Choices, choices and more choices

If memory serves, the next thing that happened was that whirlwind two weeks of option selections and meetings and more meetings. My husband handled most of the Guardian meeting himself because, well, I really didn't care and the cost of hiring babysitters for all of these meetings was getting a bit ridiculous.

At Rusmur Floors, it was finally my turn. I went in wanting Espresso cabinets with the Hickory flooring, although I was a little hesitant that the contrast might have been too bold for me. Turns out Hickory was also way expensive and since we wanted hardwood on the entire first floor... we ruled out Hickory. The rest of my thought process went like this... we love dark wood furniture and already have a lot of it so that combined with having a dog and little kids, I didn't think we should go with dark espresso floors as well. That left some sort of complementary shade for the floor. I really disliked red hardwoods and really like hardwoods that show the natural shading of the wood. So with the help of the awesome Rusmur rep, we went with this shade. I rarely see it on any Ryan blogs, so every once in awhile I still kind of second guess myself. But then I walk myself through our reasoning again and feel better. I would have loved to go with the Level 3 widest width boards, but again, budget ruled, so we have the narrow planks.

We are going with the laminate countertop on the left (of the sample cards) in the picture for the kitchen with the plan to put in Quartz counters ourselves in the next few years. We preferred the Quartz to granite and Ryan no longer offers anything but laminate, hi-def laminate and granite.

Counter clockwise from bottom left - vinyl floor for laundry room, Hardwood floor for entire first floor with the exception of the family room, Espresso cabinets in the kitchen and master bath, laminate counter in kitchen, the greyish-white tile is the master bath tile, the Ebony stain is the stairway railing stain, the Cognac cabinet in the girls' bathroom, the warmer colored tile is for the girls' bathroom and the carpet (Sweet Tea Intuitive) is for the family room and all of the bedrooms upstairs.

Another choice I don't see much on blogs - we went with black appliances. First, we don't really like the stainless and fear fingerprints. Also, on the pictures I did find, the black appliances seemed to blend right in to the Espresso cabinets and kind of disappear. I liked that. I did go for the gas range with the extra burner b/c I have dreams of buying a grill pan to set on the middle.

The last selections we made were exterior, and limited, of course, by the choices of our neighbors directly across from us and two to the right. (Two to the left are unsold.) We went with graphite gray siding, white trim and navy blue shutters. Our front door was called Outerspace, which really was a sort of navy. We are doing stone to grade, which I love and due to our integral, front-entry garage, we are getting a whole lot of it for the money.

Overall, I was very happy with the exterior choices - I definitely wanted gray and really hoped for stone accent somewhere. We selected Elevation A for the Oakmont because the full front porch was a must have for us. You can only do the full front on the first elevation.