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  • Five recent favorites! And basement finish, mortgage, and family update!

    Welcome back to my blog! That’s more to myself than anyone else. Last time I published a post, I was in the very early, still secret stages of pregnancy with my second baby! He has since arrived, and he is perfect. We chose the name Winston, and I think it’ll suit him well since he’s very calm/cool/collected so far. Me personally, I’m still working through the postpartum fun that comes with having a baby. Luckily with this being my second, I know what to expect. I’m looking forward to getting back into my workouts once my hip gets back to normal and finding some new clothes I like. I think this time I’ll focus more on finding lightweight/stretchy tops than tops that are specifically for nursing.

    Brandon has been plugging away at finishing our basement since we found out we were pregnant again, and he’s doing a great job. He’s completed framing, we got the initial stages of plumbing/electrical done, and the drywall hung for 95% of the basement. Now while we wait on the electrician to come back and add the ceiling lights, he’s working on prefill and then tape/mud/sanding. I’m hoping that we can get our own bedroom back (currently sharing with a toddler and newborn) by next spring. I’d love to get our daughter a big girl bed and bedding for her birthday in March, but we’ll see. I was in a rush to get this all done by my due date, but once I let go of that it was much more relaxing of a pregnancy. Now I care less on when we get done, except having more space for company (especially when the company is additional kids coming over to play lol), getting our room back, and then of course being able to focus on the mortgage.

    Now the mortgage.. we haven’t done an extra payment in a while since we’ve been focused on paying cash for the basement finish. And wow electrical/plumbing was way more expensive than we thought! Like double the price. That said, our mortgage started last spring and we have 2+ years of our 30 years of payment already complete! That’s not too bad! Next year I’m looking forward to making some huge progress since the more we front load the principal payments, the bigger impact they make!

    With those updates out of the way, I can share five of my recent favorites as a softball update to get back into the swing of things.

    Croc Classic Sandal 2.0 in Taupe

    Amazon

    My first recent favorite has been my house crocs! I have these same crocs in black, and I’ve even replaced them with the same style/color when the tread wore out. When I was looking for a house shoe that didn’t get gross (like the lining of a slipper), I thought why not get another pair of Croc sandals but in a new color! I chose this taupe color because it was the cheapest color on Amazon (on sale for $25 at the time!), but I actually love it. Maybe next spring I’ll get a different color for indoors so I can wear these outside! I love wearing them in the bathroom or when the kitchen has crumbs between robovac runs (…toddlers!). If you don’t like going into bathrooms barefoot and don’t wear outside shoes inside, I highly recommend!

    Sephora eyeshadow single in ‘To The Moon and Back’

    Sephora

    I was looking for a new eyeshadow color, but I don’t like buying a full palette only for the other colors to go to waste. I ended up with a single shadow, and I love it! I actually just apply it with my finger lol. I used to have tons of eyeshadows and would always apply with various eyeshadow brushes, but in this mom era where you have 5 minutes to do your makeup unless you have someone watch your little kids, a finger swipe with one color does the job. I also feel like it has less fallout (even with a shimmer) and more saturation than if I were to use a brush. It was also only $8!

    Jigsaw Planet online puzzles

    Jigsaw Planet

    I have been LOVING doing online jigsaw puzzles on my iPad while listening to audio books. I haven’t been able to do this as much since having another baby, but it’s such a good way to keep your mind engaged while listening. Audiobooks are the main way I can get through books at this time, and my biggest challenge is keeping my mind from wandering. This works!!

    Acura Brightening Facial Scrub

    Amazon

    I started using this face scrub during the summer as I dealt with the hormonal skin changes that come with (my) typical pregnancy symptoms. I feel like the extra exfoliation makes my skin less congested than it would be without, even if it doesn’t make it clear. The bottle says to use it a couple times a week, but honestly I use it once a day. I feel like with my skin, I can get away with that because even with zero moisturizer (something I never thought I’d say/do!), my skin hasn’t been dry. Now that it’s going to be winter soon, I think I will need to add a moisturizer or a sunscreen afterwards. Overall, love this scrub even though it’s super messy!

    The Book Thief

    Amazon (although borrowed via Libby)

    My final recent favorite is The Book Thief. I don’t want to spoil this book, but the story and style of writing was so engaging and like nothing I’d read before. I also loved how it was historical fiction and showed a point of view that I was less familiar with. I find myself recommending this book whenever I’m talking with someone about reading!

