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.  

The Elizabeth

One of the reasons this process seemed to be accelerated for us is because of our floor plan the Elizabeth.  We knew this was our ideal plan, however the day we visited Potomac Shores, there was only one site that could fit our floor plan.  So if we wanted this house, we pretty much had to decide within the week after reserving the lot.   Our lot does have a premium, and we weren't thrilled about that, but in the end we think we will be very happy!

In the end we were deciding between this floor plan and the Berkeley, initially, because we wanted the options of a media room and a porch off of the master bedroom.  In the end, our lot did not allow the 4' extension which would in turn allow the additional porch, so that option didn't matter as much. Because we knew we wanted/needed a home office, and the Elizabeth has the back library which we thought would be perfect for that.

Many of the other floor plans had little problems that ruled them out (wall oven addition takes away the pantry, no formal dining room) so we knew this was the layout for us!

The floor plan is linked to at the start of this post, and really can be accessed from any blog post.  As it is not currently offered by Ryan the floor plan is quite hard to find on the internet!