We made the mistake of not touring any homes before we built our last house. This time, and our advice to anyone building, we are touring as many homes as possible. This past Sunday we toured 3 open houses in Ankeny/Polk City area and last night we attended the Parade of Homes in Ames, which was so much fun!! It was quite the event and I wasn't expecting there to be so many people. It was like trick-or-treating or something....sometimes we would see people at one house that we saw 2 or 3 houses ago. There were 8 homes on the tour, 7 of which were newly constructed. The purpose of the event was to showcase 8 different builders. As we don't have a builder picked out yet, we were curious to see their quality. James being a construction guy is super picky about who builds his house...needless to say, he wasn't impressed by or interested in any of the builders.
We did see a lot of cool features/layouts that we liked...and that's the reason why we wanted to look at other houses. I can look at floor plans and pictures all day long, but nothing gives you a good feel like walking into a house and seeing it in person. One of our favorite things, which every house last night had, was a doorway from the master closet to the laundry room. How clever!! I don't know why we never thought to do that with our last house....our master closet was adjacent to the laundry room and we easily could have had a door connect the two. We also saw a couple of laundry room features we really liked...like the ironing board in the wall.
Something else we saw a lot of that we are thinking we may try is mixing white and dark wood. The first time we saw it, I wasn't a fan...and didn't figure James would be at all since he is normally anti-white trim. Most of the stair railings we saw had a mix of white and dark wood and it did look pretty classy. Speaking of stairs...we both really liked a certain stair case type that a few of the houses had. I think we at least have that part of our house picked out :)
I saw lots of light fixtures I liked, but I'm pretty sure James didn't like a single one of them that I did :( It's tough to have a husband who actually appreciates design and has opinions on it. I'm jealous of my friends who's husband's say "get whatever you want". But....I'm not the best decorator, so it's probably good when James veto's my opinions sometimes.
We also saw things we didn't like. The first one that comes to mind is door-less showers....what?!?! At least half of the houses last night had them. All James and I could think of is that there would be water all over the bathroom! Don't get me wrong....they look super cool and I kinda wanted to try one of them out, but just not practical in our opinion. Another thing we saw a lot of and didn't like was no where to sit and take your shoes off at the front door. It wasn't that the houses didn't offer a bench...there just physically wasn't room to put one...and some of those houses didn't even have coat closets for guests. I guess neither of these things is a huge deal, but just something we noticed and didn't think we liked.
I'm thinking I should have been a realtor, because I'm really loving going into all of these homes. Maybe I will just become that creepy woman who shows up to all of the open houses with no intentions to buy :) Hey, it's fun and it's free!
After looking at houses last night we stopped at a restaurant we hadn't tried yet. It was a great pick, because we found our new favorite pizza!!! Joe's Pizza and Pasta. Specifically, we got the philly cheese stake pizza. YUMMY!!!! And it was HUGE...like, one slice is equal to 2 large slices of a Casey's pizza. I was pretty sure our leftover box was not going to fit in our fridge....it barely did.
Tell me, what are you some of your favorite features in your or someone else's house and why??
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