    Those are five recent favorites that I’ve had. I haven’t really been buying/doing as much personal stuff, so maybe I’ll do another favorites post specifically for moms/little kids!

    Thanks for reading!

    Davien

  • Beginning our mortgage payoff journey!

    Beginning our mortgage payoff journey!

    I finally have time to revisit my blog now that I’ve passed my AWS Solutions Architect exam (and so has my husband!!)! We’re excited to switch gears to finishing our basement and doing small diys around the house with our reclaimed free time and mental energy.

    Quick update on our house, we have our mortgage!! I think most people wouldn’t be excited, but this meant we’d go from 8.5% interest only construction loan payments to 6.875% interest and paying down our home. This is also exciting because it means we can start our home payoff journey! Our first mortgage payment isn’t until April 1st, but we went ahead and did a full March “payment” straight to principal just to get the ball rolling. That payment was just 0.77% of our total loan value, but it took tens of thousands of dollars off our projected interest over the course of the loan and shaved off over 6 months. Remember, your little principal only extra payments here and there have huge dividends across the term of your loan. Get familiar with your amortization schedule!

    This year we plan to beef up our emergency fund to account for having a mortgage and also work on finishing our basement. We couldn’t afford to have the builder do it – so our goal is to work on it ourselves and aim for completion by the end of this year. I know, I know, it’s already March, but I have complete faith in my husband’s ability to get it done! Then next year we would be full steam ahead on paying as much as possible to our principal balance. We will have so much freedom when we have a paid off house – and we’re both so excited!

  • Front entry/mudroom tour + plans for the future

    Front entry/mudroom tour + plans for the future

    Happy Wednesday! Today I have our entry and mudroom reveal! We’re pretty happy with how it turned out!

    Behold, our entryway! It turned out very similar to how we 3D rendered it when designing our home:

    I’d say the main differences are of course our front door being a different style and our niche having leftover marble from the kitchen versus a darker stone. Either way, we’re pretty happy! If there were just two things however that would make this space perfect (besides actually decorating it), we’d have our front door and barn doors a closer stain match to our floors. I do like to think that most things are happy accidents, so we’re playing around with painting our front door to be a light gray/white or even retique it’ing a more natural wood tone. If we do the light gray/white paint on the front door, it may make the barn doors look less cool toned. Or, if we were to retique it the front door, we may paint the barndoors a lighter color or retique it them in the same wood finish.

    Speaking of, here’s another look at our barn doors:

    We have one that opens into our office and another that opens into our mudroom. Our office barn door is able to slide over our niche:

    The art that’s there is just temporary. I think we’ll hang the bunny picture in the pantry, and leave the two nursery prints on the ledge until we find new art and a bigger frame.

    Here’s a view of our mudroom behind door #2.

    We just used two cheap shoe racks and our coat hooks from the old house since decking out our mudroom wasn’t in the budget. It’s worked pretty well! With the current setup, we’re able to park Bianca’s Doona by the coats, which may not have been convenient if we had built in cabinetry. I surprisingly don’t mind the open system we have, and it doesn’t bother me to see the shoes and coats. I think it makes it more accessible for kids, and it’s been easy to dust mop around at night.

    And here’s a final view of the other side of our mudroom:

    We’ve never had ‘real’ rugs before, but these two from Ruggable have worked out great! We’ve been working hard to take care of our wood floors, which means making sure dirt/rocks don’t get tracked through the house.

    As far as changes go, we definitely want to paint the front door. I think that will change the whole look of the entry. We want to find some bigger art for our niche, too. Someday I think I want a taller faux tree in the entry, but we’ll see if Brandon let’s me have a fake plant since we have a lot of real monsteras looking for new corners of the house! Finally, someday I think it could be fun to focus on darkening up our mudroom similar to our laundry room. They both get plenty of light, and it could be nice to “hide” them a bit by letting them fade into the background with some darker paint.

    BTW – if you think our house seems empty, I agree! It makes it so much easier to keep picked up, but we do plan on adding more decor and a few more pieces of furniture down the road!

    That’s all for our entry and mudroom! Thanks for reading!

  • Laundry room tour + plans for the future!

    Laundry room tour + plans for the future!

    Happy New Year! Today I thought I’d feature our new laundry room on the blog! I think I want to do a series where I do a baseline tour of each room in our new house, and then show how each one changes as we have more time, energy, and (most importantly) money to devote to the space. Our laundry room is one of our most simple spaces, and I’m so happy with how it functions given how little we put into it.

