SOLD!

We closed, everything went really well.  We're spending the weekend in our new house cleaning and doing stuff in the yard. We won't move in for a little while, but it is so nice to be able to call it ours! Here's a picture of us from right after closing, with the SOLD sign. :)

Hope everyone has a wonderful rest of the weekend!

Closing in less than 2 days!!

Yay! We close on our first house on Friday morning! We are beyond excited.

I can't believe how smoothly the process has been for us. It's amazing that we're finally here. We have a lot planned for the next few weeks after closing. I can't wait to get in and start decorating.

This week we picked out our granite slabs and scheduled the template.  We're going with Steel Gray, it's a really pretty dark gray/black speckled granite.  I can't wait to see what it looks like installed.  Here's what the sample they gave us looks like:

Today we picked out our new kitchen faucet and found some cabinet hardware that I really like.  We have a lot more plans for the kitchen, I'll update with those later.

Our final walk-through is tomorrow night! And then, on Friday, we'll be homeowners! :)

I realized that I never posted many pictures of the house.  So, here are some pictures to hold you over until my next update! ;)

From the front yard

Stairs at the entry

Living room looking toward the front door

Fireplace in the living room

Kitchen

Dining room

Formal living room/library

Upstairs looking toward the master bedroom

Guest bedroom upstairs

Master bathroom

Upstairs looking toward the bonus room and office

Deck and backyard

I hope everyone has a great rest of the week!

Southern Ideal Home Show & Shopping

Today we went to the Southern Ideal Home Show in Raleigh. It was a lot of fun and we got a lot of inspiration and ideas for our new house. We identified three companies that we'll look at for granite. They were all very similar and their prices are basically the same, so we'll be comparing them in the next few weeks.  Here are some pictures of the granite samples we liked:

Absolute Stone granite samples

My new favorite granite - Steel Gray

AB Stone

AB Stone

We also went to Lowes and HH Gregg to look at appliances again and try to narrow down our favorites. I think we've decided to go with KitchenAid, but we'll wait to buy them until after we close on the house. We found a floor model of the range that we want at Lowes, the slide-in, dual-fuel convection by KitchenAid, and we both love it!  Here are pictures of it:

We looked at tile for the backsplash and after seeing it in person, I think we're not going to use the more modern, sleek subway tile. We both really liked the random mosaic and rectangular beige tile, which has a more traditional look. Here are some examples:

Then, we went to HH Gregg and found the KitchenAid fridge we like. Seeing it again confirmed that it's the one we want. Plus, it's a great price there. 

And, after we got back, I updated our inspiration for the kitchen. What do you think?

Hope everyone else had a great Sunday and end of the weekend!

Kitchen Design

In the last couple of weeks, any time I watch TV at home, I'm usually simultaneously browsing the internet on our laptop for house inspiration.  Well, last night there were a lot of good shows (American Idol: Go Scotty!, Grey's, Private Practice, etc) and I found time to do some serious internet searching for inspiration, lol.  We're tossing around so many color ideas for the kitchen, I wanted to see how they might actually look. So here's one possibility for the kitchen.

I'm thinking of combining white cabinets and stainless appliances with lots of different neutrals and black/oil-rubbed bronze accents for contrast. We haven't figured out everything so these are just ideas.  I like the idea of a neutral kitchen base where you can add color through accessories.

Here's an inspiration board:

I have no idea on exactly what color wall paint to use yet, SW has a bunch of grays that look so similar until you put them up against something. So, we'll figure that out later. But, it will probably be in the medium beige/greige/gray family ;).  We've liked New Caledonia granite for a long time, I like that it has black, brown, gray and white all mixed in.  Some slabs you see are pretty dark, others are light, so we'll just have to pick a slab that we like. I also like Luna Pearl granite, but Kevin thinks it's too light. I'm debating between brushed nickel and oil-rubbed bronze for hardware and the kitchen faucet. I think I'm leaning towards oil-rubbed bronze just because I don't want everything to be the same color. Plus it will work really well with the light fixtures and other hardware throughout the house. I've looked at a lot of back splashes and I love almost all of them, lol. I think the small mosaic patterns of tiles could be really pretty, but Kevin definitely prefers the more traditional rectangular or subway tiles.  Which is fine with me because there are a lot of gorgeous kitchens with subway tiles.  I also really the idea of the back splash tile and the wall color being very similar, so it makes the cabinets pop.  Plus Kevin likes the contrast of the darker tile than white/cream, so we could hopefully find a good wall color to go with a medium/dark gray/greige subway tile.  

And, here's my attempt at photoshoping a bunch of these things together to see what they  might look like on one wall in the kitchen:

What do you think?