Before Pictures (Or Are They After Pictures?)

It seems odd to be posting about "Before" pictures, when you've already seen the "Before Before Pictures" as the house was built!  But I figured it'd be fun to continue the blog through the process of getting settled and personalizing our home over the next few months.  We stopped at the house today and lucked out that the painters were there with the door open (we maybe had some other plans of getting in if no one was there...).  I thought it'd be a good idea to have before pictures while the house is empty so you can see the progression as we paint, unpack, arrange furniture, etc.

The first project on the list is paint.  We didn't even ask Bob Ward about pricing out how much it would be to paint the house because I really do like doing it.  And it's one of those things that anyone can do, so I'd rather save the money and put in my own time for that.  First room to paint will be our bedroom and bathroom so we can start living in those rooms as soon as our new bedroom furniture is delivered next Tuesday.  Next up is the family room and kitchen/dining room/mudroom.  With the open concept plan we have, the kitchen, dining room, and mudroom are all going to be the same color for now.  Eventually I might change up the dining room, but we'll see.  Then the main guest room will be painted next.  Any other room, I have no idea what to paint yet because I just need to start seeing our own things in the house first.  Our first priority on Friday and Saturday will be to get as much of that painting done as we possibly can.  Sunday morning is when our wonderful friends are going to help us move all our stuff in the house.  I know some of them have been following the blog, so thank you in advance for helping us move in!

I'll try to remember to take pictures of the progression of each room, but I can't make any promises.  Once I get busy doing something, I may forget to stop and take pictures.  Anyway, for the time being, here are the "After" pictures of the build process!  :-)  Steve and I are overjoyed with how everything turned out and we can't wait to make this house our home!!

Video Tour

Bar

Bar

Bar

Steve in the Powder Room

Kitchen looking into Family Room

Family Room looking into Kitchen and Dining Room

Pantry

Family Room

Kitchen

Basement

Upstairs now; Hallway Bathroom

Same Bathroom

Bedroom #1

Bedroom #2

Guest Bedroom (aka Bedroom #3)

Guest Bathroom

Walk-in Closet in Guest Bedroom

Laundry Room (don't worry, that vinyl will be gone pretty quickly)

Our Room

Our Room

Our Bathroom

Our Shower

Our Closet

Garage

WE'RE MOVING SOON!!!!!!!

This will be a very quick blog, and I apologize for not having any pictures, but this blog is full of great news!!  On Monday, we passed all 3 of our scheduled inspections, leaving us with only three more to go!  Right before I left work today, I had a call from JoAnna to go over the timeline of what is left.  In order to get an occupancy permit we have to have landscaping, which is scheduled for this Friday.  Final grading and driveway transition strips are set to be completed tomorrow or Thursday.

This next bit of information is all contingent on the items I just mentioned and us passing our last few inspections (which should be ok), but it looks like we are going to have our first walk through on Monday, September 24th.  We come up with a punch list during that walk through and they have until Friday, September 28th to get as much of it done as they can.  Or, they just keep working on it after we move in, which isn't a huge deal.  I would say we're probably 90-95% sure we're moving in next Friday!!!

I find September 28th to be an adorable move-in date for us.  Steve and I started dating on September 28, 2003 and then we moved into our first house on September 28, 2006!  I guess we've now made it a tradition to move in somewhere on the 28th of September.  :-)

Finishing Touches

I'm doing a bonus blog this weekend!

We stopped at the house Friday after work and saw that all of the finishing touches were done:  the fireplace has glass doors now, the microwave is installed, the dishwasher is installed, the hood above the stove is finished, etc.  Seriously - all of it is done.  This is weird to say, but the house is done!

There's still a few things to do on the exterior, like the transition strips and stone around parts of the driveway, final grading, and seeding/landscaping.  Victor didn't want to work on the exterior stuff last week until we knew whether or not Hurricane Florence was going to make an appearance in Maryland.  She didn't other than some rain here and there, so they'll be working on those next week while we get inspections.

We stopped at the house on Saturday too and as we were leaving, we saw the cleaning crew come in to clean the windows.  They told us that on Monday, the rest of the cleaning crew is coming to clean the house top to bottom.  This means we are SO close!!  I made a mistake in my last blog (and corrected it already) - we actually have 8 inspections that have to pass before we can move in.  We have 2 completed already and then 3 of them are scheduled for Monday.

