Once we were squarely on the path of building a custom house, we started setting up a few “Home Depot Dates.” With a couple of small kids, getting out of the house is not a trivial thing. But we wanted to be able to take a look at things like countertops, cabinets, lighting fixtures, etc., in-person while taking our time. So we set a few nights to go out for dinner and then, instead of a movie, wander through Home Depot or Ikea a lighting showroom or some other purveyor of home goods to see what we liked and what we didn’t.
It was a surprisingly helpful exercise. It was low-stress, since we weren’t on any kind of tight timeline yet, and we weren’t actually spending money yet – just looking at how we might spend money later. It allowed us to get a sense of how things looked and felt in real-life, as compared to photos on a computer screen. And it was a fun sort of liminal space, where we had all of these options at our disposal and didn’t need to make any decisions yet.
Here are a few of our favorites:
We also started to zero in on countertops (quartz or solid surface, most likely) and some of the other fittings and fixtures, like brushed nickel for a lot of fittings and probably carpet for the bedrooms. Overall, it was a helpful exercise from a planning perspective, and we expected it to become a semi-regular thing as we moved through the process.