Frustration

We met with LeeAnn again this evening to go over some of the various designs for our kitchen she had put together. The layouts seemed to be so small compared to what we had envisioned for our kitchen. After meeting for over an hour, our frustration started to kick in to high gear. All the planning that we had done to build our house around the kitchen and great room area seemed to come crashing down. Not only did the kitchen seem like it was going to be small, we were now encroaching on the great room space. How did this happen??? After 90 minutes, we needed to take a breather from this and regroup. LeeAnn could sense our frustrations and she was doing and saying everything she could to get us thinking about designs, but we just couldn't.

Basement

It is one thing to have a hole in the ground and call it your basement. It is entirely different once the forms for the walls are put in place. Here are a couple of pictures showing the basement starting to take shape.

Kitchen Cabinets

When we began to design this house, we really started at the center of the house and worked our way out. The center of the main floor is the kitchen. Sounds kind of strange planning a house around a kitchen, but that is what we did. Both of our previous home had the kitchen somewhat separated from the living area and that did not seem to work well for our lifestyle. So, not only was it the starting place of our design, but it is now the starting point of the many decisions we will have to make.

We met with LeeAnn from Cabinets Galore tonight. Both Jo Nel and I are visual people so until we see something, it is hard for us to visualize. We were shown more kitchen cabinets, features, colors, etc. than any one person could possibly remember. We felt as though our head was going to explode from all the information.

After spending some time listening to LeeAnn tell us the billion different options we have, both of us settled on a design and color from the main display at the front of the store. We will now wait to see how she can incorporate our ideas in to a usable design.

Breaking Ground!

It was a long time coming but we finally broke ground today on our new home! Even though there was 18 inches of frost in the ground, they were able to break through the frozen Iowa turf! Based on the elevations that were taken of the lot, we will have a full walkout basement along with a flat drive.