We had some more house guests on Sunday. Our friends Stacy, Matt and Carrie were over for the huge Vikes win, and we went over to the land with them after the game to check it out.
Sunday evening, ABC aired the episode of Extreme Makeover: Home Edition from a build in St. Paul done by our builder TJB Homes. We attended a TJB event in Blaine for the airing of the show. It was very cool to see the family who really had their lives changed by ABC, TJB and all of the volunteers that helped with the build. The mother runs a daycare out of their St. Paul home, and they were at risk of being shut down because their home was literally falling apart. TJB built them a gorgeous new place to call home, and run the daycare.
We met some people who will be our new neighbors down the street, Dianna and Mark Peterson, the couple who hosted a holiday party a few weeks before Christmas that we weren't able to make. It was awesome to get a chance to visit with them about their build and get some insight and advice on navigating through this process. They are great, and we're looking forward to getting to know them better throughout this process and especially once we get moved in and become a part of the neighborhood.
Dianna had done some significant volunteer work on this build with the Junior League. We, through WeberJohnson Public Affairs, had assisted TJB in getting a few local and high profile MN politicians to go to the work site during the build. WeberJohnson was featured on their "thank you" board at the showing, which was really nice.
Last night, we made our fist foray into the world of plumbing. Pipeline Supply in Hopkins is where we're going to make all of our many, many, many selections, and we can already tell that it is going to take multiple visits. The place is wall to wall tubs, sinks, toilets, faucets and every accessory you can imagine.
We are trying to accomplish the doable when we go into these appointments, so we knew right away that we were going to have to take the entire plumbing concept in chunks.
We started with toilets.
I'd rather you didn't, but imagine us literally sitting down on toilet after toilet to decide what might be comfortable. Measuring the width and depth to make sure they will fit nicely in the places we've designated.
We've learned a lot about each other throughout this process. One of the things we learned last evening is that we have remarkably similar taste in toilet style. I'm not going to say last night was a home run in our overall selection process. But we took a crack at choosing toilets, and of all of them that we looked at, our first choices (color, size, hardware and seats) were identical to us. So for anyone who was thinking of giving us toilet advice, we're done with that. Our toilets are selected.
We went on to faucets, bathroom sinks, kitchen sinks and tubs. We narrowed our selections significantly (especially as it relates to kitchen sinks), but clearly need to do some Internet research and another visit or two to Pipeline before we lock those things down.
After two and a half hours, our minds numb from all of the options, we decided to call it an evening. With toilets selected and other plumbing narrowed down, we decided that was enough for one day. We are scheduled to meet again with our new friend Matt on January 18th after we've had a chance to go back to the Models, and have had a chance to look at faucets, shower heads and sinks on the Internet and in Consumer Reports. We're planning to spend a few hours back in Hopkins that morning in hopes of making a few more solid decisions.
Tonight, we're heading back to Sears to lock down our appliance decisions. We're almost there, and are going to sit down with the consultant Karen to have her help us with our options and finalizing our choices.
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