Outdoor Living at E-Haus

One of the hardest parts of moving into a new or new build house these days is the sheer quantity of inspirational pictures available to dissatisfy even the most excited home owner. Taking a step back, though, it's good to have to wait, and earn, and dream. 

I wanted a fireplace to be immediately set in our house, to the point where I very nearly pulled the trigger on having one of the house contractors build out a generic mantel for us just so that we could have one done. At another point, someone suggested that we use the same stone from our exterior to build a 2-story stone fireplace and I thought-- yes! that makes sense!-- even though something else in me kept me questioning if it was the right plan. Luckily, my doubt and Nate's steadfast insistence that he build out the fireplace surround kept us from making a hasty choice, and a few months later I came across a picture that I immediately loved. Now, after a few months of tweaking, our fireplace surround is 80 percent complete and we couldn't be happier with our choices. 

All that to say (100 degree summer that would have killed a new lawn aside so yay for waiting until fall for that!), there is a benefit to the time and budget-dictated delay in creating our outdoors spaces. While we'll be spreading topsoil (so. so. so. much topsoil) and grass seed shortly, we're planning our first outdoors construction projects for next spring/ summer so that we can save towards them over the winter. 

Our property is skewed such that our front yard is really where we have both the best view and the space for outdoors living-- so how to we make this work best?! 

Do we put a patio directly in front of the house?

Do we wrap it around to the side and create an outdoors room or screened-in porch? 

Where do we plant our garden-- at the edge of our property? 

Where will we contruct the workshop?

Which project comes first-- the patio or the deck?

And what do we plant in the beds around the house?

(And this, by the way, is the view)

Pretty darn spectacular. So what do we do?!

Outdoor Living at E-Haus

One of the hardest parts of moving into a new or new build house these days is the sheer quantity of inspirational pictures available to dissatisfy even the most excited home owner. Taking a step back, though, it's good to have to wait, and earn, and dream. 

I wanted a fireplace to be immediately set in our house, to the point where I very nearly pulled the trigger on having one of the house contractors build out a generic mantel for us just so that we could have one done. At another point, someone suggested that we use the same stone from our exterior to build a 2-story stone fireplace and I thought-- yes! that makes sense!-- even though something else in me kept me questioning if it was the right plan. Luckily, my doubt and Nate's steadfast insistence that he build out the fireplace surround kept us from making a hasty choice, and a few months later I came across a picture that I immediately loved. Now, after a few months of tweaking, our fireplace surround is 80 percent complete and we couldn't be happier with our choices. 

All that to say (100 degree summer that would have killed a new lawn aside so yay for waiting until fall for that!), there is a benefit to the time and budget-dictated delay in creating our outdoors spaces. While we'll be spreading topsoil (so. so. so. much topsoil) and grass seed shortly, we're planning our first outdoors construction projects for next spring/ summer so that we can save towards them over the winter. 

Our property is skewed such that our front yard is really where we have both the best view and the space for outdoors living-- so how to we make this work best?! 

Do we put a patio directly in front of the house?

Do we wrap it around to the side and create an outdoors room or screened-in porch? 

Where do we plant our garden-- at the edge of our property? 

Where will we contruct the workshop?

Which project comes first-- the patio or the deck?

And what do we plant in the beds around the house?

(And this, by the way, is the view)

Pretty darn spectacular. So what do we do?!

E-Haus: Adventures in Lighting

Beware: there is a major photo overload in this post.

The problem with choosing our own lighting for E-Haus was that although doing so meant that we got to pick our own stuff, it did not give us an unlimited budget with which to make selections. The modest credit that we received helped somewhat, but since builder-grade = inexpensive, we knew that we would be investing a certain amount over that total. But where to invest it?

