I am so excited to make this “blog official” … we are building another house! Four years ago we moved into our very first home and we absolutely loved it. It was such a wonderful experience and we really learned a lot about the building process and home ownership in general. This time around we debated purchasing an older home rather than waiting for a new build, but the pros for a brand new space just outweighed the cons for us and we decided to go for it again. Over the weekend we were able to make all of the official selections and I’m thrilled to share our new home design with you guys!
To give you some background, we moved from a pretty affordable area of the country to a pretty expensive area which we were not prepared for at all! Because we didn’t want to give up on our school district and our city, we decided to build a town home. It’s approximately 2,000 square feet and has 3 bedrooms, 2.5 bathrooms, a bonus space which will be my office, and a study which we’ll use as a “listening” room. I’m actually kind of excited to see where this will take us because the market here is amazing and I think this could be our perfect segue into owning income property…but more on that another time.
I’m sure by this point you all are dying to get on with the formalities and see what exactly we picked for the house! Let’s start with the biggest item: flooring. The whole first level as well as the stairs is going to be super durable hardwood floors in a “peppercorn” finish. They are hand scraped 5″ planks and there’s a lot of distressing throughout.
On the second floor we chose to go with a first level carpet in a light “steamed milk” color and an upgraded moisture resistant carpet pad. The stuff is like walking on a memory foam mattress! We’ve always been told that the carpet pad is the key to keeping your floors looking nice, and so we deemed this upgrade a necessity.
Finally, in the full bathrooms and laundry room we selected a modern 12×24″ LVT tile in “gallery gray.” It’s hard to tell from the photo, but the tile has a sort of linen texture to it with varying shades of gray throughout. What’s LVT you ask? It stands for Luxury Vinyl Tile and the stuff is amazing. It looks like ceramic tile and uses grout, but it’s incredibly durable.
Next we move on to the bathrooms! I opted for a shaker style cabinet with a dark finish. The countertops are standard marble like you’d find in most bathrooms, and the finishes are chrome. In the master bathroom we opted to go with a fully tiled 5′ shower (which I’m completely excited about, by the way). We selected a frameless shower door and carrera lookalike ceramic tile with a bench seat.
Last but certainly not least, the kitchen. If you follow me on Instagram or Facebook, you know I’ve been having a really difficult time choosing kitchen cabinets. But after weighing all of the pros and cons and taking into consideration your suggestions, I made a decision! We opted for white cabinets *gasp.* Since town homes have a tendency to be really dark, and we didn’t have a great medium-tone stain to choose from, I felt like white was the best option. It’s really going to lighten up the space and it has a timeless quality. The countertops are a black and gray which isn’t quite the white and gray marble look I was going for, but there are some sacrifices that have to be made when you aren’t building a custom home. I’m confident it will be gorgeous anyway! For hardware we chose all chrome finishes with cup pulls on the drawers and somewhat modern handles for the doors. The backsplash is going to be white subway tile with dark grout – which I’m absolutely obsessed with.
One of the most important things we learned about new home design with our last house is that there are upgrades worth paying for in your mortgage and there are other items that just aren’t. As you see more and more photos of the house, you’ll find out where we scrimped and where we splurged.
This home is truly perfect for where we are right now and I’m thrilled to share it with you as we go through this whole building process!
Loading...
Leave a Reply