Today was sweet!

Today was such an awesome day! We had our appointment at our builder's "design center"! We arrived precisely at 9:00 and were warmly greeted by Jerry, the selection studio director. He sat us down and gave us an idea of what order we would pick things. In a comment on our original "house post" I mentioned we weren't going to do any upgrades, well we did. Although most of the cost of our upgrades went to carpet and electrical upgrades. Brent got two extra exterior outlets put in so he can do the low voltage lighting along some paths he's going to put in eventually. (Yes he has our whole yard all planned out, diagrams and all) Then we had flood lights on the back of the house to really light our back yard well put in, and also we upgraded to have them put in the wiring for "coach lights" on the outside of the garage. We didn't like the actual lights they had on sale, so we're going to get our own at Lowes or something.
The carpet upgrades are something we're glad we went with... we upgraded to StainMaster. The pad we got has a moisture seal on it so that if you spill something, it doesn't seep into the pad and it's also made out of memory foam!! Can you believe that! Since we went with both a StainMaster pad and carpet it takes our warranty to a full 13 years. I thought that was pretty good.
We didn't upgrade to the "over the range" microwave like I wanted to though. It was an extra $300 bucks and since we spent more then we wanted on upgrades and our microwave works great, we just figured that would be something we could wait on.
But we did upgrade to a better dishwasher! I'm so excited! It's deep/tall enough that our top rack won't catch on our long spatulas and spoons!! I can't tell you how much I hate that about ours right now. It also has a food grinder and a top water sprayer.
And then the only other upgrade we did was the flooring in the kitchen and laundry room. It was only the next level up and it looked so good we couldn't let it go!
And we really lucked out... apparently the original kitchen cupboard choices for the standard package were not very good, and people really complained about how little choice they had. So, our builders switched to a different company, and now you can choose from 2 types of wood with 4 different finishes on them... the cupboards we knew we wanted before our appointment WOULD have been a huge upgrade, but because of the new provider and choices, we got them standard!!! We really lucked out, we are the 2nd house to be built with the new choices! wheew!
WE ARE SO EXCITED! Although, we aren't going to tell anyone what all we picked! We want it to be a surprise with a "grand online reveal"! But we think our selections are pretty sweet!