Wow - That's definitely yellow

Not much actually happened while I was away riding 150 miles in France and tending to my French spider bite. I thought the house might have somehow pulled itself together, but no such luck. The interior trim (chair rails, windows, ceiling moulding) etc. took longer than expected. The man doing the trim has a reputation for being very meticulous, and he takes his time. We even have trim in the closets, which seems a little crazy -- trim for those with OCD. It all looks beautiful, however. Nothing else could happen until the trim was installed. Once the trim was finished, the painters could move in. I believe they are finishing up today.

And Wowza- the soft, muted Butter Up yellow that looked so innocently yet warmly understated on the color chip looks like Insane Clown Posse Electric Tingle Yellow now that it's up almost everywhere. It was a shock to walk into the yellow yesterday after weeks of looking at white sheet rock. I love, love, love our green bedroom, and I think our blue great room and dining room look good. However, I couldn't stop thinking about all that yellow everywhere else. Rhett likes it, and my friend Kim assures me that it won't look quite so bright once cabinets, furniture, etc., go in. I'll post some pictures at http://picasaweb.google.com/brownlot65

Rather than pay to repaint, I will learn to love my yellow.

On the inside

It's Saturday -- I made the most of the past week and now depart for France in relatively good shape. Friends have been supportive, dropping their plans to go with me to the light fixture store, holding up endless variations of paint chips for me to look at in various degrees of light, holding tile samples up to paint chips up to cabinet stain samples, and just generally reassuring me that the inside of the house won't look like a Barnum and Bailey clown exhibit (or, "Who cares if it does? YOU like it.") I carry around what I call my "color bag" with me everywhere just in case I'm swept with a sudden urge to hold up a paint chip against something. I have tile samples in the trunk of the car -- you never know. One must be prepared at all times.

So - I think I'm finished. I took a big chunk of time off work this week and immersed myself in Sample World. With Doris (whose husband builds houses - she picks out the interior elements and has all kinds of contacts) and Kim (my New York friend who tells no lies) in tow, we descended upon the light fixture shop and the tile shop and had at it -- a blazing conflagration of opinions all in the service of burning away the chaff to get at the nub of Lot 65's look. They are good about letting me pick, but giving me an honest opinion when asked. I had no idea what would be involved in picking light fixtures. Wall sconces, pendants, ceiling fans, chandeliers, flourescent closet lights, the garage, front door floodlights, door chimes, ceiling huggers for hallways, etc. -- each item needs to be chosen with the room's look in mind. Geez. The sales rep at the light shop had already done a "walk-through" of my house so she had a list of every single element that needed to be picked out. It's not that easy! Rubbed bronze or brushed nickle? How wide should the fan blades be? Black, brown, or white? Pendant or ceiling hugger? It goes on and on. I picked up a few cool things that someone else ordered and then didn't like -- I suspect they had good reasons, and you might agree when you see some of the more colorful elements.

Then immediately to the tile shop to pick out tiles for all three bathrooms, laundry room, kitchen backsplash, and tub/shower surrounds. I'm so glad I had Kim and Doris with me because I would have collapsed into a timid heap. As I've heard, "Remember, you can change the paint color but tile is forever..." This is why most tile jobs are some shade of whitey/beigey/grayey. People get scared -- you don't want to deviate from what everyone else does. I do! Hence my recurring worries about being the Tacky Clown House in the Neighborhood of Taste.

Yesterday, I went to pick out my granite. By that time, I was so tired that I just waved at a couple of slabs out in the warehouse yard that looked okay next to my tile, cabinet, and paint samples and said "whatever." Then I needed to pick out my edges -- bullnose, ogee, 1/4 something or other...the granite guy could tell I'd had enough and made some helpful suggestions which I gratefully accepted.

What will it all look like together? Who the hell knows. You know what, though? I'll be so thrilled to be in this thing that if something doesn't look quite as good as I'd hoped...oh well. Go look at some spec houses built by contractors if you are looking for beige walls, brown cabinets, and cream-colored backsplashes. When you're in my clown house, things will definitely look better after a glass of wine or two.

If you are interested...

Paint colors: Sherwin Williams/Duron -- Butter Up, Bracing Blue, and Coastal Plain. Isabelle has chosen pink and blue for her room, and Wyatt wants candy-apple green. Kim and I will be painting those rooms ourselves, since our paint contract only includes three colors.

Cabinets: Maple, Shaker style, dental trim -- Honeycomb, Gunstock, Cambridge, and Pecan Shell finishes. Kitchen is honeycomb with gunstock island for contrast.

Tile: Master bath - "verde" resin tiles - greeny/beigey/hard to describe, kid's bath/laundry is same type of tile but in orangey/yellowy/hard to describe shade. Kitchen backsplash is neutral but with one band of terracotta/golden glass tiles that sparkle and change color as you move to different angles. This will complement my crazy gold/yellow/orangey pendant lights and my colored glass fruit chandelier in the kitchen. Don't ask - you just have to see. I fell in love.

