New Build Progress: Part I

It’s hard to believe, but it has already been about five months since I shared that Kurtis and I are moving and building again (and almost eleven months since we signed the contract)! I’ve included a lot of progress details in my Weekend Recaps since that point, but I haven’t ever dug more into the details in a dedicated post. I know it’s more difficult to find any info you may be looking for related to the build if it’s spread out all over random posts. Today I’m going to share more about the house itself, and will include a few progress pics along the way, now that it is mostly buttoned up from the outdoors.

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If you missed that we’re building (only a street away!), I’d encourage you to check out this announcement post. I go into a lot of the backstory and details as to why we chose to move again. I won’t duplicate all of that here in an effort to keep this post as concise as possible.

I’m eager to start sharing some design plans and moodboards with all of you, but know I needed to get this (rather long) post completed first. So let’s jump into it!

Floorplan

I’ve had a lot of requests to share our blueprints and actual floorplans. That is not something I’m comfortable sharing for a number of reasons, but I also want to respect the copyrights of architects and builders. However, I’m happy to share general info and then a video tour of the floorplan once we’re further along.

I mentioned it here, but I’ll say time and time again, this is one of my favorite floorplans ever. It makes such great use of every nook and cranny and the flow is so great. Overall, we’ll have the same number of bedrooms, office spaces, etc. as our current home. We’ll be losing the loft (our second TV area) but that really isn’t a priority for us. Each room is slightly bigger and laid out better for how we live. We’ll also be adding a dedicated mudroom (which also provides interior carriage house access) and then our laundry room and pantry, which will be connected, will be separate. The carriage house is almost identical in terms of square footage, but will have a laundry closet which will be nice for our guests to have! But that also shrinks the carriage house bathroom and bedroom size a bit. We’ll also have a few more storage closets, and more importantly, garage stalls! Plus we’ll have one extra (and not really necessary, to be honest) bathroom in the form of a pool bath that can only be accessed from outside.

The biggest changes really come down to layout, a bit more breathing room, storage, a unique back covered porch, and the garage space!

We have a few pain points in our current home (which I address more here). Probably the biggest of which is that we are using the intended primary bedroom as my office, but we still use the adjoining bathroom and closet to get ready. We then sleep in an upstairs secondary bedroom. Most people love first floor bedrooms (especially in Florida) but we are not those people. Add on the fact I receive an inordinate amount of packages on a weekly basis and it makes sense for us to have my office in the space. One of our favorite features of our new home is that it has an upstairs primary suite, but also a smaller version on the first floor – which will be the perfect office for me! Now I’ll have a closet for products and I won’t be living in constant chaos. And, we’ll now be able to sleep in the same space where we get ready! Down the road for resale, the new owners could decide which floor they prefer so it offers a lot of flexibility in that regard.

Since moving to Florida, we have loved back porch life (or the catio as we call it often). We love our back screened-in porch now, but we’re so excited to be gaining a fireplace! Our outdoor fireplace is currently in the cabana which isn’t connected to the porch so we’ve never used it. I see our new one being used often!

We are also incredibly excited to gain a mud room! The space also serves as the staircase up to the carriage house, so we love that our friends and family won’t have to go outside any longer to get up to their space. Currently, our kitchen acts as our mudroom and I hate that we dump all our shoes at the door there. Kurtis legit wears three different pairs of shoes a day (four if we go to the beach) so it all adds up. We still need to figure out the best solution for storage in the new mudroom but I’ll save that post for another day.

As much as I love the floorplan, the one feature I don’t love is the fact the dining room is part of an open concept area, sandwiched between the kitchen and living room. It’s not my favorite, but is very workable since we love every single other aspect.

Our builder, Dune Construction, builds a lot of their houses down at the beach. With that, it’s not uncommon to have elevators because kitchens and living areas are often on upper levels for the views. So, our house includes an elevator shaft (but not the elevator without a $30k-ish upcharge). It’s a great feature to have, especially in Florida with an older population. For now, our spaces will be closets, but it’s great that the infrastructure is there if we ever had a need for an elevator in the future!

I’m really excited for our new bedroom space, as well. The bedroom portion is in the front of the house and overlooks the forest, and the back has a really beautiful view of the pond at the golf course. Since it’s all one long, narrow room, spanning the full depth of the house, it gets really beautiful light from three directions!

Right now we have a two car garage which is plenty, but Kurtis uses one stall as his gym (since we don’t have basements here) which also is shared by our golf cart. We can only park one car in our garage because of this. We’re so excited to park both cars, have a spot for the golf cart, and Kurtis gets his gym in the form of a standalone garage! This is definitely one of the benefits of having your garage and driveway at the front of your house versus in the very back like we have now.

This is also probably a good time to point out that Kurtis is the only one over budget currently. I’m (shockingly) well under my allowances so far. Kurtis….is not. But, he’s dreamed of a home gym like this for ages, so I’m really excited for him! The front will have a standard garage door and the back has a Eurowall folding door so he can open it up when weather permits. But the extra light is amazing, regardless! He also decided at the last minute to add a mini-split to the space so it can be somewhat climate controlled.

We will also have a pool at the new house. It might end up being a little larger than our current one, but if so only by a foot or two each direction. Our new backyard will be wider than our current one, but by removing the carriage house/garage and having that in the front, it feels dramatically larger. Which honestly still isn’t that large, but we’ll have more greenspace than we do now, which I’m really excited for!

I think it will be easier to share more about the floorplan and spaces once the drywall goes up and the spaces are more clearly defined. They’re almost wrapped up with siding work and the roof shingles were delivered yesterday! So I imagine once those are installed, they’ll insulate shortly after and get the drywall up!

