I may be wrong, but I grout it!

In one of our periodic visits to the house, we noticed that the listello (I had no idea what that was before we started building a house by the way!) in one bathroom was not what we picked.  For me it was a very obvious thing, knowing my style and taste, there was no way that this is something we included.

Going back to our tile selection, we definitely put more effort into the master bath than any other bathroom.  We upgraded the tile on the floors in the other bathrooms, but went with pretty standard choices as we were kind of tired of paying for upgrades!   On one visit we saw they had installed almost all of our tile since our last visit, and I immediately questioned what I saw here:

Uh....no.

No offense to anyone who has used this listello, but anyone who knows me I like symmetrical things, and this isn't really my style.  We informed our PM of the situation, after contacting T.A.C., he reported they claimed everything was correct, but they were sending out a field crew to take a look.  Now, I kind of thought that was silly at the time, wouldn't you confirm it was correct after the crew inspected the situation?

I of course had *no* photos of our bathroom choices in anything but the master.  I thought I took pictures of everything, but I apparently missed this one.  For awhile, I was convinced that maybe our choice was written down incorrectly, and there would be no way to fix it.  My wise husband advised me to just google what was on our selection sheet from T.A.C.....and well, sometimes it's frustrating how right he can be!

Well, that looks familiar!!

Once I saw this, I knew that everything would be resolved.  It turned out that the listello that they installed has a very similar code to the one above, so I could see how the mistake could have been made.  

A little over 24 hours later, we get the email from our PM that not only did T.A.C acknowledge that there was a mistake, but it has been corrected!

Photo Credit: Our PM!

So in the end, it worked out and was fixed in record time!  Our advice to anyone is to make sure you have pictures of everything!  We thought we did, and we have hundreds of photos, but surprisingly, we have zero record of what we picked out at T.A.C. when it came to the other bathrooms. While in the end it wasn't necessary, I would have felt better knowing early that it absolutely was not a mistake that was made by us.  Also, it would have protected us in the case that our T.A.C. rep accidentally listed the wrong information.

The other thing we wish we had known/asked was to have recesses in the shower instead of the soap dishes.  The soap dish looks a little dated in the bathrooms, it would have been nice to have something more modern.  It never even occurred to us to ask!  Too many decisions over a short period of time!

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.