Guardian Appointment

For those who are not indoctrinated into the Ryan Blog-verse, the Guardian appointment is the time you decide where you place the wiring of your house.  This does not include the electricity, but outlets and things can be effected by your choices.

We decided early on that if we were going to have our TVs mounted in certain areas, and we would rather have those pre-wired than to go back and change them.   If we change our minds on the locations, we will have to put nice artwork there!

Guardian offers so many options for wiring, some were not things we were considering, like the house-wide vacuum system.  It looked cool, but it just didn't seem necessary!   We also passed on the house audio system they offered.   If you have been in a model home recently, they have a multi-zone audio system installed, and it's pretty cool honestly.  It obviously is not a free feature, so I am guessing most people do not install one.  We seriously considered it, but I will say Guardian was really honest about when a system like that would be used and we thought it didn't meet our needs exactly.

To expand upon that, when you buy these sort of packages, you relinquish a certain level of control.  For example, they offered 3 types of speakers that they would install, which I do think were reasonable priced, but that means you cannot shop around for other options, and there are a lot of speaker brands out there!   The same with the house-wide audio system.  If we both listened to a lot of music or NPR while we were moving about the house, that would be ideal in my opinion.  The same song or show would be playing and you wouldn't need to deal with an iPod and headphone cords everywhere...but we were installing speakers and things more for movie and sports watching, so playing the same thing through multiple zones in the house didn't seem like something we were ever going to do at least not very often.

So we ended up getting pre-wire in several areas of the house, and we will install the speakers over time.  We also liked this option, because it did not make a whole lot of sense to wrap things like that into a mortgage.  Guardian was helpful with us being creative on how we want to use certain areas of the house, and we ended up having a lot of pre-wired areas.   In the end we think we won't regret that, but in this era with so many wireless options it did give us pause!    We did have a lot of data lines installed for smart tvs, since we know now that the Roku we have that is wired is much more reliable than the wireless one.  In the end if we don't use it it won't be the end of the world.  We really only have one data port in the home office as we expect to use our devices wirelessly most of the time.

If anyone is going through this process too, let me know what you decided to do!  I felt like this was the hardest decision given how fast technology changes.

Flooring and Tile!

This was the meeting I was the most excited about, finalizing our flooring choices and tile.  Because of concerns of using up too much vacation time early on during this process, we decided to combine the flooring and wiring appointments to the same day.  I will post about our wiring appointment later, this post just focuses on the flooring meeting.

We drove out to T.A.C. flooring in Manassas, which had a great and fun showroom.   I would have loved to pick out choices for houses all day!  We got through the meeting in seemingly record time, which almost felt a little unsettling!   Right before the meeting we viewed a house model with a master bathroom that had white cabinets and we decided to change our original choice to the white cabinets that match kitchen and laundry room.  Houzz.com also helped us visualize a few things, so I recommend an account there for anyone who needs ideas.

We first started in the kitchen, and we went in there knowing the hardwood color, type and that we wanted it throughout the first floor.  So that was very easy!    We chose the Brown Bear white oak flooring to coordinate with the Rushmore Square Painted Linen cabinets and New Caledonia Granite.

Our kitchen choices!

Next we chose the master bath.    I handed the heavy lifting over to the hubby for this, because while we agreed on the look we wanted, he had a much better eye for it and could take the tile samples and really see how it would work.  I'm very excited with how it will come out!   

We also chose our kitchen backsplash.  We don't have a granite portion vertically on the walls, we will only have tile, which is nice.  I have become obsessed with the glass tiling that is cut in the shape of bricks, so that is what we chose.

This color is a tad darker than our choice, but the same size of tile.  This wall was still under construction, which is why you see the red portions!

This glass came in a ton of colors.  We chose Top Hat, the 4th from the left.   

It was hard for me to trust the process, I have such a hard time visualizing things from samples!  I am very excited to see how this comes out though!

Sorry my picture taking skills were a bit off that morning!  I forgot my real camera!

