Here are a few images of the new kitchen.
Here is a shot of the butler’s pantry. These cabinets will be switched to the dark brown color.
One of my favorite parts about the 1st floor is this built in cabinet in the dining room.
We know that we’d like to use these 7 inch cabinet bar pulls. 
But we are also trying to decide if we should add in a few knobs, like these:
I also like these vintage glass knobs. I think these will look lovely on that built in. 🙂
What do you think?
If you want to jump to the time lapse video, click here to skip the details.
We got a new house today, y’all!
What an amazing day. We arrived at the property at around 7:30am and the awesome crane operator and set team had already arrived and were waiting for the first box.
About 10 minutes later, the first box arrived. Three of the boxes were actually delivered last night and were being stored in a parking lot a few miles away. It is pretty incredible to see the truck pull around the corner with that first box.
It takes the crew a few minutes to attach the supports from the crane to the box, but it takes flight pretty quickly!
Once the two bottom floor boxes were installed, the third box was stacked on top.
The set crew was amazing. All they do is set modular houses. Can you imagine doing this every day? Once the first top floor box was installed, the crew literally “raised the roof “. The roof is shipped flat, but is engineered to flip up once the box is set.
The last box had to be driven from the factory today, so after an early lunch, the guys were back at it.
Once the last box was set, the crew spent the rest of the afternoon finishing the roof and adding the windows and additional zip sheathing that couldn’t be installed with the boxes.
It is really amazing how quickly the house went up.
Mike was so excited, he had to strike a pose….
Check out this really cool time lapse video that Mike created!
GoingHome from LittleTownBigCity on Vimeo.
House set is tomorrow. We can’t wait! Check back soon for pictures.
We visited the factory yesterday to check out our house “on the line”. It was really surreal to see these rooms that we have been looking at on a floor plan come to life. Since we are building modular, the house is broken up into four “boxes”. The engineers, plumbers, carpenters, and painters follow a plan that is posted on the outside of each particular box.
The first box we looked at contained our kitchen and dining room. Here is a shot of our kitchen cabinets. I love the glass insert. 😉
Mikey checking out the island.
We were really excited about how the kitchen cabinets looked. The only issue we had was that cabinets installed in the butler’s pantry were the wrong color. These cabinets should have been the dark brown “Kona” color, not the white “Chiffon”. Please excuse the blurry photos.
The guys at the factory were super nice and they have already ordered the replacements. Building modular allowed us to design the interior to our liking. Details like this built-in china cabinet in the dining room are really cool. I wish we could have built-ins everywhere.
Next we moved to one of the 2nd floor boxes. This one was made up of our master bedroom/bath and part of the 4th bedroom and study. Mikey was really excited to meet his “shower room”.
To stay within our budget, we had to go with builder grade options on a lot of our finishes, like this pendent in the upstairs hallway. Not my favorite, but not too bad.
The next box was the other side of our 1st floor. This one had our family room and living room. The half walls will divide the open kitchen from the the family room.
Here is a first look at our living room. Eventually, I’d love to install built in cabinets around the fireplace. We’ll have to decide what to do once the mantle is installed.
This ends the factory tour of our new modular house. It was really amazing despite the small panic attack I had when I realized this is really happening and we have to fork over the rest of our life savings to pay for the remaining finishings. Eek!
Long time no post… After waiting for months to get permit approvals, we were anxious to get started. Our builder moved pretty quickly getting the land ready for the foundation.
You can’t imagine how excited we were just to see a crane on the property. Once they cleared out the property and started to dig, they hit some debris. Turns out, there was an existing foundation on the property. It was from the 1800’s and made mostly of large brownstones.
This was certainly a surprise, but unfortunately a costly surprise. It turns out that it is really hard to dispose of mixed soil. We had to find a place that would take the soil. It ended up costing us about $400/truckload. This was an unexpected cost. Fortunately our builder was able to use some of the material for fill under the driveway. A week later we had a big hole and the builder was ready to install the foundation.
