Planning The Showhouse: a house log

The past couple of months have seen quite the flurry of activity in the Homearama showhouse department, which you might remember as the house that we are helping to design and decorate (along with an remarkable team of builders, architects, and other pros) to benefit Habitat For Humanity. You can read some background on it here and check out a floor planning post about it here, but the exciting news is that in a matter of weeks the lot has gone from a patch of dirt to an nearly fully constructed home. It has been remarkable to witness, so here is two months of progress boiled down into six pictures:

A couple of weeks ago we even shot a little house tour video for you. It is a bit rougher than our usual tour video – mainly because there are no walls, no furniture, etc, etc – but also with all of the construction noise, the audio that we recorded on site was a mess. So I voiced over the tour again later from home. But at the quite least it helps you see how this floor plan has come to life, and mentions a few plans that we have for each room as they come together.

With construction going at hyper speed, it thrust us into design-selection overdrive. Suddenly we needed to be making decisions about lighting, plumbing, flooring, fixtures, and more – all at once. Simply so the bones of the house could be built to accommodate them. It fully makes sense that when you are building a new house you need to know every last tile, cabinet, and sconce that will be going in (to allow for certain accommodations, like proper underlayments and correctly placed fixture boxes) but it has never been something that we have done all at once like this.

It is been exciting, inspiring, excellent, humbling, and overwhelming all at the same time. There has been a large learning curve, so I like to think that we are getting better as we go – but for the last eight years of homeownership we have been so used to tackling one room at a time (frequently simply choosing one element at a time) – so being tasked with picking a bunch of elements for every room all at once (before anything is even in the space – heck, before there are even any walls up) is certainly exercising a new mental muscle.

Simply to give you an idea, here are the types of decisions that we have had to make over the last few weeks:

• selecting 7 rooms worth of cabinetry (including each door/drawer style, paint color/wood tone, configuration/layout & the hardware for each one)
• choosing 5 countertop materials for various rooms (the kitchen, the bathrooms, the laundry room, etc)
• picking out 21 plumbing fixtures (including faucets, sinks, tubs, toilets, and shower sets)
• selecting 44 light fixtures (simply anything hard-wired, so this includes chandeliers, flush mounts, pendants, and sconces, but not table lamps)
• doing an electrical walk-thru to pinpoint exactly where wiring needs to go for each fixture (to the inch), along with determining the placement of all can lights, outlets, and light switches
• making 14 tile choices for things like the kitchen backsplash, the bathroom floors and showers, the mudroom and laundry room floor, etc
• picking all of our appliances for the kitchen and laundry room
• selecting door styles for the front door, the garage doors, and every interior door (including specialty pocket doors, all door hinges, and all doorknobs)
• doing a carpentry walk-thru to share detailed plans/photos/sketches for moldings, wainscoting, and built-in features (including shelves, bookcases, benches, mudroom cabinetry, a desk nook, and a bed that is flanked by two wardrobes)
• choosing the hardwood floor style and stain color
• picking an exterior stone style and pinning down a porch column height
• mapping out a to-scale construction plan for the fireplace and the mantle in the living room

We knew going into this there’d be plenty of decisions to make and materials to choose, but we forgot how intricate some of those choices can be when you are trying to make sure everything meshes together well – not simply in style, but also in size and placement. Simply today we were coordinating between the counter guy, the cabinet folks, and our plumbing girl to make sure everyone was on the same page (so we would not end up with a sink cabinet with a counter hole for the wrong type of faucet).

One of our go-to parts of the hunt so far was lighting. You know Sherry loves herself some lights. So we cannot wait to share our finds as they start getting installed and the walls continue to go up.

I am sure those of you who’ve built a home before are nodding along a bit. We’d guess the process is similar, although nothing comes to us pre-packaged like we hear that it can with some new construction homes (i.e. “pick from these three bathroom suite options”). It is fairly exciting though, because the whole point of Homearama is for each of the seven houses to showcase distinct styles and (hopefully) interesting ideas for everyone who walks through. So we have found ourselves stretching our comfort zone a little in the hopes of creating something fresh and exciting, while still being comfortable and livable. The jury’s still out on how it is all going to come together, so admittedly we have all of our appendages crossed fairly much at all times.

And of course, all of these decisions need to be made within a budget and to meet strict deadlines (we have zero wiggle room since the show opens on May 1st, whether we are ready or not). We feel extremely lucky that our builder, aka Builder John (pictured above sporting his now-gone mustache for charity from December), is strong at keeping us on track. He tells us we are ahead of schedule, which I hope is true and is not simply him trying to keep us from stressing out.

As for what else we have been hunting for, we would enjoy for our house to have a mixture of new things and excellent secondhand scores, so there has been some of this going on…

We are nearing the end of the fixture & finish selection part of the design (at least we hope!) so we will soon be transitioning to picking the items that are not nailed, wired, glued, or otherwise permanently affixed to house. I am talking furniture, rugs, bedding, art, accessories, and… wait a minute, I feel a especially nerdy color-coded excel spreadsheet coming on. Anyways, once we get a bit more of that done we are thinking that we will start putting together some mood boards so you can see how each room is shaping up, along with photos of them coming together.

But we could not leave you without a little preview. So here are a couple of items we are particularly psyched about. Let us start with some tile – the one of the left is going floor to ceiling in the powder room behind a pedestal sink with a mirror and some fairly sweet sconces. And the tile on the right is for the main bedroom’s bathroom shower. The watery blue glass tile will fill a giant shower wall and the octagonal tile will be on the shower floor.

We are also having some lively with distinct hardware/lighting choices, like two giant gold pendants that will hang over a big navy blue kitchen island (the rest of the cabinets will be a distinct, lighter tone). And we have chosen crisp five panel doors for each room of the house (like these), which we think will be a pleasant departure from the standard six panel ones – especially since the exterior of this house is Craftsman-inspired.

Lastly, this is not an item, but an inspiration source. We knew we hoped to do the vanity in the kids’ jack-and-jill bathroom in a glad green color. But you know how our last attempt at picking a green vanity color went (seriously, it was bad). So randomly while at Target we spotted this side table, enjoyed the color, and busted out our paint deck right there in the aisle (Sherry has that thing on hand more frequently than you’d expect). Courtyard Green, here we come!

Amongst other things, one of the next big steps is for the exterior of the house to get it painted, which should be happening within the week. In fact we were simply out there with three test pots of paint, picking our go-to (along with choosing the trim color). So stay tuned for that update! We were also thinking it would be lively to open up some things in the showhouse to votes by you folks (like the color of the front door, for example) so stay tuned for those as we go. Can you believe that in around three months we should have over fifteen wrapped up spaces to share with you folks?

Psst – Wanna see the wrapped up showhouse? Click here for Our Full Showhouse Tour, which includes final pictures of every room, the floor plan, budget info, a video walk-through, and shoppable showhouse furniture & accessories.