    Here’s a little view of what our laundry room looks like from the dining/living room. We actually went with a pocket door due to a miscalculation I made when designing our house. It was supposed to be a wooden barn door, but the white pocket door was a perfect accident. We almost always have the door open, and I love how seamless it looks with the rest of the wall.

    And here’s what our pocket door looks like when closed.

    Our laundry room can be kept completely open since the pantry entrance is just a cased opening, no door. As you can see, we went pretty basic in here! Since it was a more hidden space (when closed off), we wanted to use our dollars elsewhere.

    Just inside of our laundry room, we have our dirty laundry area. I’m a big fan of keeping everyone’s laundry in their own bedroom hampers. In this basket, you would only expect to find towels, cloth bibs, cloth napkins, etc. Whenever I do mine or Brandon’s laundry, I’ll throw whatever’s in this basket in the wash, too. The only exception is now we have a dust mop and mop heads, and those need to be washed separately. BTW – this basket is very dirty and a little broken. But that’s life!

    I’d like to get a new laundry hamper or wire drawers at some point that can hold 2 or more types of laundry, is easy to clean, and has a surface of some sort that can hold our laundry detergent, iron, and clothespins. Here’s a cost effective option from Target, but TBD what we end up with!

    Target

    BTW – the cheap wooden tv tray in my picture is almost 10 years old! I’ve had it since college, and it’s always doubled as a nightstand or desk. You might notice some metal behind our little laundry stand, and that’s our capped off dryer vent. We went with an LG washer dryer combo, and we’re so happy with it. Since it’s ventless, we just screwed a cap on our dryer vent to keep air from blowing in or out (not sure which way it goes lol). We also just have one collapsible laundry basket that we keep in the laundry room. It’s just used for folding/putting away clothes, so it’s not allowed to hang out in bedrooms for more time than it takes to put away laundry. I like this rule because it keeps us from hoarding baskets of clean laundry in our rooms!

    Next up, our laundry sink area!

    Originally when we designed our laundry room, we were thinking cabinetry with a nice sink, plenty of storage, etc. When the numbers came in, we went with this utility sink option instead! I’m so glad we did. This sink gets a lot of use! Since our coffee machine is on the neighboring pantry countertop and no longer hooked directly into a water line, we rinse/fill it each morning in our laundry sink! This is also where we wash our hands versus keeping hand soap on the island. I love how easy it is to rinse our baby’s bib and then hang it on our drying rack.

    Note that we’re currently trying out bar soap. I know it’s more environmentally friendly, and I do like the look of a bar of soap over our plastic bottles we just have from SoftSoap lol. There’s also a souvenir hockey cup on the sink ledge. We use that to water our plants, and it’s my hope that someday I replace it with a cute pitcher that can sit out and double as decor!

    As you can see, we keep our cat food in the laundry room. We plan on moving our cat door to be under the laundry room sink so the cats can have direct access to our bedroom without us having a cat door on our bedroom door that’s pretty open to the whole house. (If you’re wondering where their water is, we keep it in our bathroom so dryer lint doesn’t get in it!)

    Here’s more of a straight through view! I love having our drying rack in here. As you can see, we use it to dry baby bibs, and we also keep a hand towel hung on it since we wash our hands in the utility sink. Behind that is her baby tub, which ideally would stay in our bedroom closet or eventually her bedroom closet. For now, this is where it lands sometimes!

    Enhancing this room is at the bottom of our to do list, but I’ll recap some of the things I could see us doing in the next year or two. For starters, I think we need a different laundry setup so we can keep our towels/cloth napkins/etc separate from the dirtier dust mop heads. We definitely need to install our cat door, which could be fun since it’s a little wood toned mini front door with a brass knocker! Also – we’ve painted the whole house white but this is one room where I could see us doing a different color just to switch it up. The white walls make the washer/dryer stand out, and I think it’d be fun to make this room a little darker just so it blends into the background more.

    Well, I hope you liked our super simple laundry room! Stick around if you want to see the more exciting parts of our home!

    Davien

  • We moved into our dream home!

    We moved into our dream home!

    Hello everybody! We finally moved into our dream home. When we started this dream of building our house, I was so excited to blog every minute of it. I thought I would have so much content! Turns out I have a lot of content, just not a lot of time or brain power!!

