Loan closing!

Success! We closed on our building loan yesterday and expect that our builder will begin next week. The plan is to put in the driveway, cut down any trees that are in the way of the house, and then break ground (finally - only 3 months after we wanted to break ground).

For the quilters out there, I started working on my Quilt Diva pattern. She will hang on the door of my sewing studio in our new house. My friend and I went on a Quilt Shop Hop last June and I took the pattern with me so I could purchase the fabrics for her. I even found zipper fabric that I can use for the zipper on the suitcase! I have all the pieces cut out and need to fuse the smaller parts together and then finish assembling her. Isn't she fun?

Back to the house...I'm having trouble locating the kitchen sink that I want. I would like a sink with 2 large square or rectangular bowls. I've found one, but it is an apron front sink and I'm not sure I like that look for this house. It is wide though - almost 40" and the 2 bowls are each about 18" square which would be great! My other option is to have 2 separate sinks near each other...

Loan closing set

Our loan closing date is finally set for Wed. November 28th. I don't understand why it takes so long, but am thankful that we have a closing date. I guess we need to add another month on to our estimated finish date, since we won't be breaking ground in November...

We went to Home Depot on Saturday and spent about 2.5 hours looking at doors and toilets and flooring and appliances and lights and fans and all kinds of things. No major decisions made, but we have a better idea of what we like and don't like.

Time to get the house cleaned for our Thanksgiving company. I wish you all a very blessed Thanksgiving...

Choices...

We accomplished some of our goals today. We chose our brick and our shingles and narrowed down our wood floor choices to just a couple.

The tile was tougher. We mainly wanted to get an idea of what was available and what we might be interested in. I think we've decided what type of flooring will go where in the house, but we weren't able to narrow it down any further than that. We may get our kitchen designer to help us with the tile choices.

I'll try to take a photo of the brick later and put up additional details about the brick and shingles that we'll be using.

Shopping tomorrow...

Our builder sent us a list of suppliers and an outline of the order that things will happen and when we need to have things picked out. We are headed out tomorrow to look at brick. Besides the windows that need to be decided on and ordered, the brick is one of the things we need to finalize already, even though we haven't even broken ground yet.

Most of the suppliers are about 45 minutes from here, in Westmoreland County. We can arrange to buy things anywhere, but this list includes places our builder frequents and we can probably get better prices if we shop there.

We're still waiting on the loan approval...

Meeting with the builder...

We are off to meet with the builder today out at the property. We are finishing up the financial side with the building loan and were told we can't start anything (not even the driveway) until the approval is complete. We expect to get the loan approval in a couple of days and will be able to break ground after that.

It will be interesting to see whether the river is visible through the trees yet. When we first saw the property last December there was a great view of the river, but once the trees leaved out in the Spring we lost that view. We also need to look for koi in the ponds. We were told there were 1000 koi in them, but have yet to see any fish. I haven't been out to the property for a long time, as the last time I went out it was so overgrown that it was almost impossible to walk it.

We've been researching windows and fireplaces and all kinds of other things that we need to make decisions about. I love this fireplace glass from either http://fireonice.com/main.asp or http://moderustic.com/:

It is also an interesting idea for use in an outdoor fire pit:

So many decisions! We need to decide now what windows we want - color of the outside, whether we want them clear or with muntins between the glass. I thought it would be nice to not have muntins because the views are so nice, but I've had them in windows for so long it is hard to picture a plain glass window now.