Granite: Blue Pearl in kitchen, Venetian Gold in master bath, and Giallo Ornamental in kid's bath. Pretty crazy stuff. Sorry, guests -- your upstairs bathroom is plain whitey tile with run-of-the-mill cultured marble countertop/sink.

Floors - red oak stained a mid-tone shade - haven't picked the exact stain out yet. NO CARPET!!!

Oh SH-T! We're building a house?

What a crazy and stress-inducing week. Or was that last week? The week before? People just keep showing up to the house on Lot 65 to do work on it -- I don't think a single day has gone by without trades inside and outside the house, toiling away, totally ignoring the housing slump elsewhere. The Browns are doing their bit to keep America strong by providing plenty of jobs. I have a schedule of things that I know need to happen, but time slips away and it's easy to travel along the twin pathways of indecision and procrastination. I'm going to France for 10 days on Monday. It's terrible timing, because by now I'm supposed to know what the inside of the house should look like. That was the deal - Rhett takes care of the outside and and the workhorse guts of the inside and I take care of the glamour stuff like colors and chandeliers. Apparently, no one is going to be waiting for me while I'm touring Reanaissance chateaux and sampling the wines of the Loire Valley. I have until Monday to get it DONE.

I have my cabinets on order, and the company has just called to confirm May 26 as the install date. WHAT???? Now I definitely need countertops! And with countertops come backsplashes. And we need light fixtures so we can all see what we're doing. We do have floors to put this stuff on - whew. That went in last week. Oak floors throughout, except for the bathrooms and laundry room which need tiles. So I need to pick out tiles. And the paint guy wants to know what color we're painting the interior walls. And the tiles need to match cabinets which should complement the countertops which should look good with the paint. If you only have one of the above picked out, making decisions about what goes with what becomes painful for anyone except the truly confident style-hound.

Now this where it's eminently possible to chicken out and play it safe. I've put off making hard decisions for a few months now. This is when it's time to separate the Pottery Barn wannabe's from those bold eclecticists who can blithely throw off the shackles of the word that rolls so smoothly off every Realtor's honey-combed tongue -- RESALE.

In Bad Taste?

Our "trades" have been working really quickly - we're ready for preliminary HVAC, plumbing, and electrical inspections. Our windows and exterior doors are in. And the plummeting economy has a short-term benefit for us in that the variable rate interest on the construction loan is pegged to whatever Bernacke says. So our interest is unbelievably low on the amount of money we've taken out so far. Of course, the bad news is that the housing market looks like it might just tank and take America down with it into some kind of swirling economic hell unseen since the Great Depression. In which case our final appraisal will be crap and we'll get hit with mortage insurance. At least we'll have somewhere nice to live until the bank reposseses, and then we'll toast the W years with a raised can of malt liquor.

Anyhow, I am continuing blithely along in the assumption that great clouds of dust won't begin to blow over North Carolina sending us West in a sad sack caravan of jalopies so that we can pick fruit to keep our children alive.

Today I continued in my pernicious habit of missing big chunks of work so that we will have toilets and ovens and such to go along with the plumbing and electrical wiring. I went to Eudy's Cabinets out in the country to get samples of my cabinet colors. It was tough - Gunstock, Praline, Pecan Shell, Honeycomb, Merlot, Sesame, etc. And do I want knobs or pull handles. And what color handles would those be. I can see why people get what I've heard called "Choice Fatigue." After awhile, you just pray that someone with good taste will come along and do it all for you. I want my Mom! I have a little bag of samples so I can torture myself some more at home. What if my taste sucks? What if I think it will look great and then people come to visit and wrinkle their noses in poorly-disguised aversion? Maybe I should just paint everything beige and stick with Pottery Barn. But what's the fun of building if you can't insert your own bad taste into the product? Does anyone remember the red wall-to-wall carpets from Michigan, the grass wallpaper in my room in Huntsville (actually - just include everything in Huntsville). Will I be that person? Am I picking out the green avacodo of tomorrow?

The outline takes shape

Things have been moving along at a brisk clip. The brick guys did their thing, allowing the framer guys to come on out and do theirs. We love our bricks. So much better than everyone else's bricks. Rhett had to go to a special brick showroom to pick them out and pick out a matching mortar shade. Who knew? Details, details. Once the framing started, it was amazing how quickly the outline of the house began to rise from the concrete piers (we were told our architect, one Don Gardner we plucked from the internet, put in a freakish number of piers, which means our floors shouldn't be sagging anytime soon). Day One: beams across the piers for the floor, Day Two: rough floors laid and walls beginning to rise. Day Three: Walls! This is the fun part - now we can actually walk from room to room, trying hard not to step on nails or bean our heads, and actually see how big each room is and how the house flows. I think it will be beautiful, as long as pick out the right stuff!!!!