    Our house turned out exactly as we’d hoped. The layout is perfect and every area of our home is just easy and quick to get to. The fireplace looks amazing for how much of a budget choice it was for both the electric unit itself and our DIY laminate surround.

    The marble we picked out in March was exactly what our kitchen needed. I love that I can see it from the office while working. I was a little worried about splurging on the Sub Zero panel ready fridge and whether it’d turn out or just look like an ‘attempt’ at a designer choice, but it fit almost perfectly. There’s still a tiny gap above the fridge, but Brandon is going to put our fridge on some shims or a small platform to boost it up that last little bit.

    Our first goal for the next year is to really live in our home without trying to tackle projects on the main floor. We’ll want our money going towards paying down our mortgage and finishing our basement ourselves (DIY except for plumbing/electrical!). Finishing the basement would allow us to move our two older boys into their permanent bedrooms and move our baby into her own room (which I’ll share as a wellness/fitness room). Right now we struggle with her getting woken up when we need to access our bedroom between her and our bedtime. Finishing the basement would also cut down on the dust that our concrete floor generates and produce more livable square footage, especially for the kids.

    Next year is going to be such a fun year. One of my top personal goals will be to just blog monthly. A little monthly recap of anything done to the house or purchases that stood out. I’ll also be able to give a recap on our mortgage payoff! I think I’ll share it as a percentage going down instead of the exact dollars.

    This blog will finish off my 2024 on FlutedWoodAndMarble! See you next year!

  • Day 114 of our dream home build – the start of drywall!!

    Day 114 of our dream home build – the start of drywall!!

    Hello everyone! A lot has been done at our new house, and it’s really starting to come together. Let’s jump right into some build updates!

    First, plumbing and HVAC! From what we can tell, our plumbing is all either roughed in or ready for hook up. We have our island sink water lines poking up, all toilet flanges in place, sink/shower water lines ready to rock and roll, etc. We have a shower tub in our hall bath (yay!), but still waiting on our Onyx surround in the primary bath. I assume maybe that waits until after drywall/waterproofing?

    We also have all of our electrical done, except for Brandon’s Ethernet cable he’s working on finishing up. This means we have boxes (or circles LOL) for our outlets and lighting fixtures. Some fixtures like our island pendants and dining table light just have cords in the ceiling until we get the kitchen far enough to make sure they’ll be centered on our focal point.

    HVAC is tricky.. it seems like all floor vents are ready, but they still have the air returns to complete? They may be waiting for another step before doing that piece, I’m not really sure!

    Besides that, we have our living room patio and entry stoop poured, YAY! I love how our living room patio is zero entry. We plan to put screens on our two patio doors, that way we can prop open the doors and let in a lot of fresh air during the more mild temperatures.

    We also have our fireplace framed, woohoo! Our builder did receive our ideas for the mantel, and they have no issues with building one for us.

    Last week we got spray foam insulation! It’s in the main level of the house, the garage, and the basement. I’m excited to have a well insulated house because our current one is drafty. I thought maybe it didn’t have insulation, but Brandon said it’s probably been so long it’s just disintegrated.

    Tuesday we got some doors installed! Woohoo! Aside from our two missing basement windows, we are boxed in! We love our white sliders, although the basement and primary bedroom ones were swapped (one has blinds the other doesn’t). Our patio doors have a little less glass than we were hoping for, but they’ll be good for quite some time until we would want to replace. Finally, our front door color isn’t what we were hoping for and may be a little too orange/warm toned. However, it’s a good door and I can attempt to use Retique It liquid wood once we move in to balance out the color. Worst case scenario, someday it gets replaced. You can only go over budget in so many categories, and my dream Pinterest door is not worth it… yet!

    Finally, yesterday they got started on hanging drywall! It’s really starting to come together. I think the ceilings make it feel the most ‘real’ so far.

    We imagine drywall may be finished up by end of next week. We had our meeting last week to go over all of our remaining interior decisions. We made sure we were on the same page for paint, trim, doors, floors, closet shelving, etc! It sounds like our cabinetry will be delivered to Omaha Labor Day weekend, then it’s just a matter of scheduling when it will be delivered to our house. Yay!! We can’t wait!

    Thanks for reading!

    Davien

  • Day 84 of our dream home build – almost boxed in!

    Day 84 of our dream home build – almost boxed in!

