Design Updates: Volume 5

(Brendan)

Keeping up a spirit of optimism in these interesting financial times, we continue on with another "Design Updates", well... update. This one consists of a bunch of odds and ends that were not previously selected (at least not in time to show you in a logical sequence). Since I'm pressed for time, here we go:

Master Bedroom Floor

Keeping with the Flor brand carpet tiles for upper rooms, here's what we selected for our bedroom (it's called Next in Line - Sage Gray):

Girls' Bedroom Floor

And for the girls, we selected the Tufted Frond - Bisque carpet tile design. It's shown used in the center of an area rug in the first picture below. It took ordering samples from Flor for us to finally make a selection for the Master Bedroom and Girls' room, and I'm glad we did.

Master Bathroom

Moving randomly along, here's a few things that took forever to pick out for the Master Bathroom (forever because of the variety of options, the desire to maximize value for the lowest cost, and the desire to coordinate items for a consistent design throughout the bathroom).

The interior design all starts with the focal point of the bathroom, the vanity and sinks:
We're getting the set of the above, which will include the sinks, faucets, vanity, coutertop, shelves, and mirrors. This design fit everything we were looking for (wood color, non-ordinary design, dimensional constraints of the space, etc.), for a very reasonable price -- the benefit of buying as a set instead of all the pieces separately.

In order to match the sink faucets above, I found this tub faucet:

And similarly coordinating, while also having a "rain" shower head (which we wanted), we selected this shower head and control (one of the knobs is a flow control, the other an independent temperature control):

Mud Room

You have to have a durable floor for a mud room (vinyl is a good choice) and it should be darker in color to hide dirt. To get a little bit of unexpected color in the mud room, we went with this blue-ish vinyl from Armostrong (ToughGuard Urban Settings - Lapis Twilight):

I designed the following IKEA cabinets for part of the mud room space:
It's a simple laminate gray countertop with the IKEA Nexxus - Birch for the cabinets, with stailess steel round cabinet knobs. That space underneath the left-most upper cabinets? That's space for this puppy:
With coordinating faucet:
I don't honestly know if the sink will be available next year at the current price (just North of $200 right now -- for a commercial stainless steel sink!), but we certainly hope so. It took me quite a while to find this deal, most stainless steel sinks this size are $600-$800. This would definitely fit our large-family, take-no-prisoners motif for certain appliances and fixtures in our home (our kitchen faucet is another).

The other wall areas in the mud room will eventually be filled with individual locker-style cubbies that we've aready spec'ed from IKEA. Ideally these will each have doors that can enclose the coat/boot/mitten chaos inside. At least that's the way Molly envisions it.

Just FYI, our final construction documents are nearly complete; my brother has been hard at work on those for some time now. The final documents are slated for completion October 16th. After that, in late October or early November I'll be running a competitive bidding process, and we have multiple contractors lined up to bid. We're really looking forward to seeing some hard numbers in terms of cost, and also looking forward to finally being able to work directly with a contractor (whomever is the winning bidder).