Today we had our pre-drywall meeting with the field manager and design coordinator on our new house. I admit to feeling a fair amount of stress in recent days regarding all things real estate related, including some issues I was having with the exterior color we’d chosen for the home. I’m happy to say that after the meeting today, both Apple and I had a lot of our worries assuaged.

The developer recently finished building and furnishing their official model home, and we got a chance to take a look inside of it today. Needless to say, the place is extremely well done. What struck me the most about it, though, were the exterior colors. Each house gets a two-tone look with an exterior wall color and a separate band color. I was already having doubts about the color we’d picked for our place, but when I saw this model, I was like “Dang…that’s the color I’ve had in my mind this entire time!”

Fortunately, our exterior paint hadn’t been ordered yet, and our design coordinator was happy to change the color selections for us. I am really stoked about this. Living in a Taco Bell-themed house for the last five years (bright yellow walls, bright orange roof) is getting old, and I want to go with something nice and muted on the new place. Like a dummy I forgot to take any pictures of the model, but we’ll go back and get some, perhaps this weekend.

Anyway, they’re about ready to start installing drywall at our place, so we took one last walkthrough with the field manager to make sure there weren’t any anomalies with the electrics or other stuff that will be hard to change after the drywall is in. Everything was fine except for one specialty electrical outlet which I wanted lower to the floor (it was installed about waist high).

I also got to talk about the Cat 5 Ethernet cable which has been wired throughout the house…looks like it’s going to be a nice networking solution. The “brain” of the unit is actually in my office room’s closet, which is perfect. Everywhere there’s a cable TV jack in the house, there will also be an RJ-45 jack. This way, I can simply plug in a computer or other network appliance anywhere and get Internet access, assuming I set up the WAN uplink properly via the panel in the aforementioned closet. This is great because I won’t need to string Cat 5 all through the house to plug in our TiVo or my Xbox360, nor will I need to rely on wireless hardware. In particular, the TiVo software only supports WEP encryption when using a wireless adapter, meaning I would have to downgrade all my router security just to get the damn thing online. With these network jacks all over, that won’t be an issue…just plug it right into the wall.

We also got to see the technical drawings of our kitchen cabinetry. Our kitchen island is bigger than I thought, with two full cabinets and drawers underneath, as well as an electrical outlet for appliances (food processor, blender, et al). We were given a few upgrade choices, such as crown molding on top of the cabinetry, staggering options and a valance to cover the under-cabinet lighting we ordered. I think we will probably add the valance ($750) but that’s about it. The rest can be done later, and the valance is the only thing that’s not just aesthetic, but also functional (it obscures the under-cabinet lighting indirect so there isn’t any glare from the fluorescent fixtures).

Also learned today was some various other ancillary stuff, such as the fact that we are getting our own mailbox right on our front lawn (joy!) as well as some details regarding our driveway. Apparently, new county regulations prevent the mouth of a driveway (where it meets the road) from being wider than 24 feet, due to right-of-way restrictions. Since we have a 3-car garage that itself is about 30 feet wide, this presents a problem. We’ll have to have a driveway that starts at 24 feet in width, then widens either on one or both sides as it approaches the garage doors. The logical answer would be to lay it out in a sort of y-shape, with the narrower portion being in front of the single-bay door on the right side. This would also help us landscape around that ugly transformer box which I still intend to have moved. The field manager told me to do myself a favor and keep bugging the construction manager about it, since if it was his house, he wouldn’t accept the box being that close to our driveway either.

I also investigated rope lighting, since we have installed crown-molded trays in all of our cove ceilings. It looks like I can get it online for cheap — around $150, all said and done — and it’ll be a snap to install. That will be an especially nice effect for the home theater in the great room.

We’re real pleased with how everything has come together, and going to look at the house is becoming more and more exciting. Especially now that we can see all the fruits of our labor (and expense) paying off. It’s going to be a fantastic place to live. Which is good, because I’ll be spending most of every day in it!

The community is having its official “grand opening” celebration on the afternoon November 12th, featuring a meet-and-greet with our future neighbors (the other ten or so families who are amongst the first to build in the community). Most of those other folks are employees of the homebuilder, so it’ll be nice to get to know them up front (in case we ever need anything, ha ha!). One of them is a nice guy I used to work with at my previous job; he’s a network tech who’s of largely the same technological persuasion as me, so he’ll be a good neighbor to have. And there’s free food at the event, so you can’t go wrong there.

After all the stress of late, largely related to financials and soforth, this was a nice reminder of why we’re doing everything that we’re doing. It’s all going to be quite worth it in the end.