New Master Closet

UPDATE:  We decided to finish off our master bedroom closet.  Since we did not choose the option for the extra bathroom upstairs, we decided to eliminate the "L" shape that includes a sitting area.  We used that space and the original walk-in closet to make a much larger master closet.

Here are our results:

Mud Room, Pantry, Main Hallway, Loft changes/updates

We have made a few adjustments in various places over the last few months.
We also have some ideas of things to put on our to-do list.
One is to change the 2nd closet in the master bedroom into a ROOM by adding a new wall where the closet would have been if we had that 3rd bathroom upstairs.  With that wall installed, that closet will be almost the size of the guest bedroom!  YEA!  Only trouble is that the current closet wall has electric/plumbing and other things in it, so we might have to get creative in order to accomplish this.
But here are our most recent changes/updates in the form of pictures.

We did some wainscoting down the main hallway and used twine to decorate with holiday cards this year (see "mud room" in the background).

Our additional hanging places for jackets that are often used in the "mud room".  This is really just a hallway. 

Bought a bunch of stacking shelves from WalMart and hung them upside down in the pantry to create smaller spaces/shelves.

This is what our loft looks like at the moment.  We now have an "art station" for the boys -- eventually we'd like to get rid of the 2 bookcases and make 2 desks for them.  But for now, they have a place to draw, color, and create (while their train-table turned lego-table waits in the foreground).

Our next purcahse really needs to be a new couch.  This one is about 14 years old and has been through a lot with 2 dogs and 2 kids.  It is oh-so comfortable, but needs boards to keep in together.  We are hoping to get some ideas from other Rome homes for configurations in the family room.  We are not 100% set on anything in terms of sectional or not... chaise or not, lazy-boy or not...

Here is an older photo of our family room to see our current set up (minus the plastic bins)

On to figure out the closet situation and furniture browse/shop.  

Deck completion!

Our deck is about 99% complete.  It is just missing a few caps that needed to be ordered.  But for the most part, it is done and we love it.  It is very large and currently houses our old deck furniture AND patio furniture because there is SO much room!  Here is a set of quick progression photos.

We've also built a few walls to create our own yard.  We have a large community-owned space next to us that the kids can run around in, but we wanted to have some flat land in our own yard, so we are working on walls and fences.  You can see the beginning of the wall in this photo (it is huge to cover the large hill that used to be our back yard).

UPDATES and maybe going to build a deck

We are hoping to have a deck built before 4th of July this year!  We've been in our house for over a year and have done a lot of planning but haven't really put any of those plans in motion because I returned to work this year (yikes!).  
But it is now the first day of summer vacation and I am on a mission to do more things to our house!
Here are the colors of the decking we plan to use.

Contemporary Patio by Chesterfield General Contractors Fischer & Frichtel

We built a shed in the small area behind the house next to the morning room (on the kitchen side).

We changed the sink in the kitchen.  I decided that I didn't like the 6-inch depth on the standard sink.  I also didn't like the 50/50 sink because a lot of my pans did not fit in that space.   

So we installed large sink from home depot.

We also added a hidden drawer for sponges at the sink.

We had some problems with our basement door leaking water and after months of back and forth minor fixes, Ryan homes finally replaced the door.

Our laminate in our living/dining room and foyer was not installed correctly or well (????).  At our one-year inspection they agreed to fix it but I think it looks worse.  There are gaps at a lot of seams AND many of the seams are peeling up.  We paid extra money for this floor and flooring people say that it is a good product so it should not be doing this.  We are going to try to get them to replace it with something else but I am sure that will take a while to happen.  
Good thing I am home all summer and available for them to work!  :)

And since I haven't posted since June of 2012, here is what I did to the front of our house for Halloween in 2012.

Just gotta love the view!

We've been in the house over a month and even though we've accomplished a lot, there are still so many little things to do here and there.
This picture was just taken tonight and I had to share because I absolutely LOVE living in this new area -- so much more open and calm and I love it!

Hold the rainbow up in the sky!

The next plan is to level out our back yard using a retaining wall and we are having some people give us quotes to do the work.  Luckily for us, the developer of our neighborhood (the guy who did all the "set-up work" before Ryan Homes took over), is a good friend of a friend.  So, he has all the paperwork and information readily available for us to design our necessary retaining wall.  He has even been to our house twice already to help figure out some designs.  I look forward to what they come up with, but, of course, am a bit frightened by the possible price.  Also - we have a large area in the corner of our lot that is part of a "Water Resource Protection Easement" and we can not build on it... but there should be plenty of room for us to have a decent back yard working around that section.  Before pictures will come soon!

Changes here and there...

When we chose the options for our house, we knew we'd be making some additional purchases and changes as immediately as possible.   We had a budget and we stuck to it.  Every option we chose was something we did not want to do ourselves and/or could not easily be changed down the road.
For example, we bought our own kitchen refrigerator rather than going with the ones offered.  We opted for a "counter depth" refrigerator because I was not too thrilled with the idea of a fridge sticking out into the kitchen too far and to avoid the claustrophobic feeling (that I got) when opening the last cabinet by the wall.  Here is what we ended up with and I am very happy with our choice!

It is still a tight squeeze getting into that last cabinet, but thanks to Gina (a fellow Rome owner/blogger), we asked our PM to switch the door so that it opens away from the wall... otherwise you couldn't slide out the drawer inside.


Here are some other things we have changed so far.

 We installed a new kitchen faucet -- at our last Ryan Home we paid for an upgraded  faucet but we decided to save a little money and do it ourselves this time. (the smaller photo is the BEFORE)

We have installed a ceiling fan in the morning room

We installed a ceiling fan in the family room -- this is actually the 2nd fan we have put in here because the first one was hanging too low.  We opted for less fancy fans because we couldn't find any nicer ones that we liked that put out enough light for us.

