Planning Ahead For Tile And Granite

While it is exciting to watch the structure rise, it is necessary to be planning months ahead.  Dozens of details... some not so small... must be addressed.

We had already agreed pretty much on the general look of the interior.

Downstairs, the walls would be pale blue with white cabinets and moldings.  The floors would be hardwood so that we could use our oriental rugs.  So the real choices there boiled down to deciding how expensive the cabinets would be and what species of hardwood the floors would be.

But there were other choices that we had to make.  What doors did we want?  What hardware for the doors?  What counter tops?  What fireplace?  What appliances?  What shingles for the roof?  What siding?

We focused first on the roofing and siding.  We took the architectural plans and used some graphics software to fill in various colors we scanned from siding samples.  We narrowed our choices to grey-blue and yellow ... not because we sent two sons to the University of Michigan, but because we liked them.  Then we asked for opinions.

Well, that didn't help.

I told my wife to pick one.  Well, that didn't help either.  For weeks, it was "yellow or blue?" followed by an anguished look.  The blue was more dramatic, but the yellow seemed to fit in well with the neighborhood and would not show as much dust from the dirt road.  She finally chose ... yellow.

This is roughly how the combination looks as seen from the material website without some of the additional white trim.  It will look really nice with the maple and oak turning red in the fall... and it is a cheerful color.

But we still had to be thinking about the tile and granite....

Pine Building has a tile man, Costin, who is talented and enthusiastic.  He obviously loves his work and is, conveniently, moving into the area we are staying while the home is being built.

Costin took us to Virginia Tile and Mont Granite where we spent a lot of his time and ours picking out colors and textures and quality ... within our budget ... that we believe will look good.  We got some feedback on the tile from our younger sons and they really seemed to approve.  The granite seems to have elicited positive responses, but it is quite unconventional as you can see here.

We liked that it was different and would compliment the color scheme we have envisioned for the downstairs.  It picks up a lot of the colors from our oriental rug, too.  But we realized that it had the potential to be distracting if it didn't go well with the kitchen cabinets, so we took a sample of the cabinet doors and held it next to the granite.  It really looks quite nice.

It will be a challenge for Costin to cut it in a way that makes the patterns flow well.