This was my Superbowl.

I prepped. I scoured Pinterest and Instagram and created folders with my most liked inspiration pictures. I then showed Leon my “likes” and we went back and forth narrowing our selections down to ones that we both loved.

4 hours.

We made our appointment with the builders design center showroom. A four hour block. We had just 4 hours to make our selection for all of the finishes in our home, so come prepared with ideas. No problem, was my thought in my head, we’ve got this. I have been dreaming of this day for a while and we had narrowed down “the looks” that we both liked … and after all, I am an Interior Designer.

Let the selecting begin.

And it started great! I was armed with my iPad in my hand, opened to our selected ideas that we both liked. The showroom designer was great, taking us through the selections starting with the color of the exterior of our home. This was an easy choice. we had driven around the neighborhood, looked on the builders website and had color schemes in mind. Knowing that we were the first buyer going to the design center, we knew that we had the first choice of their exterior color scheme options.

We went through the exterior choices went quickly. They had one blue toned option available. It was a new color scheme for our neighborhood that they were now offering. And, best of all it was different than any other blue color scheme in the neighborhood and it was perfect. It was the slate blue that we had our eye on for a while – the blue tone we had been looking at to paint the home that we just sold. The only paint selection that took some time was the color of the front door. For this, I wish I had more choices. I had in mind my perfect teal blue door, like the one we had – I loved that color. Sadly, the only blue that was available was the same color blue as our house. I could choose 4 options of red, an orange, yellow, green and black. Black it was. Not my first choice but it was only paint for a door, that was easy to update later … to my perfect teal. Next up for the exterior was the stone that would wrap around the front pillars by the door and then across the front of the house at chair rail height. I had originally wanted a lighter color to compliment the accent color and Leon really liked the dark stone. We selected a dark stone with a light fleck in it – a perfect mix of what we both liked.

Now for interior selections.

Even though we had our most liked looks, this was much more of a challenge. There is one word for why … Budget. We were already prepared that we were going to have to make upgrades to get the look that we wanted, but had no idea how much more our most like options would be above the builders standard choices. We started with some easy choices … or what we thought were easy, flooring.

We knew what we wanted for carpet – a cream color with a subtle pattern for upstairs. We found it right away. It looked like our pictures – The Durado. We then moved onto looking at Luxury Vinyl Plank for downstairs an upgrade from the builders laminate selections and again, made the decision quickly. A lighter flooring than we had before with variation of the boards. Again, perfect. Our showroom designer sent these selections upstairs to get our estimate on how much additional they would be for the upgrade.

We then moved onto countertops and our fireplace stone. Our kitchen counter selection was chosen quickly using our inspiration pictures as the guide. A white quartz with dramatic veining in a glossy finish. Perfect. Next up, bathroom counters. For this we went with the builder standard choosing a Carrara Marble Quartz with more subtle veining. The stone we had liked in the builder’s photo example for the fireplace was out of stock so here we had to made a second choice selection. But, after looking, I think we found a stone that will look even better.

Reality bites.

We were checking things off the list and then we were brought back to reality. Our perfect Durado Carpet for upstairs was going to be $16,000 of an upgrade. Yikes. This was not in our upgrade budget since we wanted to upgrade more than just carpet. Back to the drawing board we went looking for our second choice carpet …. which was not the Durado that will now be infamous in our house. Who would have thought this would be so hard? So many selections, half afraid we would make another choice that would be wayyyy out of our budget. We were running out of time. Our 4 hour design selection window was closing quickly. Finally, we settled on two carpet choices for pricing. Fingers crossed the prices would be better than The Durado and moved onto selecting tile selections for the bathrooms.

Success!

After going back and fourth with carpet and tile selections, we finally had success … 5 hours later. We had the perfect color palette for our finishes. Do we wish we had our first choice on some of these? Yes. Particularly The Durado Carpet and Marble Mosaic for the Kitchen Backsplash, but overall we are very happy with our selections.

Harder than I thought.

My thoughts on 4 hours to make finish sections? Harder than I thought. But again, I should have known better. I went in with narrowing down design looks we liked but, that was half of the challenge. Typically, as a designer we take more than 4 hours to make selections. Sometimes it takes weeks. Bringing samples in and out of the pallet choices before landing on the perfect selections in the budget. But we did it … maybe an hour longer than the 4 hours we were allotted, but we did it and we couldn’t be happier.