One of the best upgrades!!

We recently bought our receiver to run our surround sound system and it is AMAZING,!!!!."...... I didn't think much of this option... We were not even going to get the system because in our option sheet it had stated whole house surround sound for close to 3,000 dollars which was way too expensive for us. But after reading some of these blogs, I saw someone say that they could purchase a specific numbers of speakers to place anywhere in the house for a lot cheaper.... Well we asked our SR and it was true...just not on the option sheet. When we were set up with our meeting with Ryan's electrician to get more upgrades.. He offered us a better price on four speaker in ceiling with a sub jack for 600 dollars..... And now.....with it finally all hooked up I am sitting here starring at my tree listening to Christmas music blarring through the house ! (I am off this week!!) .....I'm really not that into listening to music that much..but my other half did a great job hooking everything up and loading pandora so we have Internet radio!!... When we watch movies....football..basketball games.....it's like you are there....the sound is amazing..and these four speakers echo through the whole house!! Just wanted to let everyone know that are picking their options right now!!... Ryan offers things that are NOT on their list!!! And thank you fellow blogger for one of our best options!! If it wasn't for their site we would have never got it!...if you guys do have the surround sound in ceiling speakers and are looking for a receiver ..we purchased the Denon integrated network receiver with AirPlay. If you have an iPad ..you can choose all your music that is downloaded to iTunes and play that or play whatever you like through pandora ect....

Organizing ..Organizing ..And Organizing some more!!!

ok I must admit, I am an organzing freak!! But I love that I can find everything very quickly because everything has a place !!! Is anyone else in the blog community an organizer? I would love to see or hear about ideas .. The only complaint I have about my kitchen is that the cabinets are a bit awkard. The upper cabinets are not that deep and some of the cabinet door openings are not that wide. We have very large dishes and serving trays , so it was hard to find the right spot for all of our stuff. What about the island drawers, what do you guys use them for?? Utensils or other things??? Here are some pics of my organizing plan... figured I would share with some people that love this stuff!!! Please share what you guys did with the inside of your house !! Those are the pics that I love to see and to get some ideas from !!!!!

Most of the left side Utensils are Hoffritz .. im not sure if the spelling is right. These are 6 yrs old and have held up so well.. I think most of the utensils are discontinued, but we cook A LOT and there is very minimal wear and tear ...

 I love baskets for all the things that dont come in a nice container to stack ect!!And YES they are labeled(mostly for my fiance to find things) lol!!

 Need another knife organizer ...

And my junk drawer.. comes in so handy everyday !!!

PICTURES!!!!

Here are outside pics from closing day (sorry no pics with garage door down !!)We will get some grass in the Spring of next year !! The color is graphite gray . They had to do a color match since we have smart siding and they painted it !

Inside of the home and starting slowly to decorate !! Waiting on a rug for under the table and we have different matching lamps ( I will have to get a new pic with them ) They are lower profile so windows can be seen more !We also bought some leather counter height stools for island.. will post more pics later !!

 Three pendanats finally.. These are HUGE Pendants , measure 10 " wide.. They are from the Guildahall collection from Progressive lighting. Ryan offers them, but way too expensive !!! We order them online and installed them ourselves!! Ryan charged us for the three pendant electrical boxes above the island...

Christmas tree is UP!!

Our 9 foot tree is up and decorated !!!! This tree looked so enormous in our old house !!! now it  fits so nice! We still need a tree skirt and gifts under the tree, but its our first of more decorations to come!! I still need to add pics of closing day, but we are enjoying the home  and still unpacking. Next up will be painting at some point in the new year and then granite!!

Morning Light......

Just had to take some pics of the morning light filtering through the foyer.. it was so cozy and nice.... So hard to capture what I see through a small picture, but I am still working on angles to try to get the whole staircase in....

WE FINALLY CLOSED !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

So we finally closed and everything went pretty smoothly. We were reimbursed for the fireplace plug. (a decision made at closing ). Everything is beautiful , sooo happy about our upgrade choices. We can look out our wall of windows at the sun setting over the trees at night and its breathtaking !!!
Its been about a week and a half now and we are just starting to settle in. It was so hectic the first week with Ryan contractors there trying to fix the little things, deliveries, movers, organizing cable installation ect ect ect ..... We are back to work and soooo tired now !!!! I have a zillion pics on my camera, but havent downloaded them, just too busy and tired, but here are a few from the first week with my crappy camera phone!!!! More pictures to come. One Pendant is missing since it arrived defective !!! There will be three soon !!!

