Taylor Home 6 - The Exterior

We've got the lot and the floor plan figured out, now let's take a look at the exterior. The city where we are building requires new construction homes to be 3 to 4 sides brick. I don't know their reasoning, but we are happy to oblige because brick has less maintenance long term and can typically increase a home's value. Since we are doing this semi-custom route, we had to make our choices WAY in advance, just as if we were building this home in a neighborhood. Good for the builder, hard for us. It's difficult to pick colors when you can't test them against the house in their future natural environment! Our builder suggested that we find a house we liked and then have them color match. Cue the creepy people driving slowly through your neighborhoods while taking photos of your houses! While it's a hard decision, I already had in my mind the look I was going for. I wanted a neutral, mid tone brick that would work with several accent colors. And I wanted the accent colors to be traditional, but modern, yet nothing too trendy. We will have stone accents on the front of our home, and I wanted the stone to accent the brick, but have enough contrast that you could tell they are different materials. After several drive by photo shoots, this one remained at the top of my list.

This house is the model home for a new neighborhood going in a few miles away from ours.

I didn't have the builder color match any of these materials, instead I went right inside and asked the agent on duty the name of the brick and if I could take some photos. She didn't seem too impressed with me, but I proceeded anyway. 

The brick is Mosstown from Cherokee Brick and Tile Company. Before I could commit, I had to see other examples. So thankful for Houzz! Have you ever used their website/app? It's like Pinterest for house stuff, but better! Check it out sometime.

Most of these examples show the brick with an ivory/white mortar, which I love. Here's the same brick with a darker mortar.

That makes it look very brown to me, so I'm staying away from that. I've seen it with a grayish mortar too and it wasn't my thing either. It's hard to find examples of the different mortar versions with the same brick, so I'm sticking with my gut feeling and using the ivory mortar. Can't wait to see it on the house!

Like that model home photo above, I chose a warm medium gray tone for the siding, a dark navy with gray and green undertones for the shutters, and an off white for the trim. The winners are all Sherwin Williams colors:  Mount Etna for the shutters and front door, Gray Area for the garage doors (I think) and siding (we will have shake siding on a few sections in the front and side gables plus a little board and batten siding on the upper rear), and Nuance for the trim.

Crossing my fingers that my choices look great on the house with the brick and stone we picked! If nothing else, the accent colors can always be repainted later, right?! Let's not even think about that option!

Oh, and the stone! We didn't know the name of the stone we liked, but again I took a cue from that model and actually from our current home. I provided the builder with photos and they will match it from there. 

I will have to do better at taking pics from here on out! I wasn't planning to blog about building this house, but it's fun and I like learning new things about home building and sharing that info with others. And at some point, I hope to share the decorating process once we get all moved in! 

Thanks for reading! 

Lindsey

Taylor Home 6 - Floor Plan

In my previous post, I shared a little info about the new lot with some pics. Now, let's talk about our builder and floorpan. I am skipping several steps we went through before coming to this decision, so I'm saving you the boring details. Please ask questions though if you have them.

For our new home, we decided to go the semi-custom build route. This not only saves money, but time. Choosing absolutely everything would've been so fun for me, but I think this was the best choice for us right now. Our builder does custom homes and neighborhood builds, so we picked one of his neighborhood floorpans already in his library and made some changes to suit our preferences. I won't share his name or the company name right now for privacy reasons. 

With this new home, we wanted to downsize a little. While I probably would've loved a home with 2500 square feet plus a basement, for resale and city building requirements, we went with a little bit larger floorpan. The plan we chose is about 3200 square feet plus the unfinished basement. Still quite a large home, but smaller than what we have now and less bedrooms and bathrooms. Yay! Less cleaning, right?! The basement will remain unfinished as long as I can put it off. My hubby has other ideas, but we shall see. That'll be a decision a few years down the road I believe. 

First Floor:

One of the main changes we made is the garage placement. We opted for a side entry garage. This change adds three feet to the width of the house. That made for a larger storage area in the garage and a little extra length in the garage itself, plus a little more space in the keeping room and kitchen. That garage storage area will most likely be used for lawnmower parking. So we have a two car/single lawnmower garage! 

We also removed that door you see in the garage storage area and will have an exterior double door so we can easily park the lawnmower in there. We moved the pantry wall back to line up with that storage area wall. We also moved the pantry entrance wall in to give us more space for a small mud room. While making a pantry smaller isn't a popular choice, it will still have ample room so we feel good about that decision. We plan to add some kind of built ins later on for storage in the mud room. 

