Kitchen Island Framing

The framers came back this week and are finishing up a few things. One is the kitchen island bar. They had to move it 6 inches because of the clearance on the north door, but I think it will be good. The worry about too much space between the sink and the stove was all for naught.

Progress

I'll go out to the house quickly before I go get the kids, but what I know so far is that they are finishing the gas line and starting to frame the basement.

Yesterday they accidentally cut the power lines to the barn from the main house. Oops, I guess they are going to fix it today. Wayne mentioned that it was probably cheaper to find them the way they did than to do a utility locate.

We had a meeting with our designer yesterday and she walked through stone, stucco, roof, window and exterior paint and stain decisions. We narrowed the roof down to two selections, stone down to three, stucco down to five and windows down to one (that one was easy with only 3 choices). We are working on getting samples of all of the options so that we can see them together. We'll meet with her again once we get all those collected.

We also had her look at the 2 stain options for the kitchen and we went with the second option so I had to put a change order in already to the kitchen designer. Not a big deal, but I'm glad we came to that decision.

Kitchen Plans Finalized

We met with our kitchen designer today and finalized the plans. Wow, I'm so excited, it's going to look beautiful. He spent a lot of time with us and listened to our needs. I feel like we got everything we wanted and stayed within our budget (barely).

Now I can't wait to see it come together. I know August will come quicker than we can imagine.

Kitchen

We met with one of the kitchen designers that we've been working with and the design and price are looking good! We had a few minor tweaks here and there and then he will give us more of a firm price. We were also able to give him exact appliances that we will be using.

The good thing about his company is that he can use different suppliers based on our needs. We can get an overall lower price that way.

The Current Schedule

Wayne really wanted to get started again today, but the weather for the weekend is looking really cold again. They didn't want the hole to sit for over the weekend, so have decided on the following schedule:

Monday, December 22: Digging for basement
Wednesday, December 24: Pour footings
Give the long Christmas weekend for the footings to dry
Monday, December 29: Start putting in forms for the foundation walls

We won't be here when they start doing the forms, we are leaving December 26 for North Dakota, so Bumpa and Grammie will have specific instructions on where to take the pictures during the week we are gone.

We are not closing on the construction loan tomorrow (Friday) because there are a few last things the bank needs. We have been approved, I guess they're just finishing their files. I don't know when we will close, perhaps Monday, but I'll need to call them. It's ok, because we have another form of funds we are using until we can use the construction account.

Tomorrow we are going to the Builders Appliance Center to check out appliances. I am pretty sure I want to go with the GE Monogram stuff. We get a good discount direct from GE at work. Wayne wants to go with Viking stove, but I do want everything to match, so I'm still leaning to the GE stuff. The only concern I have is that the refrigerator with the configuration that I want (french door refrigerator and 2 drawer bottom freezer) I think is too small. Only 20.7 cu. ft. I have no concept of how big that is, so I just have to go see it. I love the GE Monogram 6 burner stove with the griddle. It has 2 ovens side by side, a large one and a small one. I think we'll do this instead of the two 4.4 cubic feet stackable ovens.

I've also spent quite a bit of time thinking about the kitchen. I think I know how I want it designed. We are meeting with 2 cabinets places on Monday since we have the day off. We received a preliminary layout from one of the places today and it is horrible - not even close to what we want. Since I now have a better idea we will show them our concept when we meet with them on Monday and then we'll have a better idea about what it will look like. We will also need to go back to the original place we went to in order to give them an opportunity to provide pricing on the same design.

So far I am having fun, but the kitchen is a big deal!! I want to make sure we get it right. Update on appliances probably tomorrow since there will be no construction progress.

More Updates

We decided that we need to make our dining room bigger. Miles saw an example of an octagonal dining room that he really liked, so we might do that instead of a square or rectangle. We need to let our designer know right away about the changes so that he can finish the drawings.

The designer sent us a 3D drawing that we can't seem to get to work on any of our PCs. I'm anxious to see what it looks like from the outside, so hopefully we can get that to work soon.

We were going to meet with Wayne (the builder) today to show him approximately where we wanted the house to sit, but because of the Windsor tornado last Thursday, he is swamped with work in Windsor.

We are trying to connect with our kitchen designer. I guess he's got some designs for us to review as well. We were hoping to meet with him today since we can't meet with Wayne until next week. He didn't call me back, so I guess we'll have to schedule another time.

After meeting with our realtor last week (Chris), we've decided to put our house on the market sooner rather than later. We know what the market is like this summer and not sure how long it will take to sell. This will likely mean that we'll move twice, but better than having 2 big mortgages at the same time.

We are having a garage sale with our neighbors this weekend. Our neighbors are moving to North Carolina and just put their house on the market. We were bummed, but they've priced their house really high. I guess that's a good thing because if they sell at that price, we can raise the price that we are planning to offer our house for.

What to do?

This? (With the ovens separate from the range and the range in the island)

Or this? (Our design currently has the range/ovens in the island with the vent hood over the island as well. This picture shows what the range/oven would look like. Picture this in the island.)

The question for me now is, "What would the range/oven look like in the island, or should we go with something more similar to the picture above." The downside of that scenario is we would lose cupboard space. Hmm, decisions.