main floor

Okay, moving right along.

Very open concept main floor. Funny....because that's not at all what we wanted.

Have I ever mentioned this building process of ours? We started thinking new house when we started thinking about baby #2. Well, who knew how long #2 would take to make, so we held off until we found out we were pregs. Then the planning began.

And then the planning stopped, to make sure it wasn't twins! The plan would have been quite different with three daycare bills. After we found out it was just the one fella, we moved forward.

And then GBS hit and time stood still again. 

Once all was normal, we moved forward...fast. We picked a builder, picked a lot and picked a plan that worked the best given our time constraints. Our house has a lot of we want, but not quite everything. We wanted to get in before baby arrived, so some of our architectural want-list just had to take a backseat. Such is life. We're still very happy with our new home.

View from the mudroom. Kitchen/dining to the right. Pantry/Den to the left. And living room straight ahead.

We were able to make a couple changes to the builder's plan on the main floor. We added footage in the living room and in that dining room area. We're not really a dinner at the table kind of people, so I wanted to be able to tuck my table in as far as possible. And we really wanted a door-door to the outside instead of a sliding glass patio style door. Don't ask me why, it was just one of those things. And then of course we made the island as big as we could...definitely island people.

These built ins are one of my favorite add ons. I have no idea how I'm going to fill them...but I still love them. We have run into our first snag though. Emmie's toys are currently filling the cupboard areas and when she opens the door closest to the fireplace...it slams into the corner of the rock. So, that's not awesome and our doors already have a couple scratches.  

And that's the view of the den at the front of the house. This is also where we made a bit of a change. There wasn't supposed to be a walk thru there, but because we really wanted this to be Emmie's play room, I was afraid she'd never be in there if we couldn't see her from the kitchen (there is another entrance around the corner...we'll get to that.) We're very happy we made the doorway and have the added bonus of more natural light coming in from the front.

(Sorry. Longest post ever apparently. I just know so many people in the building mode right now and even some with our exact builder...so detail overload, my apologies.)

Another view from the stairs. Did I mention we love our flooring? It's a reclaimed laminate that is totally outside of our box. We went back and forth between two colors, one being very warm and safe and one that's a bit cooler with almost a grey undertone. We opted for the grey undertone and we're really liking the decision.

And you know I'll be detailing that kitchen more in the next post.