And up go the walls...

After a few weeks of waiting, piles of paperwork, and a ridiculous number of faxes, the builders are working away on our home!

It started with the foundation being poured last Friday, September 4th.

And this past week they worked on the framing...

Here are some shots of the inside (not that you would know what they were or care what the studs look like...)

Our downstairs, viewed from the breakfast area and looking into the family room. If you compare it to the floor plan, it makes sense (just remember that ours is the mirror opposite of the floorplan).

The picture above is of the guest room on the main floor and the bathroom adjacent to it.

Above is the master bedroom with the sitting room/pop-out to the right. Below is the master bathroom.

We're super excited about actually seeing our house instead of it all just being in our heads and in blueprints!

My mom was kind enough to go to the model home and take some photos. If you have trouble imagining what this house is going to look like based on the floorplan and miscellaneous photos, then click on the photo below! It contains several photos from the model home so that you can see what everything will eventually look like. Our home is going to be the reverse of this and a few small changes here and there as well as the design selections we chose, but generally gives a good idea of the home.

Glenkirk Model

We will continue to post progress photos as we can!

Design Details

To follow the previous post with even greater detail about the house, this post is packed with pics! After a long weekend in Hilton Head, SC, we drove across the state to Marietta. We met with one of the designers at the Traton Design Center allllll day on Tuesday (all day means 9am to 4 pm)! It was a very productive day, though. We had the help of my (Amanda) parents who have had a lot of personal and professional experience with this sort of thing. My dad is a realtor who has dealt exclusively with new construction and my mom is an interior designer (who used to work at a design center like the one we visited). Needless to say, we came with a lot of opinions!

Here's what we picked:

The exterior of our home will be done in Shellman's Bluff brick, the first color on the left is Roycroft Suede and will be our main home color (the shake and hardiplank), with Rice Grain (the middle color) as the trim and Van Dyke Brown (on the right) to be the color of the shutters.

Here you can see the three different flooring selections we made: wood floors for the main living areas downstairs; carpet for the bedrooms, living room and dining room; and vinyl in the laundry room.

3" Wood floor in the Old Furnace stain will be found in the foyer, hallways, family room, kitchen and breakfast area.

The Mohawk Carolina Moon Rocky Road Carpet will be found downstairs in the living room, dining room, and bedroom as well as upstairs in all the bedrooms.

The Aurora Canyon Ridge vinyl will be in the laundry room upstairs.

For the master bathroom, we have selected the Tahoe Maple Cognac cabinets, the Romanza Noce 18" tile for the floor, tub deck and shower walls, the Plateau Universal Mosaic (not pictured, sorry), Mocha Signature Cultured Granite for the countertops and the Brantford Oil-Rubbed Bronze plumbing fixtures.

This a picture of the cabinet hardware we selected for the master bathroom and the bathroom on the main level.

The bathroom on the main level will be done in the 16" Bruselas Noce tile on the floor, with the Tahoe Maple Cognac cabinets, the Cappucino Signature Cultured Granite for the countertops and the Brantford Oil-Rubbed Bronze plumbing fixtures.

The secondary bathroom upstairs will have the Tahoe Maple Cognac cabinets, 13" Plateau Yorkshire tile, and Biscuit with White Swirls Cultured Marble for the countertops.

This is the cabinet hardware we selected for the secondary bathroom.

Here is the Brantford Plumbing fixture in chrome that we selected for the secondary bathroom. This is the same fixture style for the other bathrooms, just in a different finish.

This is the Brantford Roman Tub/Shower Plumbing fixtures in chrome that we selected for the secondary bathroom. Again, the same in all the bathrooms, just in different finishes.

These are our selections for the kitchen: 42" Tahoe Maple Cognac Cabinets, Peacock granite countertops with a bullnose edge, and the oil-rubbed bronze hardware pictured.

A close-up shot of the Tahoe Maple Cognac cabinets for the kicthen and all the bathrooms.

A close-up shot of the Peacock granite countertops for the kitchen.

The kitchen cabinet hardware in oil-rubbed bronze. The larger handle will be used on the triple drawer stack pictured below.

We elected to have a triple drawer stack put in the kitchen nearest to the breakfast area.

A tilt-out tray will be in front of the kitchen sink for super-cool storage.

Kitchen sink is the Dayton Unequal Bowl with one bowl 10" deep and the other 8" deep.

Kitchen Sink Faucet is the Moen Stainless Integra pullout (picture shows the faucet in chrome, not stainless).

And probably the coolest thing we selected... the dishwasher! Yeah, the other appliances were nice, but I think we are most excited about this dishwasher. This is what we splurged on because neither of us has ever had a really nice and efficient dishwasher which is just really annoying.