    Hello everyone! Time has been FLYING since I’ve been back at work. I’ve got so many ideas for new posts, but I thought I should at least start with sharing some more of our house progress before we get too much further into the build. After a couple weeks of blocking and sheeting, we are now entering the more interior parts of the home update!

    Here’s a picture of what our house is looking like now:

    Notice anything different? I hope so! We have a roof, all of our windows besides two in the basement, and a poured garage floor!

    The builder’s crews are really rockstar’n on our home, and we just have a few more things needing to be completed before we’re completely boxed in! They’ll try to put our front door in as late as they can, so it doesn’t get damaged while contractors are coming in and out of the house. We still need two sliders installed, but we’re not sure if they’re waiting on finishing our deck (upstairs slider) or moving in the mechanicals (downstairs slider) beforehand. Our garage doors will likely be later on since we at least have a ‘bang door’ closing off the house. This was installed after we let our builder know about some lookie loo’s that were just exploring our house. They were nice people, but it was pretty forward of them to be exploring our home with their dog without asking. If you ever see new construction – please don’t do this without permission from the owner. New construction is EXPENSIVE (like everything nowadays), and we have to carry our own builder’s risk insurance for if anything gets damaged/stolen or someone injured while on our property. I’m so glad we live right next door to our build to keep an eye on it. That said, I love showing people around or giving them a tour, so it really is just the uninvited entry into our home that had us concerned.

    Oh, we also need our patio doors installed before we’re boxed in! We assume that will be done after the concrete living room patio is poured. It’s actually pretty neat – they’ll pour concrete over a steel sheeting instead of backfilling our patio “hole”.

    For our other deck, we picked out Fiberon ‘Sandstone’ composite decking. We were leaning towards TimberTech Weathered Oak to match our interior floors, but it was a bit out of budget and not the standard choice of our builder. We decided there are other things we’d prefer to ‘upgrade’. Note: it’s not so much an upgrade as it is paying more than our initial estimate we based our construction loan off of! We’ll also do standard white vinyl railing. Below I have a picture of the deck color we chose along with what I imagine our rail will look like:

    Fiberon

    We also had some great updates to our framing!

    Our shower bench and pony wall!
    Pocket door into our future fitness room/nursery
    Our office windows!
    Eating cake on our future private patio!

    Hmm what else! Well, today we had the plumbing and heating/cooling crew working away in the house. We also heard that our electrical walkthrough will be Thursday afternoon!! How exciting! It feels like we’ll be seeing drywall before we know it.

    Coming up, I plan to do posts about our primary and hall bath finalized designs now that our shower has been ordered and all tile has been purchased!

    But what’s crazy is my next update (since I’m not doing a good job keeping up to date), may have drywall or completed patios to post about!!

    Thanks for reading!

    Davien

  • How we’re saving or staying in budget with the new house!

    How we’re saving or staying in budget with the new house!

    I think I scare my husband when he sees me making a spreadsheet or typing in my phone calculator because he knows I’m trying to reel us in or save some dollars. We have a huge goal to A. build our dream house and B. Pay it off asap so we can live without worry or stress about paying for our shelter. Once we have A. and B. done, it frees us up to do all of our little projects that we have planned to make our dream home one of a kind, achieve our goal of renovating a home here in Corning, or investing in our community now that we’re really planting down our roots. Remembering our goals makes it easier to decide where we can cut costs and stay in budget with our new build!

    Exterior

    We went with a pretty basic exterior. Our house is basically a big box and only has LP siding (although we did horizontal and vertical for some contrast). Ask Brandon, I would’ve loved to have an all brick house or some natural stone that made our new house look ancient. However, we don’t leave our house often and it’s not on the main drag. We decided to prioritize the inside of the house as much as possible. So while we’re using quality materials, we went with the standard options that were used by our builder. With this, we also went with a composite deck brand they recommend and their standard white vinyl railing even though someday I plan to have us replace it with a black rail and either glass or vertical cables.

    We also aren’t including any extra landscaping besides potentially backfilling around our living room patio to avoid needing stairs/railing. Any grass, flowers, or trees will come from our own budget after construction is complete!

    Bathroom basics

    After much debate, we decided to go with standard toilets even though we were itching for a more expensive skirted model that’s easier to clean. At least for the cleaning aspect – we can have the kids clean the toilets if they want chore money! We also went with a basic shower tub surround in the hall bath and an Onyx shower system in the primary bath. Both will be durable, last for years, and more importantly, were cheaper than doing tile.