Inevitably Disappointed

So we have the perenial "glass-half-empty" or "glass-half-full" perspectival argument. Because we messed around with with big oaks in the back and tried to work around them, we never did get our land graded the way I guess it should have been graded. So we had the "footings" guy come out and do his footing thing and his comment to Rhett at the end of the day was "Wow...I sure did need to use a lot of concrete." And, "Gee, you sure have a high foundation." (I can't vouch the terms were "wow" and "gee"). So maybe we don't freak out but we are definitely very concerned. No one wants to build the ugly, freaky-looking high-foundation house in a normal neighborhood where most folks have three or four steps to walk up to get to the front door and we need a rope-and-pulley system for hardy visitors. I guess we could also direct them out to the back door which will now be leading straight out onto the dirt pile (below).

So, you ask, what's the "glass-half-full" scenario? Well, our real-contractor-in-everything-but-official-name brought a landscaping guy out to look at the freakish dimensions of the foundation and the landscaping guy said that the high foundation provided "interesting landscaping possibilities." Trees and life-size statues of the saints, I suppose.

Dirt Pile

Since last posting, things have moved both really quickly and really slowly. Small things seem to take days (getting a quote for the HVAC), but once a few key "trades" are set --- LOOK OUT -- here come the dozers, the mud, the port-a-potty (which you have to provide, and I've been told to never, never, use -- I'm not passing judgment, I'm just passing this along and I didn't ask questions). The permit hangs proudly in front of Lot 65.

Sadly, we made a costly and upsetting error. We tried hard to keep a couple of large, beautiful oaks in the back yard. However, once the surveyor came down and put down the flags, it was clear that the oaks were way too close to the house. We had to pay to have the heavy machines come back out (did you know it can be $1000 just to transport the bulldozer or whatever it's called to the site?) and take the oaks down. It became apparent that the view out the back window would be an extreme close-up view of the knarly ridges and trenches of a very thick trunk. As one wag put it, we could have reached out our dining room window and fed a squirrel. Very sad. And being novices, we did not realize that "digging the footings" most likely would have killed the trees anyway. I didn't know that I would have to know about trees to build a house, but it's all connected. Now I see why professional builders doze everything in sight down and start with a perfectly clear, flat, lot. It's much easier, if lacking in a certain lovely greeny soul. I had already planned on hanging a rope swing from the perfectly-situated branch, visions of happy chidren making memories to share with their children later on. "Yep...that old oak tree...I still remember how we used to play in its the embrace of its branches while the squirrels scampered merrily about..." We were going to build a patio around it. Now the view out the back is of an enormous dirt pile and accusatory sticks reaching out from the soil like old bones.

In fact, Wyatt wants to name our new homestead "Dirt Pile." Or "Old Sticks." I tried to explain that naming a home should recall something stately or romantic - Willowbrook Pastures, Dovecote Cottage, Camelot Dreams, Thitherfield, Woodside Commons, Ravens Beak....you get the idea. I guess Old Sticks or Dirt Pile does kind of fit us, however. We're not proud folk.

While my husband is doing most of the "heavy lifting" now (seems to be a lot of calling people about things like electricity-- Oh yes sir, may we have some? -- and standing around the now-grossly-disturbed dirt pile making guy-talk with people who presumably know what they are doing), I will be called into the fray soon. Doors, windows, faucets... Apparently, my job will be to figure out how one goes about getting these things. My pre-home-building self knew that doors came with houses. Hinges, knobs -- sure, glad to have them, whatever. Now I know that this isn't just a door -- it's an "entry system" replete with frames and what-not to ensure the opening-closing function happens with no troublesome watery inflow. And faucets come in a bewildering array of shapes and styles - contemporary, Victorian, traditional, country cottage, modern - choosing a faucet becomes something of an exercise in finding yourself. Who am I, really? Do I like a traditional twist on a modern style? Do I fit in with the sleek sensibility of the post-modern world? On the other hand, the Victorian collection adds understated drama to the daily routine...I'm not making this stuff up. Do I want to make a distinctive statement reminiscent of another era? Or do I want to stake my claim boldly in the here-and-now? If heavy sedation were available, would I take it? Mind you, we're just talking about faucets. I find myself scrutinizing every faucet I come across in other bathrooms as if they might hold the the key to future happiness. The low point came today in a dentist's office when I recognized a center-set faucet from a certain manufacturer's collection and was impressed -- this wasn't your normal cheap-o public "lav" faucet. Nice touch, tooth man!

Cabinets (outrageously expensive!), countertops, floors, toilets, light fixtures -- it's up to me to figure out what I like and I need to figure it out fast. Now is no time for an identity check.