With that said, I really don't know what's left to blog about until we move in.  Thank you so much for following along and watching our forever house go through this process.  We have a very long list of projects we are going to do once we get in the new house starting with smaller projects like painting up to bigger projects like having a deck and a fence installed in a few weeks.  Stay tuned, I'll post updates while we go through it.  And, someday soon Steve and I will have money back in our bank accounts to go on some trips again, and the blog will return to its regularly scheduled programming.  ;-)  Steve and I love to entertain and have people over, so feel free to visit us so you can see our house in person!  For our local followers, there will be one hell of a housewarming party coming soon!

Hood is finally finished

Powder room finally has a toilet and sink; we had to wait for floors first.

Doors on the fireplace.  I might love this fireplace as much as I love Steve.

Dishwasher

Microwave

We finally have hardware in our shower, but it isn't exactly correct.  Our shower is huge, so we paid extra to have an additional handheld shower head so we can use it to clean.  We've already heard back from Bob Ward that they will get this fixed.  We're hoping it's after we move in so we don't have to wait any longer.

Come and Knock on Our Door!

I meant to blog last night, but forgot about the Ravens game.  It turns out the Ravens forgot about the game last night too.  :-(  Anyway, the house...

Flooring stopped last Thursday and we didn't know why.  We thought that it had something to do with the fact that they were gearing up to pave the driveway and they wanted that to sit over the weekend without contractors driving on it.  That just turned out to be lucky in a way.  We found out on Tuesday this week that flooring stopped because a lot of the material was damaged.  They sent it back and it was delivered and installed on Wednesday.  So floors are done!  I didn't bother with many pictures of it because they have white paper down so that contractors can walk around the house without messing up the brand new floors (although there are a lot of dusty footprints all over the place too).

The flooring in the bar - the room with the least amount of paper in it.

The plumber has been to the house once already and he started the chlorine flush, which is great news.  We are hoping that is done soon so that the water can be tested and we get another inspection down.  Speaking of inspections, there are 8 total and we've passed 2 already.  We had a third one for electric this week and Steve saw yesterday that it failed but we don't know why yet.  We think it has something to do with our dishwasher and garbage disposal not hooked up yet, but we don't know for sure.

The drywall touch ups were completed this week and the painter came in on Wednesday to start those touch ups.  The painter also did the first coat on our front door and I absolutely LOVE the color.  We have an advantage by not living in a neighborhood - we don't have an HOA so we can do whatever we want to our house.  I wanted a pop of color on our door to break up all the neutrals and I think I got my pop!  If anyone is curious, the color is Spa by Sherwin Williams.

LOVE the door!

Close up

Kiss My Asphalt (We Did!)

This is going to be a short blog because there's really only one update.

Steve and I both had off work on Friday to get ready for the Do Your Best 5k (www.stefripple.org), which was a resounding success, by the way.  On our way to our friend's house that day, we stopped at our house around 9:00 in the morning to see who was working.  We weren't sure if we'd see the flooring contractors there, and we didn't.  But it was for a very good reason!  They were going to start paving our driveway on Friday!

The entire weekend called for rain, so we were a bit concerned about whether or not they'd finish Friday or have to push some of the work to Monday.  But we also knew that you're not supposed to drive on new asphalt for a day or two, so we thought they probably wanted to push really hard to get it done Friday so everything else could resume again on Monday.

Saturday after the race, we stopped by the house and we were shocked to see they finished the entire driveway!  We have a common driveway that we share with two other lots and then our own driveway.  All told, it's over 700 feet of paving that needed to be done and they did it!

We're hoping they'll be able to finish floors tomorrow so that the plumbing and touch ups still stay on track.  Either way though, the driveway is a huge milestone and I can't wait to actually drive down to the garage tomorrow after work!!

Top of the driveway; our house in the distance

Our driveway

Look at our driveway!!!  I never thought I'd be this excited about a driveway!

We're Floored (Again)!!

It has been a wonderful week at Home Base!!  On Tuesday, we walked through the front door greeted with the smell of new carpet permeating the house.  Thankfully, they put a plastic covering on some of it to create a pathway to get to the various rooms, so we were able to check it out in each room.  We chose a neutral gray for the entire second floor.  I was smart and took my shoes off, so I could actually walk on the carpet while Steve had to stay on the plastic with his muddy boots.  :-)  I was so excited about the carpet that I ran laps in our master bedroom just to play on the carpet.  Ask Steve, he will verify that's a true statement.  In fact, I've done that every day since Tuesday because I'm just that excited!  It's crazy how different it looks and feels in the house now that we have carpet.  It actually looks like a house now!  It's kind of scary how used to the white-painted plywood floors I was getting.  It's also so quiet going up the steps now too!