We decided that the best use of our extra funds would be spent in our great room, which is great in many ways, not least of which is its size. We needed our lighting to make a statement. I initially voted for chandelier, citing designs like this one:

source

But, as much as I am drawn to these looks in theory, Nate made the good point that we are both not traditional enough and also not formal enough to make an elaborate light fixture "work." So we set out to look for fans that would not be dwarfed by our space and stumbled upon this one:

It's a little modern, a little industrial, and huge. It was also a big splurge for us, so we scoured big box options like Amazon, Home Depot, Menards & Lowe's for the other hundred lights we needed. And I even found my chandelier, which will be happily installed in our library/ playroom. 

Here's much of what we ended up purchasing:

A whole lot of modern/ rustic/ industrial in primarily dark oil-rubbed bronze and black finishes that help them to stand out against our light gray painted walls and place nicely with the dark metal balusters on our stairs and balcony. The single exception is the crystal flushmount for N's room, because she wanted a "sparkly light" and we felt obliged to deliver in some way. We delivered all of the lighting in a few different carloads over the course of a weekend, and five days later-- not only were our walls painted, but the lighting was installed as well. This made for a dramatic change that mostly just served to make us more antsy for occupancy and move-in day. 

Here are some of our lights in action:

(Ignore the dusty floors mid-installation. I'll get to them later!)

Now that we have light, we can stalk our house at any time of day! Hooray!

E-Haus: Kitchen Cabinets

Hello.

I love you.

You are everything.

I have an iPhone note from 2013 where Nate and I outlined all of our big dreams for a future home. Besides tall ceilings (check!) and an open floor plan (double check), I wrote out three details that we knew wouldn't be able to happen for years and years: a tuxedo kitchen, wall ovens, and a big gas cooktop. Nate and I love to cook and we love to entertain, but we were never able to do it easily in our 1950s ranch. 

Though there will be more updates to come in future months and years, I am in love with our starting point at E-Haus. So much so that I literally squealed when we walked in and besides drywall everywhere (which in and of itself feels like a massive upgrade!), we have a good start on our kitchen. 

The judgy part of my brain is all kinds of frustrated with our not-ceiling height cabinets, but the upcharge wasn't feasible at this point and one of the reasons that we chose painted white uppers was for the ease of customizing them. So some cabinet customization is for sure in our DIY future.

On the opposite side of the kitchen is our window and no upper cabinets at all because we're also building some white oak or walnut floating shelves to warm up our otherwise stark color palette in here (I love it, but light gray walls + black and white cabinets + white quartz + stainless hood and appliances = stark) and to also tie in the dark hardwood floors that will be all over our main level. 

In the meantime, I will be drooling all over this kitchen exactly as it is. 

See you later. 

I love you.

You are everything.

E-Haus Decor Plans: The Main Bathroom

With our upcoming move, we will be moving from a single bathroom to 2.5 bathrooms. Having spent my entire adult life carting toiletries to and fro from bathrooms that are shared in some way, I almost didn't know where to start in terms of making plans for each space. Furthermore, my kids have their own bathroom in this house (well, except for when we have guests until we finish our basement), so I get to figure out a designated kid space for the first time. 

We planned this bathroom to be a blank slate (read: generic) that can be decorated and redecorated easily as our kids grow up from small to tall: rectangular gray tiles laid in a brickwork pattern, a white cabinet with double sinks, slate gray granite countertops and a low-impact brushed nickel light fixture. Then, after multiple false starts, I recalled our now-homeless art from the gender neutral nursery we left behind, and used it to make a plan for adding in some personality. Apparently, even for kids, I love texture more than color.  At least I'm consistent.

1, 8, 16: Hooded towels are adorable and also practical for small people. 

          2: The above-mentioned towels will hang on three of these elephant hooks that I plan to hang across from the vanity.

         3: The light fixture we chose.

         4: Historically we have had major problems with bath mats that get kicked around and folded and lost among our laundry. A bamboo mat will add some warmth to an otherwise cool space and hopefully some durability as well. 

        5: Slate gray granite. I kind of love the lighter matte pieces in it that may camouflage the less than pristine spots that are inevitable in a kids' space.