Fireplace plug vs fireplace blower??

So we are almost there..closing in less that 24 hrs from now!!!!... We are still working out some issues though and want to give out some advice if anyone picked this option like we did. We had picked a plug option that they install at the bottom of our fireplace where we would purchase our own blower and essentially just plug it in and use the switch on the wall to turn it on and off. This was only 100 dollars as opposed to 325 for the entire blower. Blowers online range from 50-100 average, so we thought this was reasonable. Well Ryan homes puts in a different firebox if you don't have the blower option. It's a box without the vents at the top and bottom so we would not be able to use the blower and we have no idea whether or not there is a vent kit that is interchangeable for our firebox. So we are awaiting to here if they will refund our money for the plug since we don't have the correct vents to utilize a blower!! Bottom line.....watch out for these little things before you close!!!

outside ALMOST complete

They  still need to paint trim a second coat and put our lights and shutters on, but it is almost complete .. we should be closing next week this time ! MAYBE.......

Walk thru before final walk thru!!

I wish I had taken pics, but we were too busy going over our 60+ items on our lists that need to be fixed. Honestly I feel they are rushing the closing and won't be completely finished with the home. We informed our PM that if the major items didn't get fixed / replaced we will delay closing until it's done. He wasnt happy with my comments at all tonight. Ok here are some major items and this is how it was or is going to be resolved. Fireplace hearth is crooked, couldn't get fp access door open. He called the masonry guy and he came back over and stated that we were very detailed and we wouldn't notice it when we got our stuff in there?! What?! Our pm stated that they don't even know if the hearth stone is in stock to replace and maybe could find one hearth piece and it may or may not match the other pieces!! Are you kidding?! Needless to say they had the whole top hearth ripped apart within five minutes and were trying to fix it. After the whole tub into the wall issue, they put our six foot tub back into place.I reminded pm and sent several emails to check tub for scratches b/c I didn't want him pulling it all apart again if it needed replacement. Well what do you know, scratches all over the rim of the tub....his plan? His "tub guy" would be coming Monday to fix it? Can you perfectly fix a fiberglass tub? I asked him how long would it take to order a new one and he wouldn't give me a straight answer. I wanted to know how we would know that it was acceptable ? He told us that on our final walk thru (which is the same day as closing" we would see it then. I told him that Monday night we wanted to see the tub so if it needs replacement it can happen BEFORE closing. Pm stated that this was the only walk thru before our final one. I told him that I would call SR have her walk me thru Monday night and if it doesn't look like a new tub he better have a replacement on hand....we are sooooo sick of them debating with us and cutting corners! So we had double doors with a transom placed in the living room entrance to make an office. Well the transom was sagging so they tried to fix it. They ripped apart the molding the door panels and there was a split piece of wood in the door casing that they decided to glue /patch back up. He said the transom was still low and since it was A non standard item it may just have to stay that way?!I, as nicely as I could possibly could be, informed him that it may have been a special request for the Victoria falls but it's definatley NOT A non standard item for Ryan homes reminding him several Models have two door glass entry way with transom above. I told him that he could locate for example the courtland's plans and order the door from that! He had nothing to say to me after that.... They did repaint the outside of the home since the first color was so off because they obviously didn't take the matching tab to sherwin Williams. The direct step staircase I thought would be easy for them. It comes assembled, you just put it into place. Well where the two parts of the stairs meet is cut wrong so now thy have no idea what to do, since you can see the decorative piece in the middle is wrong. Scratched cabinet doors,broken casings,paint on hardwoods, stain on upstairs hall cabinets, crooked decorative door molding on outside,uneven towel racks, waterproofing is exposed outside....the list seriously goes on and on!! Btw they ordered the wrong carpet so now awaiting our correct one!....geez do these people get how much money all of us are spending? Sometimes I feel like they are not vested and don't really care half the time! Well we are down to one and a half weeks..we will see!

Things are coming along...

