Month: June 2015

There have been various things we’ve been looking forward to with our house.  None for longer than the exterior doors.  I’ve had them in my head and chosen for about 2 years. They went in today, and I’m thrilled.  We couldn’t be happier with our 10ft ceilings that make room for the 8ft doors. They’re all solid wood, but they’re under cover, so they should be good for years after I stain and finish them.  

 

  

  

    

We’ve mentioned before that one of the things important to us was to get our costs as known as possible.  Our Out of Pocket costs page is detailing all of the “extras”, but many were expected–just items that we’re paying for directly.

One of the unexpected decisions we had to make more quickly than we expected was the sizing of our fireplaces.  We had actually gone to the fireplace store and picked out what we wanted, but the message never got back to the builder, so it didn’t make it to the contract.  We thought that was the case, so we weren’t too surprised when we heard that the ones we picked out were about a $1,000 for both.  Not wanting to hold anything up, I went to the fireplace store that day to see if it was worth it. 

After much studying, I didn’t think it did.  The upgrade was a 8 inches taller, and we have 10ft ceilings, so I wanted to make it happen, but I couldn’t justify the extra.

We went into the weekend thinking we were going with the standard.  Little did we know that the we’d find the deal of a lifetime on almost all of our lighting, and saved probably 1-2k from our lighting budget because of one big sale.  

The nagging of a short, standard fireplace continued through the weekend, and based on the savings in lighting, we decided to go for the upgrade in the living room, but keep the standard in the keeping room.  The decision was perfect in both cases.  The bigger one fit perfectly in the living room, but in the keeping room it would have been too big.