Yesterday we had our second meeting with Liliana and pushed forward with our plan to build with Wayne Homes. We didn't get much positive feedback from our independent contractors as it pertains to keeping costs low. It's unfortunate that we have very little room for movement on price, but it helps keeping things in perspective as to what we really need in our home, what we need now and what we can wait on.
My dad had about four pages of questions for our rep, all of which she had answers for or wrote down to get answers to. She has been wonderful, to say the least, and has made this process simple and easy to comprehend. It's also nice having my dad know a fair amount about what is needed for a proper home because I wouldn't have asked 1/10th of these questions and would have been hit blindly during construction.
After all of the questions and adding/subtracting parts of the home, I came away frustrated again, mostly because I don't have a lot of money and EVERYTHING seems to cost so much. I know that's the nature of construction, but man does it get you down sometimes. Little things like having a sink in the laundry room, drains in the garage/basement, the type of windows, trim, etc. just drive me nuts because of how much these things cost. They all aren't necessary for a low budget new home, but they definitely can make a positive difference. A few hours after the meeting, I settled down and I am still happy with our progress with Wayne. Liliana is going to redo our price quote and we will meet with her next Monday to hopefully sign papers and get started! Our quote is going to be close to $200,000, but my dad is quite confident we can get that $25,000 PPI down a very large amount since we will do most of the excavating ourselves. Nice.
After we spoke, my parents, Becky and I looked through there gallery of options for flooring, cabinets, etc. Yuck. We really really want laminate flooring in our great room, but we know we need to save some money at the start and just go with the cheapest vinyl. I loathe vinyl. I think it looks awful and even though they had dozens of options, they all looked equally gross to me. I know I'm being harsh, but that's how I feel. We thought about looking at their laminates and maybe doing an upgrade with something they have, but it doesn't seem wise as far as price goes. I think we will just get the cheapest vinyl and rip it all out immediately or in a year and put in laminate. I can get the distressed maple from Home Depot for about $1,400, which is less than their medium range laminates. Becky posted a picture of the maple, but here is a picture of it from in the store.
We love the black and red in this wood since we wanted a black/white/red theme in our first floor open area.
We would like solid black/onyx style cabinets with eventual white backsplash. I think we are also leaning towards grey walls.
For our family room, we wanted black couches and found some deals from cheaper retailers, but this setup at Ikea gave us the inspiration (note: we do NOT like the white cabinets in here).
We also want a grey rug and that giant ass city canvas on the wall.
We have other ideas and pictures to post, but I'll save that for another day.
Another note- have any of you done whole house audio/video over Cat5/6? I plan on doing it with a central media rack and switcher. This stuff can get insanely costly, but luckily my cousin, Michael, has done it before and is helping. Any advice for that would be awesome.
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