First Look: Our New House (Video Tour)

Things are coming full circle. It was only a few months ago when I took you on a tour of another house with the same floor plan as our future house. Today, I get to take you on the first tour of our new house. 

Our house is a modern elevation, so there are some big differences from the other house I showed you. Plus, in this video, you’ll get a sneak peek at our design selections—most of them are already installed.

As you watch the video, keep an eye out for these special features:

• Two-Story Foyer – Our house is one level, but it doesn’t look it thanks to the foyer that is 19 ft. on the high side. The front of our house is south facing. With the south-facing front door and window above plus two east-facing windows up high the foyer gets a ton of natural light.
• Vaulted Office – One cool surprise feature of our modern elevation is that the office ceiling is also vaulted. It slopes up toward the front of the house and makes the room feel larger.
• Office Doors Swing Out – Best change ever! In our old house, the office doors swung in and swallowed up two corners of the room. Because we have a large enough foyer in this house, we asked the builder to flip the doors and make them swing out. That leaves more useable space in the office. My husband wants his desk floating in the middle, which would not have been possible if the doors swung in. Bonus: We get to see the pretty single-lite doors all the time now. Whether they are open or closed, they are visible in the foyer.
• Double Lights in the Dining Room – LINK It’s way easier to hang two pendant lights over a long dining table than it is to find (and afford) a long enough chandelier. Check out the pendant lights we picked. The trick is you need two junction boxes on the same switch. We asked the builder to make this change upfront. The upgrade was only $XX. We were also able to move the junction boxes closer to the wall since we plan to have bench seating along the wall and the table won’t be centered in the room.
• Patio Home with Green Space – You’ll notice out the patio doors and living room windows, our neighbor’s house is only 10 ft. away. The space in-between is our “backyard”. We have a rear-entry garage, so there is no yard behind the house. They call this style of home with a small, low-maintenance yard, a patio home. We made up for the lack of a back yard by choosing a lot on a large green space…it’s basically a park in our front yard that the association maintains. Our kids will have more play space than they’ve ever had before, and we’ll have less yard to maintain than ever before. It’s a win-win. We plan to xeriscape the side yard in the future to make it even lower-maintenance.
• Our Kitchen Finishes – Except flooring, all of our kitchen selections are in. It’s so rewarding to see it all come together. Teal island + quartz counters + white cabinets + midcentury backsplash = dream kitchen!
• Deleted Closets – I think our realtor was going to have a heart attack if I deleted or shrunk another closet in this house, but it had way too much storage for us. We deleted a closet in the owner’s entry to make a more open, useable mudroom space. There’s another closet in the same hallway that we switched from a linen closet to a coat closet. In the third bedroom, we asked the builder to shrink a large walk-in closet down to a standard depth closet to increase the bedroom size. I don’t think our teen boy is going to miss the closet space. Bonus: After they framed up his closet, the builder was able to expand the space under a bulkhead and add extra shelves, so he still has a lot of storage in his “small” closet.