farmhouse: random.

The end is so close. We are possibly one, definitely two weeks ago from moving in here. 

We are so excited about living here, but so not excited about packing up our house here and moving it 14 miles there. (And I might be avoiding packing boxes right now...)

See all these lovely stacked boxes? They are full of beautiful hard wood flooring. 

There are exactly 59 boxes and Corey estimated each box weighed about 50 pounds. 

Those boxes all started out here. A guy with a forklift put them all on the trailer, but guess how they got off the trailer and all neatly stacked? I'll give you a hint... our arms were s.o.r.e. 

Corey did most of them. I helped him with almost 1/2. (And my help consisted of getting them off the trailer and carrying them halfway into the house before passing them to him.)

A few hours later, Corey got to move more furniture. (He's a rockstar.) We knew they were putting the railing on the staircase after the weekend and we knew it would be a whole lot easier to get this big sleeper sofa to the basement before they put the railings up. (Luckily Dallas remembered how they managed to get the thing in the house just over a year ago. He's so happy he's our friend and gets to help move all our furniture.) =) 

It might have looked like this when they moved the couch. Just maybe.

About halfway down, they realized that there is no way this would have happened with railings up. Pretty sure this couch will never leave the basement.

We also moved out a big wooden teacher desk that my dad got for me years ago. It was the teacher desk at the school my mom attended until 8th grade. (And it may or may not have been a one-room schoolhouse. But my mom may or may not have said that it makes her sound like an ancient pioneer if I tell people that. She's not ancient, she just grew up in a tiny farming community.) =) 

So those things are currently in the basement storage room, along with some other furniture we had fun painting (and spray painting!) last weekend. It's pretty colorful in that storage room right now.

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Obviously building a house comes with lots of decisions. 827,000 approximately. There are big decisions, like the floor plan and where to actually PUT the house. Then there were pretty big decisions like paint colors, and flooring and cabinets and appliances and then there were so many smaller decisions, like where to put outlets and trim colors/width/style, doorknobs, drawer pulls and grout colors. So. many. decisions.

There weren't too many decisions that overwhelmed us. Once we got past the actual floor plan, hardwood flooring was probably the hardest. Not because we didn't know what we wanted, we knew all along the look we were going for, it was just hard trying to make our vision match our budget. That was frustrating. Most of the people we worked with commented on how "easy" we were. Me, especially. Apparently there are a lot of women who get way more worked up over things than I do. For the most part, we took the advice of the people we were working with and trusted that they knew what they were doing way more than we did. And at this point there is really only one thing we would change if we could go back in time. 1 out of 827,000 is pretty good, I think. =)

I took these pictures for my mom when we were choosing all our lights and fans.  (She loves to make decisions. Or not.)

We spent 2.5 hours here, choosing every single light fixture for the entire house. At one point, we had two dining room chandeliers we liked, they were the exact same price and neither one of us felt strongly one way or the other. So we asked Jason, the sales guy that was working with us and he chose our dining room fixture. (And honestly, I don't even remember what it looks like.)

We had fun with a couple of our choices. This is going to be the light that hangs over the table in our breakfast nook. It's actually an industrial light that someone would typically hang in a barn or shed. We're not typical people, apparently. =) 

These lights also came from the industrial section of the catalog. (Jason commented that lots of house nowadays are very "vanilla." He didn't think our house would be.) =) Three of these are going to hang over the kitchen island. But they won't be black. We picked a more fun color. (Or as fun as you can get in the industrial section of a lighting catalog.)

Pretty sure we are down to our FINAL decision!! Woo-hoo! Paint colors for the front and back door. We chose the front door pretty easily. I had chosen 7 different shades and when we held them up to the door, it was easy to pick the one we wanted. The backdoor, however, is a different story. I think we've narrowed it down to two basic colors (but of course each of those colors comes in various shades...)

We're not only comparing it to the gray, but to the turquoisey walls in the mudroom, too. The other door in the mudroom is white (two, actually. There's a half door in there, too. Yay for dutch doors!) so I wanted this door to have some color. I asked for opinions on Facebook last night and it was pretty much split down the middle between red and limey green. Corey likes one better than the other and I'm just torn. But the decision needs made today. I might have to drag my mom out the farm today to have her help me. You know, since she loves making decisions and all. =)