The past couple of months have been a whirlwind at the Homearama showhouse — the project we’re designing and decorating with an incredible team of builders, architects, and other pros to benefit Habitat for Humanity. If you want background or floor plan details, those were covered previously, but the exciting update is this: in a matter of weeks the lot has transformed from a patch of dirt into an almost fully constructed home. Watching that progress has been incredible, so here are six images showing two months of work condensed into a few snapshots:
A couple of weeks ago we filmed a short house tour. It’s rougher than our usual tours because there are no finished walls or furniture yet, and construction noise made on-site audio difficult — so we added a voiceover recorded later. The video still gives a good sense of how the floor plan has come together and highlights some of our initial ideas for each room as they take shape.
When construction started moving at high speed, we went into design-selection overdrive. Decisions about lighting, plumbing, flooring, fixtures, and more had to be made quickly so the house could be built to accommodate them. It’s expected when building a new home — you need to know tiles, cabinets, and sconces ahead of time so tradespeople can plan for underlayments, proper fixture boxes, and precise locations — but it’s different from the way we’ve always worked, room by room.
It’s been exciting, inspiring, humbling, and occasionally overwhelming. There’s a steep learning curve, and we’ve been pushing ourselves to make a lot of choices at once — many before walls were even up. After eight years of taking projects one element at a time, this full-house approach has definitely exercised a new mental muscle. Still, we feel like we’re improving as we move forward.
To give you an idea of the scope, here are the kinds of decisions we’ve made over the last few weeks:
- Selecting cabinetry for seven rooms: door and drawer styles, paint or wood tones, configurations, layouts, and hardware for each one.
- Choosing five different countertop materials for the kitchen, bathrooms, laundry, and other spaces.
- Picking 21 plumbing fixtures: faucets, sinks, tubs, toilets, and shower sets.
- Selecting 44 hard-wired light fixtures, including chandeliers, flush mounts, pendants, and sconces.
- Conducting an electrical walk-through to mark exact locations for wiring, can lights, outlets, and switches.
- Deciding on 14 tile selections for kitchen backsplashes, bathroom floors and showers, and utility spaces.
- Choosing appliances for the kitchen and laundry.
- Selecting styles for the front door, garage doors, and all interior doors — including pocket doors, hinges, and doorknobs.
- Completing a carpentry walk-through to specify moldings, wainscoting, built-ins, shelves, benches, mudroom cabinetry, a desk nook, and a bed flanked by wardrobes.
- Picking a hardwood floor species and stain color.
- Choosing exterior stone and setting porch column heights.
- Mapping a to-scale plan for the living room fireplace and mantle.
We expected lots of choices, but didn’t fully anticipate how detailed coordination must be so everything works together in scale and placement. Just today we coordinated between the countertop team, cabinet installers, and the plumbing contractor to ensure the sink cabinet and countertop hole would match the faucet type — little details that matter once things are installed.
Lighting has been one of our favorite hunts — Sherry especially loves fixtures — and we can’t wait to share the lighting selections as they’re installed and the spaces start to feel finished.
For those who’ve built before, this likely resonates — the process feels similar even if other new-construction options offer pre-packaged bundles. Homearama’s goal is for each of the seven houses to showcase different styles and ideas, so we’ve been stretching beyond our usual comfort zone to create rooms that feel fresh but still practical. We’re excited to see it all come together and are keeping everything crossed until it does.
All selections must stay within a budget and meet strict deadlines — the show opens on May 1st, so there’s no wiggle room. We’re grateful to our builder, Builder John (pictured above), for keeping the project on track and for reassuring us that we’re ahead of schedule.
We’re blending new purchases with secondhand finds, which has been fun and rewarding. As we wrap up the fixtures and finishes phase, we’ll move on to the movable elements: furniture, rugs, bedding, art, and accessories. Expect mood boards and progress photos so you can see how each room is shaping up; yes, a color-coded spreadsheet is likely in our near future.
Here are a few items we’re especially excited about: two tile choices — one that will run floor to ceiling in the powder room behind a pedestal sink with a mirror and sconces, and a watery blue glass tile that will fill a large shower wall in the main bedroom’s bathroom with an octagonal tile on the shower floor.
We’ve had fun with hardware and lighting choices: two large gold pendants will hang over a navy blue kitchen island while the rest of the cabinets will be a lighter tone. We also selected crisp five-panel doors for every room, which feel like a nice departure from six-panel doors and suit the home’s Craftsman-inspired exterior.
We also found a spur-of-the-moment inspiration: while shopping we spotted a side table in a green hue we loved, tested a paint deck in the aisle, and decided to bring that Courtyard Green to the kids’ jack-and-jill vanity. After our last green-vanity experiment, we were happy to get this one right.
Next up: exterior painting, which should happen within the week. We recently tested three paint pots on site and picked a favorite along with trim colors. We’re also planning interactive moments where you can help vote on details like the front door color, so stay tuned. In roughly three months we expect to have more than fifteen finished spaces to share — we can’t wait to show you the results.
Psst — Want to see the finished showhouse? Our full showhouse tour includes final pictures of each room, the floor plan, budget details, a video walk-through, and shoppable furniture and accessories.