The House!

Joe and I spent several months looking for an existing home in Pittsburgh, but the style of homes up here is so different from those in Oklahoma that we finally decided to go ahead and build a home. We went with Ryan Homes which was suggested to us by a co-worker who is also building a house with them. We were elated to find a neighborhood that had flat back yards with plenty of space for the dogs to run (most of the yards here have sheer drop offs or steep inclines almost directly off the back door) and because the neighborhood was previously owned and partially developed by a custom home builder, Ryan was offering incentives to buyers that included non-typical upgrades to match the neighborhood covenants. We settled on Beaver, PA which is a suburb of Pittsburgh and is about 30 minutes outside of our office. It has a great school system and a super cute downtown area with shops and restaurants.

The model home in our neighborhood is the "Palermo", and after exploring the other options for the neighborhood we decided to stick with that plan. It's a great open floor plan with plenty of room for us and the dogs. After it's all said and done, we should have around 3,300 square feet (including the basement, which is a totally new concept for me).

We opted for the four foot extension to the master bedroom and office, master bathroom option A (roman shower, no soaking tub), no bonus room, two car garage with front entry, kitchen with gourmet island and morning room, and finished basement with powder room.

2nd Floor

1st Floor

Basement

We signed our contract to build the new house in late February and slapped the "sold" sticker on our lot of choice :-) Hooray!

This is Joe's Fonzie impression

I don't know what I was going for here :-/

We made our choices with Guardian for the alarm system and electrical wiring, and we recently went to Ryan's design center to pick out our flooring and cabinets. I have jumped on the grey wall paint bandwagon, so we decided to go with dark wood floors, white trim, and grey walls (we'll paint the walls after the house is finished). After going back and forth over the cabinet and counter top colors, we finally settled on a modern-looking dark "espresso" cabinet with greyish granite counter tops to match the walls. We also picked out a neutral cream colored carpet and ceramic tile.

Now we're just waiting for the loan paper work to be done processing and our home will be under construction! They have us slated to begin construction some time in May and be move-in ready around the end of July, but we're hoping they'll bump us up so we can get in sooner.

And that's the latest update on the house! Now I'm just praying for Spring to be here, I'm beyond done with the cold winter weather!