I am so excited to share this part of the new house with you guys! Hands down my favorite part of building our dream house: CHOOSING ALL THE DESIGN FINISHES! The 8,348,239 choices that had to be made were overwhelming at times but 100% FUN. I am going to do my best to share as much as I can in this post, but just a warning, it’s going to be long! I probably won’t be able to share bore you with every single selection, but I’ll share the important ones 😉
This entire process took a couple of months. I am sharing all the finalized selections, but know that behind all of this was hours of pinterest scouring, dozens of screen shots, lots of mind changing, budget crunching, and asking my design minded friends’ opinions. (Notice that hubby approval wasn’t mentioned. That only fell under the budget crunching category, haha!)
So this is the design center that I visited probably no less than 12 times throughout this process. They highly encouraged you to come and “preview” the design center on specific days to get a feel for all the selections and options, that way when it came down to D Day (design day), you spent most of your time telling the designers what you wanted, and not browsing and debating. I went to every.single.preview day and laid out tiles and countertops and matched flooring to cabinets to faucets.
I even brought in samples of my own backsplash and hardware that I plan on adding to the kitchen to match up with the cabinets and countertops since I’ll be doing those things myself. I’m pretty sure they dreaded seeing me walk through the doors every time, ha!
They have several kitchens and baths set up throughout the design center that feature so many different standard options you can choose. And then they have this “custom” kitchen area which features examples of things you can custom request.
The sky is literally the limit with the custom items. I had custom requests for both my kitchen and master bath cabinets. You’ll see more of that below 🙂
Faucets, lighting, flooring galore!
So if you don’t have me pegged yet then SPOILER ALERT: I have dreamed of an all white kitchen for my new house. I’m sure that’s not shocking, being that I love neutrals, but a beautiful white kitchen was HIGH HIGH HIGH on my priority list for our new house.
Like this one. From Bree at Zdesignathome. It just makes me melt. But obviously, we had a budget I had to work within. Mainly for the design elements for the entire house. So I had to prioritize WHERE I wanted to spend that budget and how much I wanted to dedicate to the kitchen, baths, flooring, etc. Let’s just say a lot of it went to the kitchen. Followed by the master bath 😉
So here’s a configuration of the standard kitchen that our builder provides for our floor plan.
Not super exciting, right? One of my ABSOLUTE MUST HAVES for my new kitchen was a custom range hood. Not a microwave, not a stainless steel hood, but a wood hood that matches the rest of the cabinets. Like if I had to get zero upgrades everywhere else in order to get this hood, it was going to happen. It’s that serious, y’all.
There’s a model home that has exactly what I wanted. So I took this picture to my builder and said THIS. Make this happen.
Annnnd I even love the stacked glass cabinets on top of the cabinets on either side of the hood. I think it just all comes together as one pretty package. So I asked for those too!
So instead of that, I will have this!
I changed the configuration of the island to seat more stools, and will also have a rain glass pantry door, instead of a regular door. We will also have a pot filler beneath the hood and pendant lights hanging above the island. I added sooooo many other things like a built in trash can, bumped out cabinets and countertop at the stove, drawers instead of doors for pots and pans, built in refrigerator side panel, extra thick crown molding, light rail molding, disposal button on the counter, built in soap dispenser, and tilt out sponge drawers at the sink.
I just can’t wait to see this come to life. We decided to do our own backsplash and hardware for the cabinets in the kitchen. I am dead set of having gold hardware and unfortunately the builder didn’t have any gold options. As far as the backsplash, I want a marble subway tile. We can do this ourselves (read: hire a handyman because I can’t cut marble) for significantly less than what the builder would charge. So those two things will be happening immediately after we close.
Here’s a sneak peak at the finishes for the kitchen put together.
The countertop is a white speckle quartz that I just adore.
the Q1 in the photo above is the quartz countertops I chose for all the bathrooms and the Q2 beneath it is a closeup of the kitchen countertop. And this is the faucet I chose for the kitchen.
Our breakfast nook, which is adjacent to the kitchen will have a wall of cabinets that match the kitchen. The standard configuration of the breakfast cabinets look like this:
Pretty boring. Again, I saw a model that had breakfast cabinets with a lot more interest and personality. So I took a picture with me to the builder and asked to copy them. Here is what our configuration will be:
With glass cabinets in the center 4 doors.
Much better, right? It will also have the marble backsplash and gold hardware that the rest of the kitchen will be sporting 🙂
Oh! And I almost forgot this little collage I made of our kitchen.
I already ordered these gold pendants to hang above the island and I’m really dreaming of these upholstered bar stools, but I think they’re super unrealistic with kiddos. I’m super struggling with this one over here.
Moving on to the master bathroom. Give me all the marble. Marble tile floor, marble subway tile shower, and a gray and white sorta marbly countertop. It will look super duper similar to this model that I just absolutely love.
The main differences are that my vanity cabinets will be white, and we will not have that half knee wall in the shower. It will be solid glass to the floor. I can. not. wait. Oh, and there will be a chandelier over the tub. (That I may have already bought) Melt.
We customized the vanity to be similar to that one pictured above. The standard vanity looks like this:
I actually really like that it has a vanity stool area, and in fact my current bathroom has one that I use almost daily, but I just really loved the extra storage and look the full vanity provides. So I reconfigured it to this:
And I’m reallyyyy hoping I don’t regret this decision!
The rest of the bathrooms will have the exact same finishes as the master: white cabinets, gray/white countertop, and marble tile showers.
The difference is that they will have wood tile flooring like the rest of the house. Speaking of wood tile flooring, this was probably hands down the design decision I stressed over the most.
I knew I wanted wood tile flooring as opposed to real wood, because of 1) the cost savings and 2) the durability of tile, but I had no idea how hard it would be to choose one. There were SO MANY options and I was terrified to pick a floor for MY ENTIRE HOUSE when only looking at one single piece. Flooring can look so different when it’s 2,000 square feet as opposed to just looking at a single plank. I literally was sick over this decision. Again, I really really wanted to copy one of the floors in the model that I adored:
But, it was the most expensive color they offered. Just my luck. So I was determined to find a cheaper alternative. I found this one that I really loved (from the 2 planks):
But since I was worried how it would look in the whole house, I went to the website online where they give you a virtual superimposed image of what it looks like in a large space. And this is what it showed:
Like, seriously?? That looks NOTHING like the sample I had in my hands. The picture online looks like pine needles all over the dirt at a campsite. There was no way I was going to put this in my entire house. So I was back to the drawing board. It just so happened that while I was stressing this flooring decision, our custom quotes for the kitchen and bath cabinets came in. And they were surprisingly way under budget. (I budgeted super high just in case because remember, that custom hood was happening NO MATTER WHAT haha!) So I had just enough left in the budget to get those same wood floors that were in the model. WOOO HOOO! I was able to sleep again.
Here are the double front doors I ordered. As opposed to solid, no glass, doors. I’m really excited about the extra light! And nervous about the fact that I can’t hide from people I don’t want to answer the door to, haha!
Phew! If you’ve made it this far, here is a picture of all the selections I made for the entire house. (Minus the wood floors because I changed them after the fact like I mentioned above). Pretty much white and gray everything 🙂
But don’t worry, I will be adding some more pops of color in my decor at this house (I think!) to warm everything up. I’m super excited to see it all come together and hope it looks as good in person as it does in my head and on paper! What do you guys think? Leave a comment, I love hearing from you guys as always!