In the original plan there is a door in the dining room leading to the mud room. We took that out just because we wanted it to remain all open. Maybe we could add a modern sliding barn door later on? 

Next up is the living room. This will be my office and Cole's classroom. We will let Josie do homework in there too so she doesn't feel left out. ;) We've been homeschooling for several years now and have had all kinds of classroom setups. I think I prefer to have everything in one place so I can work while keeping an eye on him as he works. This will keep all office/school supplies in one area too. I would love to have a built in work space and/or a feature wall in there. The opening will have double glass doors so we can close it off and add curtains if needed. 

Moving on to the great room. We will have built in bookcases installed on either side of the wood burning fireplace. We have chosen to do a 3x3 coffered ceiling, similar to this. You'll see in the floor plan there are windows with a door along the back wall. When we visited a homesite where this same floor plan was being built, it felt weird to us for that door to be right there. Instead, we have removed that door and replaced it and the windows in the plan with a large four paned window. The door to the deck has been moved to that short wall in the keeping room. 

We will have the porch/deck extension, because if not, what would be the point of having a deck? The keeping room will have built in bookcases on either side of the fireplace like the great room. That fireplace will have gas logs. Some may hate that idea, but I like it because that means it might actually be used! So easy with a flip of a switch and no clean up! The built ins will match the color and style of the kitchen cabinets, which is a simple white shaker. The keeping room looks HUGE, but in reality, the area closest to the deck will be the eat in kitchen area.

The kitchen floor plan will remain the same with one small change. The original drawings have the built in oven and microwave placed next to the refrigerator. I scoffed at that idea originally and had to look up examples. While it does work in some applications, I felt I would prefer that they be separated. So, the oven/microwave will be moved to the opposite wall. We had a similar setup in one of our previous homes, so I think it will work well. 

Second Floor:

Like I mentioned before, the side entry garage gives us some extra width in the house. This extra width will make the master bedroom and bathroom a little wider. With that extra space we will make the shower a little larger. In place of the built in tub, we have chosen this stand alone tub. Super excited about this! 

You'll see an extra area in the master for a walk in closet extension. The original plan shows that this is optional, but our builder says he always includes in. Score! We have designated that room as Scott's clothes ironing room. We have even added electrical outlets in there for that very reason! There will also be unfinished attic storage on either side of that closet extension. Extra storage is always a great idea! 

In the master bedroom, you'll see two windows on the left side. They are actually small square windows. We recently decided to add a third window in the middle, so we'll have three square windows. We plan to have our bed there, so it will be a small feature wall. Maybe we can add some wood paneling or wall paper to make it really pop! 

The only other major change on the second floor is the bonus room in place of the two story great room. We will paint a projector screen on the wall as we did in our current house and at some point, we will install cabinets below the windows on the right side in the plan. They will house the electronics and maybe a popcorn maker and beverage station?!  

Check back soon for exterior details!

Until next time,

Lindsey

Taylor Home 6 - The Beginning

We are building a new home! This will be home number 6 for us. We've been in our current home for 3.5 years now and since we can't stay anywhere longer than 4 years, we figured it was time to move on. Just kidding! We have lots of reasons why we chose to do this, but I won't be getting into any of that here. 

We are now 6 months into the process of building our new home and since this is my first official blog post, I figured I'd go back to the beginning when we first found our land, our builder, etc.

We weren't necessarily planning to build when our new home search began. But we both love living on a private lot with neighbors close, but not too close. Therefore, most neighborhoods are out of the question. We also enjoy the freedom we've had without an HOA watching over us. So, this this leaves us with slim pickings around this part of Georgia. Vacant, buildable lots are very hard to find or they are quickly snatched up. I don't remember when I first found our new lot online, but I kept going back to it over and over again. Wooded, private, shared driveway, within the school district we needed. Sounded perfect! 

It was love at first sight! Look at all the trees surrounding us!

Here's what I saw the first time I drove up that day back in March. I've added some text to explain placement of things because it's hard to tell what's what from pictures.

Here's an aerial view so you can get a better idea of where we are situated in relation to the neighbors. The common access driveway will only be used by us and one other family. It's like our own personal road!  

Check back soon for details about our builder, floorpan, upgrades, and progress pics!

Until next time,

Lindsey 

Coming Soon!

Welcome!

We are working on our design, photos, and content for our first blog together! This will be a place for us to share our home projects, crafts, and ideas with our friends. Check back soon for the unveiling!

xoxo,

Lindsey & Brooke