        6: We found a similar low stool with warm wooden legs and an entirely white and gray elephant top. This will make an ideal extra surface for both a parent who bathes kids and a kid who needs a boost at the vanity. It doesn't hurt that the stool repeats the color AND animal pattern we've got going on. 

   7, 10: Two of the three pieces of our nursery art. 

   9, 14: The bamboo finish will repeat in the wastebasket and shower curtain hooks.

        11: Tile, gray floors with white cabinet.  

        12: We opted to provide all of our own lighting and mirrors throughout our home. In this space we decided to use two round mirrors with modern wooden frames in lieu of a standard frameless rectangle.

       13: A non-slip mat inside the tub is a must with small people. At least in this iteration the color would help tie in aqua balloon art.

       15: We have forever used a ruffled aqua ombre shower curtain, but now it feels like overkill. We already have a solid white curtain in a waffle texture, so it's an easy choice.

Reality [Our Budget] is Setting In

Now that we are a day away from actually getting some machinery on our property and building this house, many more decisions are starting to come into play, which is both exciting and terrifying. We are finally looking at specific kitchen layouts and talking with designers about our weird ideas to see just how realistic they are.

We are also getting the real numbers behind the choices and upgrades that we've been hoping to make. This is where perhaps our home journey sets us apart from other people building custom homes-- we don't have the budget to do everything we want to do, and as it turns out, everything we want to do is definitely more expensive than we anticipated. The hickory hardwoods I posted about? Yikes. Fiber cement siding? Yikes-er. So it's time to make some cuts.

Some decisions are easy. We aren't having our built-ins done by our builder because we are more than capable of doing them ourselves, and in fact prefer to do so. We are also going with some inexpensive options for the time being that we will upgrade ourselves when we can. But when it comes to decisions like the quandry above, it's kind of a headache.

In this case, we made that decision because we had to, and when we turned off our hearts-- because my heart really, really "needs" both options-- it was clear. We were looking to upgrade from hardwood to a different hardwood, or from a finish choice that I abhor to one that I love for many reasons. And vinyl seems like it could make us cringe for years, whereas we'll happily live with the standard wood floors. So, yeah! Upgraded wood is out and Hardie Board is in. Best of all, we can make this compromise without compromising our move-in budget and ability to buy some furniture.

Now please keep your fingers crossed about our quartz countertops. Because I'm pretty sure that whatever numbers I'm given there are going to make me cry*.

*Inside. Please someone shake me if I ever actually shed physical tears over a finish selection. It just isn't that serious.

Countertops: White, Whiter, and Whitest

The one finish decision that we came into this house with was our countertops. I have forever loved white counters-- marble in particular-- and have told Nate from day one that someday, I was going to have a kitchen with them.

Unfortunately, real life intervened at some point and while I don't need everything in my life to be pristine forever, we are not in a stage of life where we could baby marble the way it needs to be, and so it would inevitably end up stained/ etched/ pitted almost immediately. I have heard that you can have it refinished every year or every few years, but that sounds a) like a pain and b) like something I am not going to have time for in the coming few decades.

So, alternative white countertops is where I started. And I almost immediately moved away from granite options, because even the lightest of those don't look anything like I've imagined. Ultimately, it seems like there are just a few alternative countertop options that might work us:

Corian Rain Cloud:

Cambria Torquay:

Caesarstone Misty Carrera:

Caesarstone Frosty Carrina:

There are lots of other options that I came across, but I am finding myself feeling pickier and pickier and too many of the others were either super speckled or too contrasty for my taste. Today, of the materials above, I'd go with one of the Caesarstone options, but also we haven't gotten it all priced out yet and I need to see samples in person. There are two hundred million decisions to make when designing a kitchen, but as countertops take up a large amount of visual space and I feel very confident about what I want, we're starting here. Now onto the cabinets.

The Waiting Game

So, we're still waiting for that final permit so that they can actually start building! Everyone I have mentioned this to has responded with some variation of "Well, there's bound to be some hold ups in the process," which is true but frustrating since this particular stressor could have been helped if everyone was transparent from day one. And yes, other hold ups are bound to happen, from delayed shipping of materials to bad weather to-- I don't know-- slower than expected contractors. I'm just ready to get this show on the road!"