    Lighting

    You know, I think we’ll end up in budget for lighting which is very surprising for me! We decided to go with just standard flush mount lights in our office and bedrooms. I was originally planning on ceiling fans, but we’ve lived without them for a few years now, and having the air on or windows open is enough to feel cool. Also, I hate cleaning them, and they can’t be good for my dust allergy if they’re not being cleaned. And I know boob lights have been getting a lot of hate lately, but IMO not every light needs to be a “moment”, sometimes you just want them to blend into the background and let other things take the spotlight. Saving money on our main lighting allowed us to splurge on accent lighting. We’ll have nice sconces in our primary bath and entry, and also a nice vanity light in our hall bath. I plan on being happy with our lighting choices while we’re paying off the mortgage, BUT this is an area of the home that is super easy to upgrade later on. Plus, you could give your old lighting to a Habitat Restore or other donation center!

    Window treatments

    LOL! I don’t know why curtains are the area that I just can’t bring myself to spend money. I think it’s because if I can’t splurge and get super high quality curtains/drapes/shades that I see in these million dollar homes, then I want the cheapest option that doesn’t look like trash. We’ve actually lived without curtains for quite some time, but I know the kids’ bedrooms will need curtains for sleeping, and we’ll also want curtains in our office to reduce glare on our monitors. In our primary bathroom, we have large windows that will need cafe curtains so you don’t see anyone using the toilet.

    Alright, back to how I plan to save money on this line item.. We recently tested out a pretty brass Amazon curtain rod that’s about $30. Then for curtains, hear me out, I tested out this curtain hack where you just use a flat sheet! All you have to do is cut the seam on each side of the top hem (or if like me, you don’t know how to do that, just cut a hole as close to the edge as possible) and slip it on your rail! You could also use curtain clips, but I wanted to test out this way first since it doesn’t involve spending extra money on clips. Our main windows are 5′ x 5′, so we need two twin flat sheets per window. I think total, we should be at about $50/main window for window treatments. Then for our cafe curtains, I plan to learn how to sew a hem and use either fabric by the yard or maybe thrifted fabric since less material is needed. Of course down the road, this will be a potential upgrade candidate, but for now, there are so many other things I want to spend money on than curtains!

    Wall treatments

    We paid a little extra for smooth walls, but otherwise we won’t have any fancy wall details. Any shiplap, molding, or wall texture will be done on a room by room basis when we have the time or money to do so. We’re also just using white paint everywhere, but that was more to save us mental energy than money since it’s only $50 per additional color.

    The basement

    Not finishing the basement right away is our #1 cost saver. Without this choice, we would not have been able to build our house this year. That said, finishing the basement is also our top priority once we get the house paid off. Waiting until we’re mortgage free again will allow us to splurge where we want and be really intentional about what we want down there.

    I hope you enjoyed reading about what standard or cost saving options we chose for the new house! Everyone will have different things in life that they find valuable, and that’s what makes personal finance and building a home such an individual experience.

    Thanks for reading!

    Davien

  • Finalizing our Kitchen Design!

    Finalizing our Kitchen Design!

    Hey everyone!! Things are moving along nicely at our new house, and it’s so crazy to think that in three months or so, we will likely have our marble island we’ve been dreaming about!!

    This week we heard back on what we were looking at for overages with our cabinets, countertops, and plumbing fixtures. For what we’re getting, it was a very reasonable amount, so we said let’s do it! Now that we’re at the point of no return (cabinets are being ordered!), I’m ready to share our final kitchen design!

    You may remember a previous post about my Dream Kitchen Design, and you’ll see that not much has changed aside from narrowing down specifics!

    Walls and flooring

    Our wall color will be a Valspar color match to Benjamin Moore Chantilly Lace throughout the entire house, including the kitchen. We did want the Benjamin Moore brand, but our builder said they’d be able save money by color matching with Valspar, and that it’ll look the same. I’m a little nervous, but we’re going to trust them! Our kitchen hood will just be a drywalled box that hides the vent. It’s a simple design for our kitchen, but it’ll be a nice base if we ever want to spice it up down the road. For our flooring, we’re 99% sure we’ll go with Malibu Wide Plank Engineered Hardwood from Home Depot, the La Playa color. Just like the wall color, this will be carried throughout the entire house (minus laundry room and hall bath).

