Our New House

Did I fail to mention that we are buying a house?

Michelle and I have been searching and searching for a home to buy. We flip flopped on buying new or used, farther away from Michelle’s work or closer. We looked in Aurora, Commerce City, Brighton, Denver and Westminster. Guess what? We ended up buying a new home right here in Thornton. The new house is two miles north of here. Being that close is nice as we can basically visit anytime we want to check the progress of the house.

The house is a two story with full finished basement (actually making the house a three story). 3 1/2 Bath and 4 Bedrooms.

We kind of stumbled upon these homes while we were driving around looking a different housing area.

Hardwood floors in the kitchen and breakfast nook will be standard as well the granite countertops in the kitchen and master bath. The remaining baths will have Corian countertops.

We have a couple of appointments setup for the design center where we will pick out the colors for the carpet/flooring and cabinets as well upgrades to faucets, lighting etc etc.

We are going to meet the construction supervisor as well. Kind of a pre-construction meeting. The house only has the basement foundation poured right now and should be done sometime in late July or mid August.

The main drawback to the house is the (small) size of the back yard.

Here are some pictures of the progress (and the small ass backyard):

Basement “shell”

Neighbors small ass yard

Our right hand side neighbors house.

Our rear neighbors back yard

Well, we finally finished our design selections at the Design Center!

I’ll tell you what, this was no easy task. Two weeks ago we had our initial “choosing” and we basically went from room to room picking flooring, fixtures, appliances etc. We felt that we did pretty good. When we got home that evening, we went over our choices and dropped a few items (window coverings, hardwood flooring in the study) so we could bring down our bottom dollar. We were able to knock off $3,500 from the initial $17,000 in upgrades. We felt that we did the right thing! SAVE MONEY!!

Well, today we did the “final” and walked out adding $5000! We added hardwood flooring to the study, “Hollywood Wrap” to the stairways, tile around the fireplace hearth and “Euro Shower” enclosure in the master bath. The Euro Shower is an enclosure that you would find in the more upscale hotels (which we use when traveling). The door pops open, has clear glass and just looks right. The standard choice had a slider door. The tracks on the door usually get all mucked up with soap scum and soon become an eyesore and a bitch to clean.

You think we were done don’t you? Well, we couldn’t stop there. We added quartz to the kitchen counters and kitchen island (we nixed the standard granite since it looked like crap), painted the kitchen cabinets a lighter color and tiled the walls from the counter tops to the bottom of the cabinets. Looks sweet!. When we compared quartz to the granite, the difference was night and day. Quartz is definitely the way to go. Since the quartz is man made, there won’t be any variance. What we see is what we get. The kitchen is going to look f**king awesome!I

I put together a slide show and posted it on You Tube. Please be advised that the appliances are approximate to what we are getting. The picture of the kitchen sink reflects the sink and faucet that we went with. The backsplash is a natural stone in a brick design. We decided to go with a lighter colored kitchen. The kitchen cabinet hardware follows to all of the other cabinets in the house (bathrooms) which is a nice bonus.

You can see the video here:

 

We went with diagonal tile layout in the master bath. There is a picture in the slide show showing the layout. We picked a different tile accent that will run horizontally (two rows) in the shower. It looks a lot better than the standard look.

We can hardly wait to move! There is no new news on our move-in date so we won’t close until July or August. That’s okay, we are putting money aside for the move. Oh, that reminds me. I got a quote from “Two Guys and a Truck”. $1,200 for the move. We have to box the stuff but they will move all of the heavy stuff including the gym equipment that is the basement and the china hutch. I am glad that we got rid of that 40” glass TV. That think weighed 350 pounds. My back still feels the hurt from moving it a few times. We planned on spending $3000 for the move so it was a nice surprise to get such a low quote.