It happened that the week we found the right builder, plot and house design was the very same week Chris’s parents were visiting from England. The market moves fast out here, so we didn’t feel we could wait until after they left or we would risk losing the lot. Due to the nature of these semi-custom builds, we were contractually obliged to pick out the contents of a large portion of the house that week. We had two meetings lasting three hours each about things like what kind of counter tops we wanted and another two hour meeting about the tech in the house.
I am very glad we split the first one up into two meetings. They were willing to schedule two three hour meetings or one six hour meeting. Having two meant we could go home and sleep on it. I cannot believe anyone would pick the one six hour session considering we had to choose what kind of cupboards we wanted, which kitchen appliances we wanted, the color and type of our floor tiles and carpeting, where we wanted tiles or carpeting, if we wanted to buy a washer and dryer from them, if we wanted to buy a water softener from them and a series of other upgrades we had to hear about and then budget for or reject.
Beyond those three meetings, we also had to go back up to Estrella to give Michael the first deposit within a week and in that time also finalize the location of all of the electrics in the house so they could submit the plans to the city.
This was an absolutely insane week with Chris’s parents being here, picking out all this stuff and putting out several ‘fires’ at work that involved me working overtime. I actually did quite a lot of work from the car on the way to all these appointments as they were in Scottsdale, so it was a bit like having a commute again since these places were all about a 30 minute drive from where we live at the moment.
It was completely exhausting, which is part of why the blog is a bit behind at the moment. I just haven’t had time to really sit down and edit videos or write blogs in a while. We were very grateful to Mimi’s for doing such a nice Mother’s Day spread as as Mother’s Day happened to fall the same week as all this. Normally we would have cooked Chris’s mum something, especially as she had come all that way, but this was just not going to happen in a week like that.
Here is the video: