Stones and Appliances

Last night we had more house guests. Tim, Amanda and their daughter Claire came over for a New Year's Day dinner. Before dinner, we all went out to the property to show them where we are building. Nothing has changed since the pictures in the last post. But it was fun to walk around in the snow and show them the foundation of the house.

After dinner, we spent some time showing them the plans and talking about the layout of the house.


Today, Sara and I had a wonderful day spending most of it doing stuff for the house. We're still debating the in-floor heat. We'll probably come to a conclusion on that before the end of the weekend. It has been nice to get a lot of different perspectives on this topic. Thanks Adam for your texts and call. I appreciate it. We'll see how the rest of the weekend goes, and see what we end up deciding.

As I wrote earlier, this Saturday was about stone and appliances.

We were at Condor Stone in Spring Lake Park for a few hours this morning. After driving around other parts of the lakes, we've come to some basic conclusions on what we want the stone to look like on the front of our house. Between the stone, brick and boulders, Condor has a great variety and it seems like we'll be able to customize a front for our home that looks awesome. We had one minor issue in that when we were talking to the sales lady, she up and left to go talk with another customer. We thought she was going to answer a question or two, but she was gone for what seemed like 10 or 15 minutes. Just up and left us. Interesting theory on customer service.

We have a good enough idea of the style and color we want, so we decided to get her email address and send pictures to her, Mary Arneson who will be helping us with decorating, and the boys from TJB. We'll leave it up to them to come up with some samples based on what we like.

While at Condor, another couple was there looking at stone for their new home. After the kind of small pleasantries one has when making similarly huge decisions, we came to learn that the couple is the same couple building just down the street from where we will be in Aspen Bay. They are closing in late January or early February, so they are a lot further along than we are. I think they are about our age, with two young children. I'm not sure why they are just now looking at stone (although part of their visit was about their fireplace). But it was very nice to meet another new neighbor, especially ones who are going to be new to the neighborhood in 2010 just like us.

We took a quick break for lunch and Bloody Mary's. Applebees has a decent Bloody Mary bar and a location between Condor and the Sears we are going to for appliances.

Because we are building, we have to talk with a Commercial Appliance consultant with Sears (and of course, she's not their on Saturday). Nonetheless, many of the other sales people were very helpful at Sears today even though we won't be able to get them a commission by purchasing from them.

We'd already looked at stoves, ovens and fridges at a past visit. We went to Sears today to revisit those items, and look at dishwashers, washer/dryer sets, and microwaves. It was a lot of fun looking at all of the appliance options. We're really close to selecting a nice Electrolux washer/dryer set. I think we found an awesome Samsung fridge (it is huge and one of the must usefully designed fridges I've seen). We found an LG Dishwasher that we are 99% sure is exactly what we want. And we are leaning towards an Electrolux stove and ovens.

Apparently Sears almost "never" has Electrolux on sale, and it is the one brand that builders don't get special rates on. But until January 10th, all Electrolux appliances are 10% off. Karen, our commercial consultant, gets back to the office on January 4th, so we hope to schedule our meeting with her early next week so that should we decide on Electrolux, we can get the 10% discount they are currently offering.

We know essentially what we want for almost all of our appliances. These decisions might end up being pretty easy. We just need to sit down with Karen and make sure (especially with the kitchen) that our options mesh well with the way we envision our home looking. We'll probably discuss with her a few of our options among a much narrowed list of choices. But we are very very close on all of these decisions.

What an awesome day for us along this journey. We were out and about for about 6 hours, and got a ton accomplished. What we didn't accomplish we narrowed down significantly.

Who says this is hard??? :)