Our completed kitchen...

Used Sapphire Blue Granite, which is mostly black with some brown and gray/blue areas throughout.    Had to have the farmhouse sink / apron front sink / farm sink (people call it by different names).  Wanted it to be a corner sink, which turned out to be a bit of a pain for the person designing the cabinets, but it turned out beautiful...many thanks to Bryant Herring / Herring Cabinets for sticking with the corner sink plan and making it work.  Cabinets done in Benjamin Moore Swiss Coffee...thanks again Bryant for giving me free rein on choosing my cabinet colors.  Gray glaze hand painted onto the cabinets.  Gray tile backsplash.  Blue deco.  GE stainless steel appliances....including our first ever convection oven and microwave.  Nicest kitchen we've ever had.  Check out the final product...

House Closing...Finally

We finally closed on our house yesterday...yay!  It was a crazy race waiting for final numbers, finding the bank closest to the attorney's office while waiting for the numbers so I could rush in there and get a certified check.  Twenty minutes before closing, got a call from the lender with an approximate number, so had to just get a certified check in that amount.  Then rush to the attorney's office.  Sign my life away (again).  Mike was out of town, so he had to sign a Power of Attorney the evening before so I could sign for him...that means I had to sign my signature, plus his name and my signature again and so on....felt like 100's of times.  Then write a personal check for the actual difference between the estimated amount and the actual amount owed (around $500 difference).  So glad to have that over with.  Home sweet home...

Cabinets for the new house - #whitekitchencabinets

Cabinets...seems like an easy thing to choose.  Not so much.  We went through four different cabinet makers before finding the perfect one.  The perfect one had the right combination of quality and price.  Andrew (builder) is very concerned that all aspects of his houses are very good quality and he insists on getting the best price for his clients. I honestly thought I would lose my mind by the time we got to the "right" cabinet maker...but I kept going through the process because I knew Andrew was looking out for our best interests.  In the end, we went with #BryantHerring (#HerringCabinet) out of Clinton, NC.  He did a great job...beautiful cabinets at a great price...and he did them exactly like I wanted.  Bryant is very laid back and easy to work with.  I was able to pick out the exact paint I wanted (lots of research time spent on #Houzz.com looking at other people's white/off-white cabinets).  Instead of #glazing the entire face of the cabinets with the gray I wanted, which would have changed the base color of the cabinet, he brush painted the glaze along the corners/lines/etc. He really cares about his product.  Our cabinets included 4 pull-out drawers, a sorting shelf (for flat sheets/pans), and a pull-out with 2 garbage cans (1 for garbage, 1 for recycling).

We went with dark stained wood for the master bathroom...

Oops...mistakes happen

Had to make a decision on porch steps.  Wanted them to be stone.  Apparently you can't use the man-made stone like on the side of the house because it is not made to withstand foot traffic over the long haul.  So off to try to match something up...final decision ended up being made by me over the phone with the stone company...major mistake...this was the result:

It was worse than it looks in the pictures. I'm sure the neighbors were thrilled that we decided to suck it up and pay for a change order to redo them to a different color.

Farmhouse Sink / Apron Front Sink...So Cool!!!

I've never had a farmhouse sink before, and hadn't even thought about wanting one until after we started building.  My husband saw a picture of one somewhere and said he liked it, so I started looking at them online and realized I thought they were pretty neat, too.  Our builder had never put one in before...he said it was tremendously heavy.  I think it has turned out great.  Please forgive the dust...should be all clean and ready to close in another week or two, but for now it is hard to realize how pretty everything is with all the dust on the countertops.  Although impossible to tell right now, the granite countertops are actually mostly black (with some brown and gray/blue).

Sheetrock goes up

Starting to look like a house now...

Insulation...So Fluffy

Lots of insulation in these walls...

Prayers and Scriptures on Floors and Walls

I took the kids to the house and set them loose to write their favorite bible verses and prayers wherever they wanted.  They  loved it!  I also let them go crazy and draw and write all kinds of other things...thanks to the "Minecraft" craze, there are "Creepers" all over the place :-)

Mandy Parkerhttps://plus.google.com/1092877689111317490680

Choosing wall tile

Time for the fun stuff...picking out tile for kitchen and bathrooms.  Watch out for cost surprises.  The deco on the wall in the kitchen ended up costing us an extra $100 just for shipping because it came from across the country.

Kitchen tile decision...

And how it turned out...

Master bath tile decision...

And how it turned out...

Tile for Reese's bathroom...

And how it turned out...

Tile for Caleb's bathroom (except we went with a different deco shape)...

And how it turned out...

We have walls...sort of

Okay, so I procrastinated way too long and didn't start this blog when we started the building process, as I had planned.  However, I still want to document the journey we have been on, so I'm going to reach back into my memory banks and the old pictures to try to show you what we've experienced through this custom home building process.  I must say I was really excited to start this process...how great that I would get to customize everything to be the way I wanted.  Oh, yeah, I forgot you need to have unlimited funds in order to truly get things just the way you want them.  We realized this after our first house choice was designed and drawn up, just to find out that the build cost was going to be too much for our budget...back to the drawing board onto choosing another house design.  We finally settled on a plan that we liked and was within our budget...well, sort of.  Here are some pictures of when the framing went up:

This corner fireplace has been a nightmare for my builder due to logistical complications.  You could tell, though, that once we got through all the issues, it was going to look so great.

More framing pictures...

Bonus room...

Loft...

Master bath...

Breakfast/dining room...

Kitchen...

Screen porch...