The upside of our slow start, of course, is that we are getting extra time to make our finish selections and save up money for other purchases to come. We are waiting on our initial kitchen layout so that we can finalize that plan, but in the meantime, we have pored over our samples and decided on our exterior stone:

The color scheme was simple enough since we have known that we wanted a rich gray exterior almost from day one, but who knew that there were so many varieties out there? Ultimately we wanted something that was a little irregular and less tetris-like in appearance, but that also flowed with our otherwise modern aesthetic, so Rustic Ledgestone in Onyx easily won out here. 

As a side note, I am sure that there are more curated ways to go about choosing stone-- like going to a stone yard, for example-- but budget dictated that we go with builder's choice on this one. And frankly, I love the options we came away with, so I'm feeling like this is a win-win for builder, budget, and the building itself. Yay!

I've also been getting WAY far ahead of myself by dreaming things like couches and lighting and rugs. Here are some of the things I've been loving, liking and lusting after lately. First, this West Elm couch.

LOVE:

At just under $1300 for my ideal set of options (86.5 inches, ink blue performance velvet and poly-fill for maximum looks and minimal risk for disaster in my very child friendly house), it ain't too bad. I've been crushing on versions of this couch for a few years now, so it's probably going to worm its way into my house. We've had leather couches forever, and they are classic and probably always going to be workable, but they're just not as cozy as fabric couches in my option, and plus I love the idea of adding in a tiny bit of color to our otherwise neutral home palette. 

(Also, palette versus pallet versus palate is quite the complicated trio of words. I wrote out each option before I was satisfied that I was using the right one up there.)

I'm less certain about this next option from Overstock, but it definitely fulfills the high style and low risk theme I'm going for with furniture for the time being. The price also varies and I've seen it dip low, which is where I'd buy. 

LIKE:

Essentially, I love them, and I know that they are a knock off of expensive but classic Eames dining chairs, but MCM is having such a moment right now that I'm worried about going too "Basic" or trendy or that maybe it's inappropriate to go with the cheap knockoff when I know better. They are wipeable and also low profile, which will make Nate happy since he has an aversion to hefty dining room chairs. The table that they will go with doesn't exist yet, but we've been batting around ideas. It's going to be custom-built by us, maybe with lumber from trees from our property that have to be felled. All that to say, we could make any chairs work.

And third, the rug from Anthropologie that I love and will never ever have, for all kinds of reasons.

LUST:

And that concludes the window shopping for today. Back to real life and relevant decisions!

All About that Wood

One of the first things we knew about our next house-- whether we ended up buying or building-- was that we needed hardwood floors in the living areas. We were spoiled by them in our first house, and they are infinitely easier than other flooring options (in my opinion) to clean and deal with when a problem arises. Even our experiences with tile in living areas has been problematic. That stuff shatters when hit right, and either we are awesomely accurate at dropping kitchen items and optimizing the damage, or we had seriously bad luck, but we have a solid track record of at least two broken tiles per year in our former kitchen.

Here in 2015, the options for wood floors are many. Did we want hardwood or engineered wood? Shiny or matte? Pre-finished or stained on site? Painted? Dark, light, white, gray? Wide or skinny planks, or something in between? Laid traditionally or in some kind of pattern? Heavy or minimal grain? Hand-scraped? Beveled or smooth? And the choices go on. But given my aesthetic, most of these choices were easy. It was really in the breakdown of engineered versus traditional that we wavered for a while.

ENGINEERED HARDWOOD FLOORS: The wood surface is much thinner than in a traditional plank-- it's a veneer. There are multiple layers of material that have been pressed together, and normally the center is plywood although the specifics vary a bit. Due to the thinness of the exterior veneer, engineered hardwood can only be resurfaced a finite number of times (some can only be recoated and not refinished, but many can be refinished a few times if needed) but also its construction makes for less expansion and change due to weather and settling as well as creates an overall harder surface. Engineered hardwood can be low quality, but it can also be very high quality; it depends on the manufacturer.