Finishes and Selections

As mentioned previously, our new home is not custom. However, the builder is allowing us to make quite a few finish selections as well as a few changes to better accommodate us (and to make our home look different than our friends’)! With the purchase of the home, we essentially negotiated a flat rate for the lot/house/pool/landscaping/finishes/etc. so we knew the full price from day one, rather than a cost-plus model that some builders use. With that, the builder has given us allowances to use for the various finishes and selections throughout the home. Builder allowances can commonly be a source of contention with homeowners, so if you’re set up under a similar model, be sure to look at your allowances closely! Thankfully, we feel our builder offered very reasonable allowances that we can stick to for the most part.

So far, we completely finalized plumbing selections, have likely finalized our hardwood flooring, and are very close to finalizing our tile selections. We still need to meet with the cabinet maker to go through those plans (we have their suggested plans but have the ability to pay the difference for changes). We’ll also need to finalize our appliances and light fixtures within the next month, as well, to avoid any backorder issues.

With so many selections available, I have definitely reached the analysis paralysis stage of the building process. Unfortunately I just like so many things, it’s hard to make sure everything is cohesive for an entire home! I basically have four distinct houses being built in my mind. Ha! But overall, we want the home to still have a coastal vibe, but we are also focusing on timeless and more classic pieces to mix in. There will be some traditional elements popping up too. Basically just a more mature version of my style from years past. Kurtis will almost be 50 by the time we move in, after all 😉

Following are some of the selections we’ve made so far.

Plumbing Fixtures

The plumbing fixtures, surprisingly, were the very first items we had to finalize. Specifically the shower and bath hardware since those fixtures need to go in the walls during the framing stage.

We worked with WinSupply, at our builder’s request, and they were incredibly helpful and we had everything narrowed down after one visit!

I knew I wanted polished nickel going into the meeting. For me, it is the most timeless option, and I didn’t want to get stuck later trying to match various brass/gold tones since those can get tricky.

I really wanted a bridge faucet, but Kurtis hated the idea of a separate sprayer (which most have). But we found this beautiful option from Delta that has an integrated sprayer but still offers the bridge look, so it was an easy decision for us!

In our carriage house, butler’s pantry and laundry room, we also needed a faucet. In the first image below, we had narrowed it down, but I love the more arched neck on this faucet. It was also really cost-effective and looked very similar in style to our kitchen faucet. The second image below shows the faucet we selected for some of the secondary bathrooms. It looks incredibly similar to some of the Studio McGee x Kohler products as well as some from Brizo, but was significantly more affordable. It also still had a really great weight to it. I’m not a label snob when it comes to selections like this, particularly if the brand is reliable from a functionality standpoint!

In our bathroom, we opted for the Brizo Invari line and then the Brizo Rook collection for the shower (on the right below). It was definitely more of a splurge, but since these are fixtures we use daily, this is where we preferred to spend more of our allowance.

We’re really excited with all of our plumbing selections and can’t wait to see them all get installed!

Hardwood Floors

When it came to the hardwood floors specifically, I know pretty quickly what I like and what I don’t. So, when our rep at 8Five0 Tile suggested this white oak hardwood flooring (and showed a few stain samples), we committed pretty quickly when we heard it would be within budget. It’s the D&M Flooring Silver Oak French White Oak flooring. They said it’s one of their most popular floors and holds up well to our specific elements. So, it was a fairly easy decision. We went back and forth between the Whisper stain and the Lotus stain. We ultimately preferred the Lotus because it was slightly less red. It’s an 8″ white oak engineered hardwood, similar to what we have currently (the background in the next two pics) but in a slightly wider width. I like that you can see some of the grain and character.

Here we have them on Rachel’s floors when her home was still under construction. The one we’re going with, Lotus, is the one on the right.

Tile Selections

We had what we *think* is our last tile meeting on Friday. That may change once we receive the actual bid this week 😉 It took me a few months to get there, but I’m glad I started the planning process early so I could really think everything through. We had three total appointments (the first of which I went to by myself to narrow things down without Kurtis) and I’m feeling pretty confident in 99% of our selections! The below image was from our second meeting, but we’ve already changed quite a bit since!

For the most part, I want to keep things very classic and timeless. But we have a few fun options thrown in, as well. The carriage house bath is one of those places. We’ll be doing the star tile on the floor (but in the tan and white colorway so it has less contrast), Cloe subway tile shower walls (I love the color variations from tile to tile), and this fun bubble mini hex tile on the shower floor. Kurtis and I kept rubbing our hands over it because it has such a cool texture!

Below you can see the pool bath tile in the center (the large linen texture for the floors, clover penny tiles for the shower floor, and white and blue subways for the shower). We’ll be doing five or six rows of white tiles (depending on how the math works out) for every one row of blue tiles so it doesn’t feel too busy. Ignore the “Bath 4” label below. That was the old version of the carriage house and we much prefer the combo above.

I had to laugh because I kept telling the folks at the tile store I hated the thought of a lot of grout lines, but I also don’t love oversized tile. They were like “you do realize it’s one or the other, right?”. Ha! Yes, I know, but a girl can dream 😉

Exterior Paint Colors

I’ll do a dedicated post on how we narrowed down our paint color choices, but let’s just say we tested a lot. I could probably singlehandedly keep Samplize in business. Ha! I shared the below image to show just how important it is to test exterior paint at different times of day and lighting conditions. It’s wild how much they can vary!

Our top two contenders were the one on the top right in the image below (BM Coastal Fog) and the bottom left (BM French Canvas).

Our builder put a large sample of each up with SW Pure White on the trim so we could see it in “real life”. We still really like both options, but ultimately decided on the BM French Canvas (the color on the right, below). I’m guessing they’ll be painting soon, as well! The shingle color we opted for is called Weathered Wood from GAF.

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