There are several other things we picked (like wall color, door handles, doors, etc.) but forgot to take pictures. Those will just have to be surprises! ;) Sorry this was an incredibly long (and for some of you, boring) post, but we thought it would be cool to preview our selections. Once our house is done (!), we can post the final photos and you can see how it all came together!

A little bit closer to being REAL adults...

So some of you may have heard already, but for those who want to know more or are completely in the dark, this post is for you! Our big news for 2009 is that we are moving! We debated early this year about staying in Augusta versus moving somewhere else. A lot of our decision was based on family location and work/rotation opportunities. When I got the list of possible rotations, we immediately threw out anything that wasn't either in Augusta, near Milledgeville or NW Atlanta suburbs. Not a whole lot was offered for Augusta, so we took that to mean we just weren't meant to be there, plus I think we were looking for a good excuse to move closer to our families. ;)

After a little debate, we decided that we would want to settle in the suburbs of Atlanta. Randy had a good opportunity to stay with his current company (Golden Living Center/Aegis Therapies) and transfer to the Marietta facility. My parents live in Acworth, so that's pretty much where we started and worked in an area around them. Two months into the house hunting process, we were getting worn out. We would find a house, but either something would be wrong with it (like toxic mold, eek) or someone would make an offer on it before we were ready to move on it. Needless to say, we were frustrated.

Nearing the end of one particular frustrating weekend, my dad recommended that we visit this one new neighborhood we liked initially, but they only had one home available at the time. We drove over there and sure enough, that one home was under contract. So we started thinking...and talking it over with my parents (our realtor and interior designer) and came to a decision: let's just build our own!

The scoop: We have signed the contract to build a house here:

Yes, that is OUR under contract sign on the lot sign! :) You can view the builder's website and neighborhood page here: http://tratonhomes.com/community.php?c=12 (Make sure you let us know if you want to build here too cause there's a referral bonus!)

And the floor plan we selected is called the Glenkirk, and here is the layout of the house:

And the sample picture of the front. Obviously ours will look a little different (first off, it will have a right-hand garage) and we will get to select the exterior colors and such...

So there's the update for us. We will continue to post home developments here and hopefully have pictures up as they build it as well as the finished product. Our closing date is set for November 30. All our Augusta friends, sorry we will be leaving you. All our Atlanta friends...here we come!

Masters Week

I can tell the Spring semester is close to done - It's Spring Break! Or, if you live in Augusta then it's called Masters Week.  Imagine living some place where once a year, for about a week, everything changes.  When you live as close to the Augusta National as we do (maybe about a mile?? You could comfortably walk there from our place), everything changes.  We watch the weeks leading up to the tournament as locals prune their flowerbeds, park their golf carts out in front of their establishments to show support, hang banners and change signs to greet everyone but the locals, and hang street signs to direct 'Golf Traffic'.  Yikes. It's a nightmare. I know it's great for the community, but boy is it an inconvenience! The streets flood with cars and scalpers - we have to take different roads around town to avoid the traffic.  It's like Washington Rd turns into I75 in Atlanta on a Friday during rush hour! All the restaurants offer live entertainment at night and the local Kroger sells all sorts of miscellaneous golf paraphernalia. Don't get me wrong, I support golf (trying to learn it), but it's just so funny to see everyone flip out to put on a nice face for the world. :o)

Despite those annoyances, this year we decided to stay home. I have been doing schoolwork (lame), hangning out with friends, visiting my friends and family in Acworth, and my parents came to visit Augusta.  My parents decided that it was worth the drive to Augusta in hopes of getting tickets into the Augusta National.  After passing a few hours, we were able to get in for the Tuesday afternoon practice round.  Apparently everyone decides to leave around 3pm... so naturally, that's when we got in.  My dad was like a kid at an amusement park - he grabs the map, plans our trip around the course, tells us the history of EVERYTHING and when he sees a golfer, he has to tell us who he is, where he is from and some bit of history about him.  It was so cute! 

Here are some pics from our visit to Augusta National:

Our First Valentine's Day

To celebrate our first Valentine's Day since getting married, we traveled up to Maggie Valley, NC with a couple of Randy's co-workers and their families.  Upon arrival there, I was not so excited about the place we were staying; really, nothing more than an old, sketchy motel.  Although if you ever travel to Maggie Valley, there isn't a much more than that in general.  

So Saturday we all went for some good ol' country breakfast to get our day going.  With full bellies, we packed up everybody to go tubing in the snow (well, fake snow)! We had good fun with this activity until I fell off the tube and ate some snow pretty badly. Eventually I got talked into getting back on the tube for a few more runs. Some late lunch and down time prepped us for an evening of skiing at Cataloochee.  We spent several hours out on the slopes traveling up to the 'blue' slope finally. Randy had never skiied a blue before but he did very well. 