Hey Everybody, Kitchen is nearly complete and the stone fireplace looks great...check 'em out.

17 days left?

I got a chance to sneak into the house tonight to find it in total disarray. They sprayed the moldings, but never covered our cabinets. There was a bowed wall in our kitchen so that is ripped apart... They are trying to stain our banisters and looks like they spilled the stain all over the landing...our hardwoods which are a quarter of the way done are only half covered.. Our tub is taken out and sitting in the master bedroom because of the huge mistake they made in there ..no stone fireplace yet..no appliances in yet..even some of our toilets are not in.... we literally close in 17 days!!! That's counting weekends! I'm not sure how they will finish... btw we have half our siding up..and it needs to be painted and we need a driveway!!?....are they kidding themselves or have all of you been at this stage three weeks from closing....I thought this was punch out stage where all the little things get taken care of??please let us know from those who have closed!!

rub a dub dub a problem with the tub

Aside from the cheesy post title.... we ran into a problem with the tub.  Basically when the tub structure is framed a piece of plywood is set onto the top and the hole for the tub is cut.... well turns out the hole was cut about 1 inch off center... so what ends up happening?  well the edge of the tub ends up a bout a half inch into the wall.... so then what happens? well the drywall guys come along and trim the drywall around the tub... then the tile guy comes along and tiles right around the tub... and nobody says anything to anybody about whether or not its at all strange that the tub is about a half inch into the wall!....  any way ... once the tile went in we spotted it and said something... it's being fixed!... but its putting our closing date off two days :(

Its a little hard to see here but under the window just to the right of the missing tile and under the window you can see the tub is too close to the wall... it should actually be about a half inch away from the wall...but the tub is about a half inch into the wall...this wasnt noticed by the PM or anybody else until we said something... when we asked the PMs manger about it he actually thought it was typical....and was good for water drainage...he said the area and around the tub would be caulked and all would be fine ?!

 

PS. some of you might notice that thats not the listello we ordered... well you are correct.. they messed up on the order... luckily we think it looks ok...

A little sneak peek

 Our Kitchen Cabinets are going in !!!! They are absolutley gorgeous... Its a nice dark cherry wood and they are HUGE!!!!! This picture cant show the size of them , but the rooms are all nine foot ceilings and they almost touch the top!!!! After the hardwoods are installed , our island will be going in as well!!!

 The workers are actually here on Saturday and Sunday !!! I am amazed that they were working until 630pm Friday night and when we drove by SAturday morning, they were already there !!!! Geez!!! I hope they get a break... but look what amazing work they did on our Direct set staircase!!!! more pics to come when they finsih staining !!!

Soon there will be a stone fireplace from floor to ceiling !!!

 Our beautiful staircase

 Our Electrician working hard!!

 Alternate view of Kitchen from the family room.. Our pantry doors look tiny compared to the enormous cabinets !!!!

 We are going to be closing in mid Novemeber, so they are working FAST

We just want some consistency....

In our development we are required to put on a particular siding.... called smartside... its like a wood siding...anyway they started putting it up the other day and when we got a look at it we thought it was definitely lacking in quality...the gaps between planks where small, large and medium... the cuts where absolutely horrible (not straight)... We want the siding put up with some consistency.... not sure if the guys doing teh job just aren't experienced with it or what...so we told them to stop putting up the siding until we can meet about it... so tomorrow we have a meeting schedule to discuss the siding as well a few other things...(grading, driveway plans)

A few pics to illustrate our point are below :)

The cut below the window is absolutely not straight... we have no idea why they would put this up...

 These planks are not uniform... some come right up to the edge others not so much...

Here are a variety of small and medium gaps...

Small...non existent gap...

Drywall Up... Hopefully this post wont be too dry :)

They have basically finished plumbing, electrical and dry walling.... Its really interesting to see the timeline...nothing, to framing to drywall to paint and trim... I think in a later post I'll put together a cool time lapse.... anyway without further delay... the newest pics are below :)




A few pics of the view into the back yard... trees changing colors look great...

 Looking upstairs from the foyer

The master bedroom from the top of the stairs.

Master bath...

Kitchen from laundry room...

Family room from the kitchen

Morning room, kitchen family room from dining room.

Foyer from upstairs...

Family and kitchen room from foyer entrance hall