty will be our old wine fridge and our cocktail making stuff --- so having ice there is really great. The drawers are brand new, panelable (I made them show me in the instructions how the paneling works because the drawers are black right now and would not look too good in this area without panels. They have a few other things which are great deals as well, but some of them are a little harder to handle. This appliance I just pop-in, hook up to the icemaker (accounted for in the new plumbing quote) and it is ready. The vent hood by Broan, which is very nice, and a good deal, I am not sure if it would be as easy. They also have a nice Wolf range, and it is discounted several thousand dollars, but it is not the one we have in the plan (Nany either) and I am less comfortable with something like this.
Cabinetry --- The poor cabinet guys --- they told me to fax over my changes. I don't think they knew I had 50 pages of changes!! I am sure they were surprised last week when I dropped off this big binder of my cabinetry plans! We are going to keep the cabinets simple and paint them the same color as our trim, I think it will be nice, we'll see --- Lloyd says they'll make me some sample doors / drawers to take around with me to look at stuff like tile, etc.
Garage Doors --- I thought I had some good cost savings here. Nick and I picked a carriage door by Clopay. Instead of being solid wood, it was steel and the guy thought this would save us some money vs. the budget. But, when he priced it all out it actually came in as a more expensive option because the 3 doors are 9'x9' which makes the steel ones custom. The wooden ones were custom all along, so no savings there. Unfortunately, it had always been my plan to paint the doors the same color as our trim, and we decided no windows since we'll put a basketball hoop on the driveway. But, now that they'll be wooden, it is going to be hard to resist doing the pretty stained wooden carriage doors that Nick has always loved anyway.
http://www.clopaydoor.com/reserve-hardware.aspx
Stairs --- The plan has always been to do walnut stairs, with painted risers. Now the question is which type of handrail and posts? Our staircase will be u-shaped, and I like the Georgian profile where the handrail is continuous, but we also like the painted big post look as well --- not sure how to describe this exactly. I am trying to find good pictures of handrails I like to take to the stairmaker on Monday. I was watching a tv show the other day while doing my exercise machine when the house in the show had a really pretty staircase --- thankfully the show was DVR'ed, so I was able to rewind and take a picture of the screen! This is the white post look --- excuse the flash on the screen! The other staircase picture is the more formal Georgian variety.... both are pretty...
That is about it for this week.... hopefully we'll see some framing next week.....
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