The New House: Exterior and First Floor

I showed you a few pictures of the model home we're building last week. Here are the rest of the pictures and all of the details.

The hardest part of the entire process was choosing an exterior. The house we chose has four different exterior options and we considered three of them. The model has a front porch elevation and it's the one we originally decided on.

But, then we saw this stucco and stone elevation.

I have always wanted either a stucco Mediterranean or a French country home. I got a bit of both with this house. But...there's always a but. When we went to choose the stone and stucco combination I found out we could only choose certain color schemes. I had planned on a darker stucco with light stone. The only stucco colors they offered were a variation of white. As you know I love white, but I started to get nervous about maintenance of white stucco in the area we live in. So, we made a spur of the moment decision to switch back to brick. Instead of the front porch house, I decided to go with a third option. This is the house!

The stone will be the same color and the brick is a similar brown. The entryway will be arched instead of rounded so you will be able to see the front doors better. Yes, doors! We are going to have double doors! I can't tell you how excited I am about having double front doors. I'm already imagining double wreaths at Christmas and throwing both doors open on moving day.

There are a few decisions I've made that I'm not too sure about and the biggest one is not getting the stucco and stone exterior. It's way too late to change my mind now and I don't know if I really want to either. It's such a hard choice!

Now, on to the interior. I really like the layout of this house and can't say I would change much. I love the high ceilings and arched doorways, too.

I'm excited to have a good sized breakfast room to comfortably fit all five of us.

That one little transom window on the left wall drives me crazy! I was hoping to add one on each side, but I was told the porch outside makes it very expensive to move braces (or something like that).

The kitchen is going to look completely different. I was excited to find out a larger vent hood was an option. I'm also going to have cabinets all the way up to the ceiling since we added small glass front cabinets on top of the uppers.

There will be some fun wine drinking nights in front of the fire!

The master is huge compared to what we are used to in our current house. I think my furniture is going to look like it was made for a doll house.

Separate vanities aka no more whiskers in my sink.

This closet is insane! It could be a sixth bedroom. I'm going to have to shop more to fill it up.

Guest Bedroom

That's the exterior and the first floor. All three boys will be upstairs and I can't tell you how happy I am to be on a different floor now that they are getting older.  Each of them will have their own bathroom, too. I'm not so sure that's a good thing...because boys. There's also a gameroom and a media room upstairs. This house is big! The funny thing is that my husband and I are already talking about when we sell it in 10-15 years to buy a small condo in Florida. It will be great for our family in the meantime. When I get overwhelmed in this house I'll remind myself that Florida is just around the corner. It's a trade off for these wrinkles, right?!