It may be a bit difficult to see, but we chose a nice dark grey tile for the floors and white tile for the walls with a glass accent to travel from the tub side through to the shower.    Our bathroom granite we chose was the Santa Cecilia Light which we both thought was beautiful and tried to use it where we could!

For the other bathrooms, we chose darker cabinets, the Wyoming Square Cherry Java with Burlywood granite.  We did the minor upgrade to tile there, picking a lighter tile with different accent glass in each shower to change it up.  Our buyer's agent said that the standard tile was actually fine, the minor upgrade we made was not that much so we don't regret our choice there at all.  It was too hard to get pictures of all of our bathroom choices, so you will just have to wait and see!

All the other bathrooms

We kept the standard carpet for the second floor and the basement, but upgraded the padding to the 8 lb. pad.   Since we plan on entertaining family and friends, we picked a darker color for the basement so it would hold up to stains better.   

Second floor carpet on the left, basement carpet on the right.

That was pretty much it.  I did realize at this meeting, that with the speed of all of our decisions, there were a ton of questions I probably didn't ask previously.  I have no idea what our pulls or knobs will look like for example.  I do think (or hope!) that I asked all of the questions that I really needed to know, and things like pulls and knobs can be replaced very easily so I'm not super concerned about minor details.

Last minute structural changes!

So a lot has happened since my last post.   I was unable to attend our 14 day structural meeting, so hubby took care of all of the heavy lifting while I was available by phone.  Our buyer's agent was there to help and I think it went very smoothly!  We tried to pick out as much as we could prior to that meeting, but there was still a lot to go over that we never even thought of.   We added pendant lighting to the kitchen and the wet bar, and a gas line rough in outdoors when we are able to build our dream outdoor kitchen!

We also picked our house colors:

Not our floor plan or elevation, but these are the colors we chose!

Everyone in the community seems to be picking the gorgeous slate blue color (our first choice!) or red houses with tan trim.  We had hoped there was a dark green option, but that was a color combination we only saw in the artist drawings on the website and Ryan confirmed that it was not an actual option.    If they ever read this, they should absolutely offer it, it was gorgeous!

We drove through the neighborhoods for inspiration, and this was the one color scheme that we both really liked.  I'm not sure the pictures we took do the scheme justice, but we are definitely happy!

There were a lot of things that were connected that I didn't know before, such as our granite in the wet bar had to match the kitchen and the cabinets in the kitchen had to match the laundry room.  There are still a ton of choices!   After looking at other bathrooms, we decided to change our initial choice of Tahoe Square Cherry Bordeaux to the Rushmore Square Painted Linen like we had in the kitchen.  We really liked the idea of a clean white look to the master bathroom.

Our Sales Associate was really good at going on the high side in estimating our options so when we made our choices, there were no surprises.  In the end we ended up so far under our estimate, I was able to add the under cabinet lighting in the kitchen!  I am very excited about that!

Options and such

During our home buying process, we debated going with an NV home instead of the Elizabeth with Ryan Homes.  We were offered a chance to look at a Remington Place II which was the original layout I had been considered with NV but in the end decided against it.   Long story short, while NV homes offers a lot of the options to the Ryan homes as standard features in their homes, what Ryan homes was offering the weekend we visited was very hard to beat.  We could have our dream home with just about everything we wanted in the Elizabeth, or get an NV home for more money with less finishes.  I'm not sure it would always work out that way, but it did the weekend we reserved our lot.

I am not going to list everything here, but what we did decide to add was:

• Finished Rec Room (free upgrade, community standard)
• Optional Porch off of the Morning Room (free upgrade)
• Jack and Jill bathroom on the 2nd floor (I wanted a bigger closet!)
• Media Room
• Bedroom in Basement (free upgrade)
• Wet bar

What we decided against:

• 4' Extension to the house (Our building line would not allow it)
• 1st floor bedroom
•  We had enough bedrooms in this thing!  We also knew we wanted to use that room as a home office.
• Covered porch off the grand room (We want to put a deck there).
• Tray ceiling in the dining room
• French doors off of the front porch (We figured the doors limit the size of a dining room table)

As I said, this isn't an all inclusive list, but probably highlights the big decisions.