    Cabinets and countertops

    Our cabinets will all be from CKF (CKF 360 Signature line), in the Summit door style.

    CKF

    For the kitchen, our built in wall cabinets will be the same white as our walls. Our island will have white reeding on the side facing the living/dining room, and Tricorn Black cabinets facing the range. All other perimeter cabinets will be Tricorn Black.

    Our waterfall island countertop is CONFIRMED (YAY!) as white venatino marble!!

    Our perimeter countertops will be Wilsonart Black Alicante with a pencil edge and no backsplash to start. After we move in we plan to build a tall ‘slab’ backsplash from the same laminate with a small ledge at the top. You can see this design in the kitchen render.

    Plumbing

    Our kitchen sink is the Kohler Whitehaven sink with the tall apron. We landed on the 35″ size.

    Build.com

    Our faucet will be the Kraus Oletto in Spot Free Antique Champagne Brass. We’ll get the matching soap dispenser and air switch for this too.

    Build.com
    Build.com
    Build.com

    Lighting and hardware

    We’ll have three pendants over the island:

    Modefinity.com

    We’ll do a mix of Pennington pulls and Brookline knobs from Top Knobs for our cabinetry. We’ll do the knobs in matte black on the island and the lower parts of our tall black cabinets. For the perimeter base cabinets and upper portion of the tall black cabinets, we’ll do the black 12″ Pennington pulls. For the fridge, we’ll have two honey bronze 24″ Pennington pulls. Then we’ll use the honey bronze 12″ Pennington pulls for the other white wall cabinets. The small cabinets near the ceiling will be honey bronze for the white cabinets and matte black for the black cabinets. Here are the various pulls/knobs we’re using!

    Wayfair
    Wayfair
    Wayfair
    Wayfair
    Wayfair

    Appliances

    For our fridge/freezer, we’re going with a 36″ Subzero Integrated model that allows for cabinetry panels. The top is all fridge space, with two freezer drawers below. There were a few reasons for us picking this specific fridge/freezer. For one, it’s cabinet depth and allows for seamless paneling. We also tested it out at Nebraska Furniture Mart, and compared to other models, the look and feel just seemed nice. We’ve also read many reviews about how it keeps food/produce fresh and helps them last longer. With our local grocery store being a little sketch when it comes to produce, this was an important feature since we only go out of town for groceries 1-2 times a month. Finally, reviews also say that this brand of fridge/freezers lasts a long time, like 20+ years! Due to the depth though, it will be a bit less space than we’re used to. We plan to keep our current fridge/freezer in the garage to help with any overflow!

    Subzero-wolf

    For our range, we’re going to be purchasing a 30″ stainless steel Cafe Dual-Fuel range with a double oven. We currently have an electric range, and I know Brandon’s excited to cook with gas. It’ll be nice to have the two ovens available for when we’re cooking real chicken and my vegan chicken. I’m also excited to not have to clean up burnt food from a glass cooktop!

    Build.com

    For our dishwasher, we decided to go with a stainless steel Cafe dishwasher with drawers! This will be perfect for those days when you want to run a load of dishes after lunch, have some bottles to wash, or when Brandon and I are empty nesters someday!

    Build.com

    Our microwave will just be our current one. It works fine, so no need to purchase a new one! We plan on just putting it in our pantry.

    Here’s our overall mood board for the kitchen! What’s not shown is any small accessories we put in with towels, cafe curtains, rugs, etc. I think this will be my last kitchen design post until it’s here in real life! Of course, as we see progress in the new house, it’ll still be included in my update posts. I can’t wait to also show our cabinet organization/layout down the road! I’m positive we’ll be all moved in by the end of this fall!

    Thanks for reading! Stay tuned for some more house progress pictures next week – I’m waiting for the current major milestone to complete before giving my update!

    Davien

  • Day 50 of our dream home build – framing/flooring update and marble galore!

    Day 50 of our dream home build – framing/flooring update and marble galore!

    Hello!! We are in a very exciting part of our build. We have our floors and walls!

    I was just going to include the framing in my update, but I realized my last update had a dirt basement floor. On May 29th, we had our concrete slab poured. What great progress for the first month of our build!

    PSST! That brown house in the back is our current house!

    The framing process has gone lightning quick. On June 6th, we left our house to go look at countertop slabs in Omaha. When we came back later that night, we saw ALL of our exterior basement walls up! It was so cool to have to walk through a doorway and see how big our basement windows would be.

