Ominous

I love the eeriness of this photo, so it gets its own post. 

Foundation walls

This sure have been progressing quickly.  As I mentioned before, our break ground date was supposed to be May 1.  Here we are still 3 days away from that date, and our foundation walls have already been poured!

Here's a few photos from yesterday, pre-pour.




And here's a few after...

Project Manager meeting

We just had our first PM meeting.  We will also have a PM in training involved with our project as well. Sounds good to us... the more eyes on everything the better.

The meeting was fairly straightforward and took about 45min.  First we reviewed the site plan and then all of the architectural plans, including all of our option selections to confirm they had everything correct.   There were a few late minute changes we had made that had not yet made it to him, but our sales rep was already on top of it before we could say anything.

Then we took a ride over to our site and did a walk around of the property.  My one concern was over the backyard, but he addressed that before we even had a chance to ask.  Although we will definitely have a slope, he is planning to try and use whatever dirt is not required for the backfill to try and level out the yard as much as possible.  It looks like we should have at least 30ft level before it starts to slope at all, and even then its more of a gentle slope downwards than a big drop off.

We have a pretty huge, very level lot at our current house, but it's completely wasted on us.  So this should work fine.

A few photos below from Friday and today.

A hole is born

Drove by the lot on my way to work yesterday to see what progress had been made on our neighbors... and lo and behold there was an excavator sitting right smack in the middle of the lot.

Drove by again on the way home from work... and our dirt mount is now the beginnings of a dirt hole.

We haven't actually had our pre-construction meeting yet, it's not scheduled until next week.  The original plan didn't call for them to break ground for another two weeks, and now they think they may have our foundation footer in by the time we first meet the PM!

Stakes!

Passed by our lot two days ago and it looks like we've been staked out. Lot of little flags everywhere.

Passed by today and we now have a porta-potty on the edge of the lot now too... things are getting serious!

A different kind of flyover

So a little more exploring on youtube, and i found this "flyover" of the golf course that has been bulldozed for our development.  From what i've read, it had closed down a few years ago and had been falling into disrepair well before that.

Still, kind of interesting to see what was.

Drone videos over Highland Estates

I just came across a series of amazing drone videos someone in the neighborhood has taken dating back to near the very start of the development.  Exciting to see the progress over the past year and a half, but even more so to see how much land is left to develop.

Seeing how big it is makes me wonder why they decided not to put a clubhouse in like they've done with some of the other developments.  The lower HOA fees are definitely nice, but having that community space seemed like a really nice plus in the other areas we looked at.

Kitchen selections

Our kitchen will not have the attached morning room, so cabinets will cross over to both walls. We did however upgrade to the gourmet island.

We priced out granite at the big box and smaller local granite stores, and decided the Ryan price was not crazy, but we could still save money by doing it later and not have that additional cost raise our final sales price.

One thing to keep in mind is that Ryan charges the same amount for granite in your kitchen whether you get no island, the small island, or the gourmet 8ft island.  That's crazy. The gourmet island effectively doubles your total counter space from roughly 30sqft up to 60sqft.  So if you get anything less than the gourmet island you definitely should skip the upgrade and have it done later.

Color-wise we went with the Jamocha laminate and the Tahoe Cherry Bordeaux cabinets.

http://www.timberlake.com/collections/tahoe/

Formica laminate

Electrical and lighting finalized

We had our final selections meeting yesterday. I will try and come back and post separately on our earlier selections, so this will be a bit out of order, but its easier to talk about things that just happened.

Very little overhead lighting is included, which is disappointing but not unexpected based on the many blogs we'd read up on. We noticed that a common thread was to be sure not to skimp on lighting, especially on the first floor.

First floor

We do get 9 recessed lights included in the kitchen, which seems like it should be more than enough. But we decided to add two pre-wires above either end of the gourmet island to give us the option to add pendant lighting later. These will be on a separate switch from the other lights, which will give us the option to turn on some lighting in the kitchen without the blinding light of all 9 cans.

We also added a light pre-wire to the pantry, and an additional outlet to the opposite side of the island. I wanted to add an outlet to the pantry, but eventually was overruled... I'm sure I will regret that later.

In the living room we were initially going to put just a fan with light in the center of the room, but decided to switch that to a fan pre-wire only, and added 4 recessed lights to the corners of the room.

In the office we added a light pre-wire.

The dining room comes with a chandelier.

The foyer/hall and mudroom come with overhead lighting, and the powder room comes with lighting as well.

Second floor

The master bedroom get a fan pre-wire in the center. We debated recessed lights, but we like having a fan on at night and adding those seemed like overkill.

Master bathroom comes with lighting, as does the master closet. We did add an outlet to the closet for steaming/ironing, glad we realized it didn't have one at all.

We added light pre-wires to the center of each of the three other bedrooms. We debated adding them to the closets as well, and we'll probably regret not doing that later.

Laundry comes with lighting.

Bonus room we added just a center fan pre-wire. It's such a large room that I'm regretting not adding recessed lights around the room and in the bump out. We just aren't exactly sure how we will be using this room yet. We also added a dedicated circuit to this room based on some other blogs, thinking we might want to have a mini-fridge and the treadmill in this room and who knows what else. The SR didn't think it was necessary and convinced us to remove it, but when I reviewed the final contract we missed that it was accidentally still included.

Exterior

There is one outlet near the back door, and one on the front porch near the door by default. We added one additional outlet in the front down from the porch in anticipation of holiday lighting needs.

Also added floodlights outside the master bedroom window overlooking the backyard.