Custom Home: Paint Colors

Today they started painting the interior of our home. Finallyyyyyyy!! I hated choosing paint colors, hired two interior designers (which wasn't really helpful), and still have lots of doubts. I can pretty much guarantee that I'll be painting again once we buy some furniture and start living in the home. So if anyone out there is trying to pick paint, here are some that I liked...

Most of the interior of my home will be Smooth Stone (Glidden WN49). I like cooler colors and wanted something in the gray family.

My family room looked better with a warmer color and I needed something to go with my brick fireplace. The cold gray wasn't really doing it. I decided on Edgecomb Gray (Benjamin Moore HC-173).

Penguin wanted turquoise/teal/blue kind of color and BOY OH BOY she got it! Her room is Winter Escape (Dunn Edwards DE5750). It's a bit much for me, but I'm hoping her white bedroom furniture helps tone down the color a bit.

Peacock is my purple girl! Her bedrooms is Shimmering Sky (Dunn Edwards DE5960). I can handle her room a bit better but it's still very purple. I think we should've done a 50% of these colors to make them a bit lighter.

Because I'm a pink girl and my girls are obviously not, I needed to get my pink in somewhere. The girls' bathroom is mostly my Smooth Stone grey color, but on one wall (the wall with their cupboards & mirrors), we had it painted Spring Azalea (Benjamin Moore 2077-40)

Most homes have a paint color called Swiss Coffee for their trim. Too yellowish for me. I wanted a cleaner, crisper white. I chose Pure White (Sherwin Williams 7005). My kitchen cupboards, laundry room cupboards, master bathroom cupboards, girls' bathroom cupboards, interior doors, and all trim are in this color. I love how it turned out. (The photo below is not very accurate.)

Another color that I might add later but only liked it in rooms on the north side of my house is Revere Pewter (Benjamin Moore HC-172).  It matches well with the smooth stone & edge comb gray.  I'd say it's a richer color with more gray than the edge comb gray.

Happy Fall Break

The kids got out of school at lunch time on Friday and we enjoyed our weekend ... crepes, soft pretzels & 4-berry sundaes at Sam's Club, violin classes, Sonic, Sunday Roast, bike rides, crafts, etc. Today was the first official day of Fall Break & Daddy's day off work ... YEA!  We got up somewhat early so we could be to the zoo by 8am and enjoy the zoo for an hour before it officially opened - best time to go!  We stayed at the zoo for a few hours ... until it got too hot & our legs wouldn't carry us anymore.  After lunch, we went to the library for a while, went to a nearby outdoor mall (including a stop at the Apple store to play), & had dinner at the Cheesecake Factory (the kids love it, but I hope to never go there again!).  Two of the three kids fell asleep in the car on the way home ... that means it was a good day!

We are loving the perfect fall weather we have here ... in the 80's and lots of sunshine.  We hope to do lots of outside playing this week!!!

In other news, our house plans have *FINALLY* been approved by our town ... it only took several months....  And I think we've decided on a general contractor.  Now we have to finalize our budget and do lots of bank paperwork before we can break ground.  Maybe by Christmas time we can start digging.  My fingers are crossed!!

Plans in Hands

About a week ago, we picked up our plans from the printer.  It was a long-awaited & joyous day.  We've had a couple small hiccups this week, but nothing too serious.  Now we are waiting for our HOA & town to review everything & give us feedback/things to change.

Plans for the Home

Sooo ... we've been working on plans for our home for about 3 months now.  I think we are finally just about done.  It's been consuming many-a-days and we are counting down the days until we can move onto the next phase of the process ... sending everything to engineers & then submitting plans to our town for approval.  Slowly but surely we are making progress.

Raise the Bar: Street Scene

Friday's photography assignment for the week was "street scene".  I've been wanting to document the progress of the street we hope to live on someday, but life gets busy & documenting our street never happens.  Friday brought us some nice weather, so I took my boy for a 3 minute drive to our future street and snapped a couple quick photos.  As of Friday, March 1, 2013, three houses are complete and four others are under construction.  I think three or four more houses are in the planning stages or are getting close to breaking ground.

So far this "little" project has been a lot of frustrations for me.  We've had to put our plans on hold a couple of times for various reasons, but in January we decided it was time to get moving on a home for our family.  On Feb 2, we met with an architect for several hours and by Feb 12, I had a 10-ish page document with pictures & links for what I want in each room of the house, the styles I like, etc.  I've bugged the architect a few times since then ... he told me he'd have something for us by the end of last week and then it was by Saturday afternoon ... he still doesn't have anything ready to show us.  I can't tell you how many architects I've contacted about designing a home (these are architects that friends & general contractors have used & recommended) and only 1-2 of them have responded to my emails, calls, etc.  Guess no one wants to make money right now ... or something ....  So, the waiting game continues.

Other street scenes can be seen here.

Vacant Lot

Sooo... we are still working on the lot that we found several weeks ago ... working on making it our lot.  We go over to visit "our" lot several times a week and we even went on a bike ride to our lot one night as a family because it's super close to where we are renting right now.  It took me a week or two to find and decide on a lender for our lot loan.  Very few lenders are offering lot loans in AZ because of the economy here and when you do find someone willing to lend some money, it's only some ... they want significant down payments.  This was not music to my ears and caused me a lot of stress because I wanted to be able to put down as little money as possible and keep my cash in the bank, but if this is where we want to be and what we want to do, we have to make the sacrifice.  :)

Sometimes I hesitate saying anything about the lot on my blog because for some reason or another it might not work-out, but we are hopeful and so far everything looks good.  I suppose if it doesn't work out, we can be sad together, right?  I've also had some questions about how to go about building a custom house so rather than answer a bunch of emails, everyone can just read it here.  I also want to track the progress of everything we do over the next year or two as we work on turning this lot into our little piece of paradise. :)

Kiddies ... July 23, 2011 @ Vacant Lot. 

Penguin 8 1/2 yrs old, Peacock 4 3/4 yrs old, Turkey about a month shy of 4 yrs old!