Out with the new; in with the old

Although we are sorely disappointed, we've arrived at the necessary conclusion that we should not do the kitchen and baths in a Modern style. We have been discussing it at length and finally have admitted to ourselves that we really need to keep style consistent throughout the house. On the one hand, we're disappointed that we don't get to play with some very cool designs for kitchen and bath. On the other, it does make some decisions much simpler.

We'd been struggling with how to keep the kitchen and bathrooms Modern, yet have them fit seamlessly with the rest of the traditionally-styled suburban house. Although we had some ideas for accomplishing this, we realized that the Modern kitchen and baths would also affect our window, flooring, and door choices, which truly need to fit with the modified Ranch and integrating even a hint of Modern design into the front door and windows would make the house feel hodge-podge. Besides, even though we're building the house for us, we were still concerned about potential resale issues in this very conservative market. Basically, we didn't feel it made design or financial sense to corrupt the design and ignore its inherent qualities.

The good news in all of this is that it should be cheaper because we can specify some materials that are more "common" and therefore less difficult to come by. Also, since we're going with a style that's more Prairie/Shaker, we're already familiar with many products that fall into that complement and can use some preferred vendors (like www.rejuvenation.com) and make decisions expeditiously.

Although we're disappointed, we definitely feel that this is the right way to go. There's always the next house...

Before it gets too hot tomorrow morning we plan to go out to the site to pick up debris for recycling and trash. The guys who've been doing the site work are not the tidiest and have left probably 500-750 nails and lots of plastic bottles, food remains, and other non-recyclable items. I found a recycling facility in downtown Wichita, so we'll take the nails, rebar, plastic, etc. down there on Tuesday; they only accept recyclables three days a week. We'll aim to get the space as clean as possible to keep the debris from getting permanently entombed in the concrete floors this week. Seems like we shouldn't have to be doing this, but at least it's getting done--and we know we'll do it well.