    Our view into the house from the downstairs slider.
    Looking down into the basement from the garage.

    That next day, June 7th, our interior load bearing or otherwise necessary walls were up! We’re not finishing the basement right away, so this is how it’ll look until we finish our framing in the next few years.

    Taken from our bedroom window!

    We had a little bit of a waiting game for our floor trusses. They arrived on June 12th, and the crew got started with putting them up!

    The next day, we had to go to DSM for our dentist appointments. When we came home that night, the floor trusses were all setup AND we had our stairs!! This was such an exciting part. Hands down, the stairs made it feel like a home even though they led to an unwalkable part of the house!

    Friday, June 14th, the crew got to work on our upstairs subfloor. This was an exciting milestone because we could finally ‘tour’ our main floor without having to remind ourselves or whoever else that it was actually upstairs!

    How the ceiling looks from the basement.
    What half of our house’s views will look like. Living in the treetops!
    This is our 20’ patio off our bedroom! It’s on top of the downstairs bedrooms instead of jutting out from the house, which will make it more private and quiet.

    This past Monday, June 19th, I went back to work and our baby started daycare. Being away from the window (we work in our basement) made the progress seem so much faster! This was the day that the rest of our subfloor got put down and our exterior main floor walls went up!

    Office, entry, garage!

    And finally, our most recent updates! Our interior walls and garage walls were put in place yesterday and our top plates installed. It seems like the next step will be our roof unless there’s more to do on the subfloor or if windows/exterior doors would need to be installed first.

    Back of the house
    Our new office!
    Patio doors flanking the fireplace! The patio isn’t poured yet, but it’ll be 18’x12’.

    We also met with our kitchen designer a couple weeks ago. I think we landed on a good plan, with just slight changes here and there. We’re currently waiting to hear back on our cabinetry/countertop quotes. Our cabinetry estimate was created with framed cabinets, so there will be an upcharge to switching to frameless (more storage space!). We also wanted a tall skinny cabinet with a pullout for cans, appliance panels for our fridge, and some hidden drawers which will increase the cost. I think I’ll do a separate post for our final kitchen design including cabinetry, appliances, hardware, etc once we have all our decisions 100% done.

    Speaking of the kitchen, we recently had the day I’d been most excited for — countertop slab day! The day we got to officially pick out slabs for our island and put them on hold. We’ve looked at slabs many times, but always just browsing. We saw some awesome ones at Midwest Marble Tile and Granite (Midwest Marble from now on) in Omaha back in March, but we didn’t have a build contract at that point. Once we had our kitchen design meeting, our builder wanted us to look at slabs to see where we were falling within our countertop estimate. We looked at Midwest Marble in Des Moines and found some White Venatino slabs that were nice, but wanted to keep looking. I put some on hold in Omaha ahead of our trip there, just to get the estimate process going. When we went to look, we were a little unimpressed with the ones I’d put on hold and much preferred the ones that were still there from March. Unfortunately those were already claimed, but we had a couple other places to check out. Those places were a little lacking when it came to marble options, but we asked Midwest Marble to show us the second slab we had on hold before we 100% committed.

    “Unfortunately” the second slab had a big stain from how it was stored. My wonderful husband asked if there were any like the unavailable ones we liked better, and the manager did a bit of research. After finding out the slabs from March had been on hold for a while, he called the fabricator that had been listed and lo and behold, they were no longer needed! We could not have been more excited about those slabs freeing up! We put them on hold and immediately emailed our builder that we found our dream slabs!

    Moving on from our kitchen island, we recently bought our laundry room and hall bath flooring from Floor and Decor! Our laundry tile we’ve actually had picked out for over a year. Imagine our surprise when we’re killing time at Floor and Decor and find it discounted $2/sq ft and about to be discontinued! Of course this was the perfect opportunity to buy all of our pieces!

    Here’s a picture of what it looks like! There’s a ton of variation, so I was practicing laying them out in the order I’d like. There’s also a piece of our engineered wood flooring to visualize how they’ll look next to each other.

    We also decided to just go ahead and buy our hall bath flooring too! This is more of a creamy marble. We’re both so excited for this one!

    Well, that’s all of our new house updates so far! I can’t believe that next time I do a house update, it’ll most likely either be boxed in or we’ll know more about our final kitchen/bath designs!

    Thanks for reading!

    Davien