Carpet in our room

Carpet on the steps

Backstory on why Steve looks angry:  As a kid, when he and his sister were in trouble, they were told to sit on the steps.  In their rooms, they could find something to do.  Now that we have carpet, I'm able to tell Steve to sit on the steps if he's not being good.  He thought he could walk on the brand new carpet with muddy boots!!  ;-)

It gets better...

On Wednesday, they started installing our floors on the main level!  I was planning to blog about the floors after they finished.  They haven't finished yet, but are probably going to be done tomorrow.  Today, they covered the part of the floor they had done with paper, so yesterday's pictures will have to do for now.  I guess you aren't getting an actual picture of the floors until we move in.  Sorry guys!

Closeup of the floor we chose

Yay floor!!

I cannot wait to see the rest of it around the fireplace!!! 

Dining room is done!

Throughout this entire process, we would send emails probably on a weekly basis to our Bob Ward team to say whatever progress looked great and to ask what was coming up that week.  We have been thrilled with our team at Bob Ward, but one thing they could improve on is communication.  They aren't too quick to reply to our emails.  We were set up for that even before we agreed to build with them, so we were kind of used to it.  But they would let enough days go by that we'd usually need to follow up on the email and in some cases, we'd need to follow up a couple times.  It has never gotten to the point where I blow up like I did with BGE because I'd usually always see progress on the house at the same time, so I was getting answers that way.  Still, it'd be nice to have the communication a little more regular.  I bring all this up because we sent an email last week asking when they think we may have keys because we have deliveries lined up and contractors (deck and fence) coming the last week of September.  No response.  We asked again this week and this time we got what is shown below.  Steve and I got quite the laugh out of this!  Where was this document since February 22nd when we broke ground?!?!  But the best news is that we know drywall and paint touch ups were the last things they needed to do before all of our inspections, so assuming all goes to plan, the house is going to be done next week.  Fingers crossed we pass all of our inspections quickly so we can move in soon after!

A lot of good news in this document!

I Love Lamp

I don't think I will ever be able to say this enough:  I hate BGE.  They were supposed to be completely done with their work this past Monday, and that was not the case.  On Monday, we were expecting a response from our weekend email to Matthew (because surprisingly Ferguson did work on Saturday) where we were confirming that Monday was still the expected completion.  No response.  On Monday night, we sent another email expecting a response on Tuesday.  Tuesday we emailed and called.  No response.  Tuesday evening after another day of no power, I called Matthew's boss.  That was the correct fire to light apparently.  Tom (Matthew's boss) called the contractor Tuesday night and they claimed they never received the paperwork to install the meter at the house.  This was the only thing left in order for us to have power.  Thankfully Tom pulled some strings to make sure that happened Wednesday morning and by Wednesday afternoon, we knew Victor had been to the house and he confirmed we had power!  You have no idea how happy I am that we have power and that we are done with BGE's (mostly Matthew's) shenanigans.

Do you know how exciting it was to go into our house and turn lights on and off?  And ring the doorbell?  And have the AC running?  It's a huge hurdle that is finally behind us.  All that's left now is flooring, chlorine flush in the pipes, and a ton of inspections.  We are hoping we're only about 3 weeks away from move in, but that will depend on how long the chlorine flush takes and whether we pass inspections or not.

We weren't able to see lights on or turn them on until Thursday - this was so fun to see as we pulled into the driveway!

Look at all the lights that are on!!!  PS - I hate that pendant light over the island about as much as I hate BGE.  We already have a replacement for it.

A few little things happened at the house this week too.  We finally have our barn doors installed (well...regular doors on barn door hardware - it was $4,000 per door if we went with actual wood barn doors) and our porch railing was installed.  We have to have the railing on the porch because of the grading in the front yard - it's slightly too big of a step and wouldn't be code if we didn't have it.  Whenever I've dreamed of having a front porch in my head, it's always included a railing, so I'm not heartbroken at all over needing to have one.

Pantry closed 

Pantry open

Master bath closed

Master bath open

Porch railing!