We got rid of the full size towel rack in the powder room.  Seems silly to have a rack for a bath towel in a powder room to me anyway... not to mention that the towel rack was on the wall in front of the toilet so there was no way to not drip water all over the floor each time you went to dry your hands off over there.

Installed (installing) our garage door opener - I know Ryan Homes offers these as options, but again, we decided to do it ourselves and save money. 

We are not too thrilled with the lack of space in the garage.  We had a 4 foot extension in our garage at our last Ryan Home and we don't have that here....but there was this strange cement ledge that we decided to put our garage STUFF up onto maximizing the space for our extra fridge and freezer.  It makes a huge different so that the cars can fit easier into the space AND you can open the doors to both appliances... this is an in-progress photo though because we plan to make our garage look neat with bins and such.

The basement area under the family room is going to serve as the man-cave.  We had ALL of this stuff in our 4 foot extension in the garage at our last house, so we are working hard to get everything set up in the unfinished basement.  Unfortunately that means adding some framing and nailing through cement -- something we have never done.

On the kids side of the basement I decided to put the boys names on the wall.  I did this in our old house with paint once we finished our basement, but since we are not finishing this basement too soon, I just put their names on the wall with duct tape.... not as nice, but will serve the same purpose and make them both smile.

The new duct tape version -- just temporary and goes with the more "unfinished" look/decor.

The old version in our old house. 

Our next project is our dining room - we plan to paint my grandmother's  furniture, do some wainscoting, and replace the chandelier.  Here is a before picture... not sure when I will have an "after" picture, but the chairs are being painted as I type this NOW.  Yea!

Another project will be to figure out what to do for our deck.  We have some ideas but nothing planned just yet.  Although anything will be better than our current "deck".  ha ha.   

2 weeks post move-in = a work in progress!

We are still working on unpacking and setting everything up in each room of the house.  We have been here 2 weeks and there are so many things on our "to do" list, but overall we are happy with everything so far.  We do have a running list of items to tell our PM about, but nothing major that needs to be addressed (YEA!).

Here are some updated pics, but PLEASE keep in mind that these are all IN PROGRESS shots, and therefore do not judge us on our lack of decorating skills (yet).  We have plans to paint the rooms, but it took us a long time to paint our last house, so I'm not expecting it to happen too quickly here either.  At least Ryan homes does a two-tone paint now so we aren't looking at stark-white throughout.  :)

The study - with temporary shelves - we want to make some built-ins at some point with doors to cover all the crap... but this is our solution for the time being so we have somewhere to put stuff (still more stuff to go here and go through that is not pictured!).  A big THANK YOU to PAM for the desk because we had a card table before she gave us this desk!!!

Not super thrilled about having the couch blocking the openness between these rooms, but our sectional can only be set up in one direction... We also will be replacing these lamps and hanging those pictures that are on the far wall.

I thought I was going to dislike the orange chairs in here, but they are OK especially considering a lot of our decor is the same color -- I plan to make new covers for dog cages (you can't see the 2nd one) so that they will match -- the cages were hidden in our last house so we may also eventually look at doing something down the road because we like our cages in this area.

Dining room and living room - plan to hang curtains and art work soon (and paint this dining set black)!

Living Room - just need to finish hanging stuff in this room

Master Bedroom - it is huge and empty because we don't have much here.  I plan to use the  "sitting room" (not pictured) for my sewing area (need a table) and crafting supplies.  I actually have a large wardrobe armoire over there now that has all my supplies in it because our closets are big enough for all our clothes.

Guest bedroom - need a bedframe -- probably the only "real" furniture that we need to purchase -- otherwise we had stuff to put in all the other rooms.

Loft - LOVE this area!  It is the slightly neater area for the kids to play.  We will more than likely get some sort of futon eventually so adults can sit in here, but for now there are 6 kid-level places to sit and hang out.

Boys bedroom - they wanted Rockets and space so that is what we did.  Again, it will eventually be painted with better/more decor, but for now we like the way it is set up.  Once they are old enough we will bunk these beds and it will give them much more room.

Playroom - since the boys wanted to continue to share bedroom, we had extra space to create a playroom -- and this is where I decided to put all their more plastic-type toys (rather than in the loft)

Love this large linen closet -- works great for me to fold and store in my OCD fashion.  ha ha.

Boys bathroom - same decor from our old house.  I plan to put a 2nd towel rack over the toilet because that is where it was in our old house and I liked it there better.  We also put some hooks on the back of the door for the towels they actually use.

Unfinished basement -- MECCA of fun for the boys!  There is too much construction going on outside on a regular basis so I don't feel comfortable having the boys run around and ride bikes outside, so this basement has been GREAT for the boys to let out their energy!  I foresee this remaining unfinished for quite a few years.

View of the basement from the other side.

Temporary wall of (empty!) boxes -- we plan to put a wall up here (a few feet back from here) to create a work room for Russ -- right now his tools are over there so this box wall serves as a way to keep the boys out.

Mud room -not sure why this is termed a mud "room", because it is really just a small hallway.  It works fine for us, but I would not refer to it as a room.  I added our lower rod to the bottom for the boys jackets so we have more room for our stuff.

Love the pantry - I even had room for our large dog food container so we don't have to store our dog food out in the garage anymore!  Actually there are a lot of things in here that used to be stored in the garage -- and I have yet to fill this thing up even though I've made many trips to warehouse stores and grocery stores.  YEA!!!!  

That's it for now.  I hope that we will have more decorative photos to post in a few more weeks because we are planning a housewarming next month... yikes!