Day 7

A design meeting is where you meet up with one of the designers (this time it was Crystal) and pick out elements in your house that are customizable. Alen and I had already put a lot of upgrades into our contract, so the design meeting was not spent going over those details. Some of the things that I'm most excited about is the espresso colored cabinets, stainless steel-looking hardware on the cabinets, the stainless steel kitchen appliances, cedar garage door, travertine tile in the master bath with a frameless glass door, and surround sound wiring in the living room. This place is going to be totally awesome! The majority of the design meeting consisted of choosing colors for the outside of the house. That was so much fun! After talking with Crystal and looking at some colors I had pre-chosen we came to the conclusion that there was one color combination that we loved the most! Alen loved it too :) The colors that we found to be the prettiest were a light blue, white, and reddish-coral. The best part is, that the natural cedar that will be on the house goes perfectly with the paint colors. Hopefully, the home owner's association will love the colors that we chose. I can't imagine the house in any other colors. The blue and the white makes it look like a cloud. Cloud 5904 Toscana.

Day 1

The real "Day 1" is actually January 7, 2010. That is the day where the contract was completely and totally official - and Alen and I got our first house! We're so excited about living in a house that is so contemporary and different looking. We're also super excited about our neighbors. From what it sounds like, they're a pretty awesome crowd, and I hope we'll get to be "real" neighbors.

Alen and I had been looking for a house starting in December 2009. We're weren't really serious about looking for a house, considering we just moved in with each other in May 2009 and that we had pretty much no money saved up. So, what gave us the bug? We started watching too much HGTV and we had also fallen in love with a house in North Austin in Avery Ranch. The house was gorgeous: limestone and Spanish tile roof. There was just something missing about the neighborhoods in North Austin. We didn't want to fall into suburbia and be stuck there forever... depressed about our limestone house and all it's normality. We were looking online at www.zillow.com and www.trulia.com and came across a house with a dramatic profile picture and enticing specs. We decided to "map it" to find out where in Austin it fell. When we saw the map, it looked like the neighborhood was way too far from Alen's workplace and Austin in general. After a couple more weeks of looking around for some more promising homes, we decided to look back at that one house. We were drawn to the beautiful design and unique architecture. It was like nothing else you could find in Austin... definitely not the typical suburbia coffeeandanewpaperinthemorning thankyouverymuch. I looked more closely at the map and figured the neighborhood was close to 183 and was only 6 miles from UT Campus/Downtown Austin. Not too bad.

Then we drove over there. Nine Sixty Nine. Agave.

Once we drove up the Sendero Trails we knew that this place was somewhere we could live and be happy. I saw a neighborhood where the neighbors actually knew each other and liked each other. A place where people planted gardens, relaxed on the deck, and ate dinner while looking at a view of downtown. Alen saw the awesome contemporary architecture - clean lines, bright colors, and large windows. A place where he could come home to everyday and not feel like he's fallen into some sort of brick house, white picket fence, suburbia.

We fell in love and we had to live there. So, we bought a house!