The foundation was constructed by a company called Superior Walls. They use precast concrete walls to create a pre-insulated basement to fit any architecture. It is pretty amazing. The entire foundation was set in just a few hours.
Tomorrow we are heading to the factory to see our house on the line. The “drop” is scheduled for a couple of weeks from today. Things seem to really be coming together!
I haven’t been able to update the blog for a while, since we were waiting and waiting AND WAITING for the township to approve our plans and release our building permits. It took about 4.5 months, but we finally have permits! Our builder is planning to start clearing the lot and excavating for the foundation next week. The house is scheduled to go into production on June 11th. We can’t wait! Check back for more regular updates, now that we are really getting started!
Choosing appliances for the new house was really fun. I did a TON of research on the kitchen forums of gardenweb.com. The forums were a great resource, especially when choosing our oven/range. If you know us, you know that we love to cook, so getting an excellent stove was very important to us. When looking at stoves there are a few different ways to go. You can buy wall ovens and a cook top, like this:
Or you can buy a slide in or stationary range, like this beauty from, Bertazzoni:
We would have loved to go with the wall ovens and separate cook top, but space and budget considerations left us with the standard freestanding range option.
When choosing our range, we had to consider whether to buy all electric, all gas, or duel fuel (electric oven and a gas cook top). Folks seem to say that electric ovens are great for cooking and baking, because of the heat precision an electric oven affords. Electric ovens have a smooth cook top, which I tend to like.
However, it is also seems that you can’t beat the versatility of a gas burner for simmering on low or cooking at high heats. I love these great open two ring burners made by Capital Culinarian:
So it goes without saying that a duel fuel range would be the best of both worlds. Of course, that option costs extra money, so we had to make a choice. We really wanted a pro-style 36″ range and most ranges of this size are gas or duel fuel. After a few trips to various appliance stores, we narrowed down our search to American, BlueStar, Capital, and DCS 36″ gas ranges. We ultimately chose the DCS 36″ 6-Burner Gas Range.
We got a great deal on the range from a local retailer. We were also able to take advantage of a special that the appliance store was offering and they threw in this sweet double drawer dishwasher for free.
Now we have to find a refrigerator that matches the DCS brushed stainless steel. Fun!
Oh man did we have a hard time picking out flooring! Our house will be open concept, so we plan to have hardwood throughout the whole house. The only rooms that will not have hardwood are the bathrooms and possibly the basement.
While picking out hardwood, we had to consider how the floors would look with our kitchen cabinets. Our builder uses Merillat Cabinets, the Classic Collection. We selected the “Portrait” style maple cabinets in “Chiffon”, which is a soft off-white color.
That would be pretty easy to match, except we decided we wanted a darker colored kitchen island. We chose the same style cabinets but in the “Kona” color, which is a dark wood stain.
Picking something that wouldn’t be too close to Kona, but looked good with the Chiffon proved to be more difficult then I thought it would be.
I have always wanted black floors and I quickly convinced Mike that they would look super slick.
But the black hardwood looked odd with the dark brown cabinets. We decided to look at the opposite end of the spectrum and started looking at unfinished floors.
Mike vetoed the unfinished floors early on and we had to compromise. We finally landed on a dark maple that is not too similar to the Kona cabinets. We found a really great deal on a 4″ wide espresso maple for $4.25/sq ft. This is only .25 cents over our flooring allowance.
Since the first day of the house design process, my husband has been dreaming about having a walk in shower.
How do you go from this
to this?
We finally have a layout that we like, now we have to pick out the finishes and I mean ALL the finishes.
I never thought about what type of door knobs I liked, until our last house had brass fixtures. Yuck. Â Now we are pouring over these types of details and crossing our fingers that we get it right. Â Stressful.
We decided to start with floors… Lets see where this takes us.
littletownbigcity 