Here is us waiting for the rest of the group at the bottom of the slopes:

A nice pizza dinner to celebrate Valentine's day and some gin rummy while watching all the holiday movies on TV was perfect for us. Sunday morning we headed back to Augusta because we both had things that needed to be done before Monday.  

Now, the reason I mentioned the sketchy motel in the beginning of the post was because it plays a role now... Today I went to the Student Health Center at MCG to get my diagnosis confirmed: bed bug bites!! The doctor was certain they must have come from the motel this past weekend. What a pleasant thing to find out.  So, now we are cleaning everything; clothes, bedding, the cat, etc. The gift that keeps on giving... Happy Valentine's Day! 

My first blog post

Amanda has been heckling me about not having blogged yet so here goes. Probably the biggest news recently is that we found out last week that we will be going on a medical missions trip to (I'm going to butcher this if I don't look it up) Guanajuato, Mexico. We are very excited about it and are looking forward to it a great deal. Amanda will be going as a PT student and I will going as one of a handful of PT providers for the trip. I went on a similar trip to the Phillipines when I was in PT school (way back in 2002; yes, that's right - I'm old, or so Amanda reminds me). It is an amazing opportunity to spread the Gospel message while being able to serve and help meet peoples' physical needs as well when they otherwise may not be able to receive care. We are so excited! Amanda is in the process of getting a new passport (she changed her last name back in August because she agreed to put up with some bum for a lifetime or so).

I was pumped up yesterday by National Signing Day for college football (if you don't like how this paragraph has started, you may want to just skip it). Georgia signed a great class of incoming players, headlined by Aaron Murray, a quarterback from Tampa, FL; Marlon Brown, a receiver from Memphis, TN; Branden Smith, a defensive back from GA; as well as a host of other outstanding players that hopefully will light it up 'between the hedges' over the next several years. Brown was especially big news because he chose UGA over Tennessee at the last minute (how do you like that Lane Kiffin? Kiffin is Tennessee's new head coach who claimed they were going to take some players away from GA; UGA wound up signing the top 2 rated players from the state of Tennessee!). In all, UGA finished with what most people had as the 8th-9th best signing class in the nation. ESPN had it rated as the 6th-best class (funny, I went all the way down to 25th and I didn't see Ga Tech's class ranked; had to be a misprint, right?). We'll have to wait and see how these high school talents play out in the future, but nonetheless a great day to be a 'Dawg (what day isn't?).

As for the whole me drinking the bottle of milk thing at the baby shower, I will just quote NFL Hall of Fame coach Vince Lombardi: "If they keep score you might as well win." I don't know that he meant that mantra to be applied to drinking milk from a baby bottle, but there you go. Will add more later.

Boys and Baby Showers

This past weekend, Randy and I had a lovely time with some people we haven't seen for a while. Friday night we saw Romeo+Juliet with Erin and Gary (long lost friends who aren't so very lost anymore) at the Shakespeare Tavern - which was awesome! Saturday I tried THE final bridesmaid dress for Ginny (right??) and caught up with her over lunch. In between, we got to spend time with my parents, whom we hadn't seen since Christmas. But Sunday was quite entertaining...

Apparently the male gender amps up baby showers. Enter the scene: Randy's best friend Matt and his wife are having their second baby (a little boy soon to be by the name of Ashton Kenneth). So, the not-so-surprise baby shower was where we found ourselves on the only appropriate day to have a baby shower for a little boy: Super Bowl Sunday. Many males also found themselves here, which is definitely a new-er experience for me. I always thought it was just females who bothered in these gatherings of 'oooh-ing' and 'awwwing' over cute baby clothes with a chance visit from the daddy-to-be towards the end of the shower. Seeing as how the day was already brewing with testosterone-packed competition, why not start the party a few hours pre-game with a little man vs. man race.

Contestant 1: Randy


Contestant 2: Matt

Oh, what a glorious race it was. They were neck and neck the whole way through chugging a half-bottle of milk through a nipple. I was having flashbacks to high school marching band camp skit night where two seniors always managed to challenge each other to chug a gallon of whole milk - neither ever won... But alas, this victory must go to only one. That 'one' was the man I then had to ride in the car with for the next 3+ hours back to Augusta. Ladies, remember this when you invite or encourage your husband/boyfriend/male friend to attend baby showers. They will find a way to masculinize the shower. No simple games that involve avoiding saying the word "baby" or guessing the circumference of the pregnant belly...this is intense competition. Be prepared!