TRADITIONAL HARDWOOD FLOORS: These are also layered, but the exterior part is much thicker than engineered hardwood and it is sliced from the log. This is just traditional wood flooring and prone to the same problems-- moisture, settling, dings and dents, etc..  It goes without saying that overall wood quality and hardness/ softness varies based on both the tree and the manufacturer.

Ultimately we found that the differences between the two were not nearly as dramatic as some of the other decisions that we're coming up against (see: vinyl versus fiber cement) and that furthermore, both options have great advantages as well as some disadvantages. We wanted pre-finished flooring for multiple reasons, including a more consistent finish that wouldn't depend on dust/ dirt/ hairs and people not walking on them for some time after installation, the durability of factory finish, and of course the cost advantage. So ultimately, this battle came down to our simple preference. We ended up choosing a number of wood flooring options-- both engineered and hardwood-- and looked at them both in pictures and in real life. A hickory hardwood ended up being our clear favorite and the winner, and I cannot wait to see them installed in our house eventually.

First of all, we love that hickory is one of the hardest domestic wood species, which we hope means that it will hold up nicely against the demands of our young and wild family. But most of all, we love the slightly rough but not insanely wavy finish, the darker color of it (it is notably darker in person), and the high variation of tone within that dark finish for a more organic look.

Countertop finishes are up next!

Home Siding

One of the first real decisions that we've had to make with regards to our new home with with regards to siding, a subject that I previously knew very little about, and honestly, one of those areas where an already built home might have been preferable to me. There are just too many decisions.

Also, our previous home had little to no curb appeal for the majority of the time in which we lived there; it was only in the final months that we realized it could get an overhaul in just a few hours of time. Once we repainted the front door and shutters, took off the unattractive storm door and planted some shade-loving flowers in the built--in garden box out front, it became a new house. There are no excuses like the ones we had there when you're the person who chose every finish.

Our first choice was brick or stone, and it wasn't really a choice for us. Brick in the right conditions can be classy and attractive, like here where it is wrapped around all sides of this traditional house.

But it can also go wrong to my eye, like when it is used on very modern structures or just the face of the house or with doors/ shutters that fight with the formal wishes of the brick. And for those and a thousand other reasons, stone is our winner and from there I assumed that we were set.

It turns out that siding is an even bigger question; what brand do you use and what type? I had no idea. We are coming from aluminum siding but have seen vinyl done well and done cheaply. There is also another easily accessible though pricer option called fiber cement siding that I had literally never heard of but seen and loved in pictures like this one. For what it is worth I also thought that it was called "hardiboard" when I first did my research, but as it turns out, that's a brand (James Hardie siding) not a finish. It looks similar to vinyl but better, like here.

But siding is not just a house's pretty face. It is also a protective layer, so I did some general research.

VINYL SIDING: used for homes since the late 1950s and is still the most common exterior siding in the U.S.. It is used far less often in other countries because it is a manufactured plastic and has a negative environmental profile. Vinyl, like wood, is flammable. Though, as with all products, vinyl siding quality varies quite a bit between manufacturers, it's an overall established and inexpensive product that can be quite attractive especially with more and more layout options for buyers. In general, though it eventually needs replaced, vinyl siding is very stable and low-maintenance throughout its shelf life.

FIBER CEMENT SIDING: started being manufactured in 1903 and originally contained asbestos but now is composed of cellulose fibers (aka wood), sand and cement. One of its major benefits is that it's noncombustible and has long-term structural capacity once installed, though it is fairly subject to impact damage. It is more eco-friendly. Because it can fade and chip, it does require some superficial upkeep. It's also about twice the cost of vinyl siding. It can be painted any color and comes in a variety of layout options. Specifically, if we end up choosing fiber cement siding, we're looking at Hardie Board.