Master Selection Sheet

"This is the FUN part" my Sales Rep kept saying, but this was the part I think I was most anxious about. Mainly because I know there are so many options and we want our house to look as nice as possible but stay within a decent budget. Seems possible, right? Well yes and no. You have to compromise... and BTW you can't make ANY changes after this meeting unless you want to pay a $350 fee (eek!)

I read blog after blog to prepare myself for this meeting. Listing out the items we cannot change, the items we can change later on, what are our must haves in the house etc. I think the toughest part for me was having no clue at all what our flooring might cost which would impact our overall budget. Our SR put in an estimate based on our conversation but that was just hardwoods, not including upgraded carpets and tile. I think this is a major enhancement that RH should offer. The flooring, cabinets, counter-top selections should be done all at once. I know it will likely make the already long meeting longer but at least it would cut down on my having to leave work early twice in two weeks (because all of these meetings have time constraints on how quickly you must complete them) and this would help us work our budget better and choose a color combination that works the best for the overall house. Good news for new RH home buyers out there though- our flooring rep (more on that meeting soon) told us that RH is doing a pilot on having the flooring meeting combined with the granite and cabinet meeting. They are testing this out in Northern VA. Pretty cool! Now I digress... :-)

Onto selections, selections, selections! At this meeting we confirmed items from our original contract meeting and chose the basics: We opted not to have the study and have a formal dining room instead (no charge). We are not huge fans of a formal dining but this is something we liked in the model home, it made the foyer/ entry way seem so open and large.

We decided to have just have the main basement area finished (this was a free incentive thanks to our SR), we added a finished bathroom in the basement because we did not want to do this later but we left two of the rooms in the basement unfinished. It was very costly to have those two rooms finished. We also did not add the option wet bar, we are going to finish that later as well.

We selected Elevation K with grey siding (the name was twilight shadow), with almond shake siding, and a metal accent roof over the porch. The exterior was very hard because it can be tough to see the big picture. I wish they had a computer application that allowed you to see the colors on the elevation you choose. I originally went in knowing I wanted a dark blue house with tan shake siding and a red door. The blue choice was a really light blue which wasn't what I wanted so we decided to go with the dark grey and the door is a raisin color but we can paint that ourselves later.

We selected a frame-less shower in the master bedroom, and upgraded the cabinets in the master but kept the standard counter tops. In the upstairs bathroom we went with standard cabinets and counter tops. In regards to outlet, we added two HDMI cables; one in the basement and one in the main living room. We kept with the standard 3 cable hook ups and added one phone line just in case we might want one in the future. Something that our SR said no one has ever added was an outlet in the master bathroom little toilet room :) Why not have an option to have a TV in there!

They give you 4 free ceiling fan rough-ins, which quite honestly I thought they should give us 4 free ceiling fans but that was an extra $200 per fan. We added one additional ceiling fan rough in. We added the garage service entry door and extra outlets in there. We also added flood lights facing the backyard. I will tell ya, these little things add up so fast! It did help that we eliminated some things from our original meeting and in the end we only ended up slightly higher than when we started and still under our overall budget, so we were happy with all of our choices.

Next up our meeting with NVR mortgage.

Thanks for reading!