Six month review

It's already been six months!

The house feels like home at this point. We're mostly unpacked. Furnishings are mostly in place (although there are, of course, things we want to add or upgrade). We're making good progress putting up art. We've even been part of a couple home tours (that's a normal part of setting up a new home, right?).

Six months in, we have a feel for what works well and what could have been better. Overall, we love the house. It's a great place to live: comfortable, beautiful, and functional. It just feels right — it's the right size, has the right functions, and supports our life in positive ways.



The great room is compact enough that people in the the kitchen, living, and dining rooms can interact comfortably, but spacious enough to hold large crowds. When the crowd gets too large, the large open space can get loud, but furniture and carpets have helped decrease the noise.

The kitchen is highly functional. It's one of the first things people comment on. We love the large amount of counter space, the induction stove, and the general layout. The bi-fold cabinets get out of the way just like we hoped — and they look really cool. A shelf under the sink provides a place for necessary but unsightly sink accessories. We're not finding the combination microwave / convection oven as useful as we hoped; its controls are just awkward enough to make it a bit of a pain to use as an oven.

So much counter space!

The media room also elicits exclamations. It must be something about walking into a teal cave with two rows of seating and a 106" screen. It's been a great venue for watching movies and playing video games — Rock Band is easier when everyone can read the screen clearly! Although we find the room itself quite large enough, we do wish that we had been able to add more storage, especially for large objects such as Rock Band drums and DDR pads.



The house is filled with natural light. Even on cloudy days, we don't bother turning on lights most of the time. We do use the lights in the kitchen, partially because it is further from the windows and partially due to the fact that work done in the kitchen often requires more light (e.g., chopping).

Separating the master suite into separate sleeping and dressing rooms has made it easier to get up and dressed without disturbing the sleeping partner. We haven't had an opportunity to test the dressing room's fitness as a sitting room — when just the two of us are in the house, there isn't much need for another sitting room.
We love the master bath and don't regret forgoing a tub in favor of a smaller room and larger shower. Although the high (36", standard kitchen height) countertops took some time to get used to, it's rather convenient. We'll see how well this height works if we have kids. =)

It took awhile to figure out exactly how to tune the heat pumps. We initially set the temperatures too high. We didn't initially understand how the presets worked. We had to learn how to tweak the settings to maximize efficiency when it was really cold out. Now that we've figured all that out, we appreciate the ability to set the temperature differently in different rooms, especially the rooms we don't use as often. The heat pumps don't dry out the air, which makes for lovely feeling air. In retrospect, heat distribution would have been more even if we had put the second main floor unit in the great room rather than in the office.

We have had some annoyances, but they are mostly small things. We had initially planned the dining room so that the table and pendant could be centered relative to the island and the adjacent wall. When we actually accounted for the space needed for chairs and cabinet access, we realized that the table would need to be about a foot off of centered on the wall. We were able to move the pendant, so that is centered, but when you look at the table head on, you can tell it's not centered on the wall. A small thing, but something that we could have fixed with a little more forethought.

100% natural light!

Another thing we might have changed in retrospect is our exterior color scheme. The grey-on-grey color scheme is gorgeous on sunny days, but on cloud days it looks a bit dour. And in Seattle, it's often cloudy. While on the topic of paint, the matte finish paint that was used in the interior looks good, but is a maintenance pain. It mars easily and can't be cleaned.

Another thing we need to fix — the house number is just above a downward pointing light. Oops.

The angle of the driveway is steeper than we would like. It's a constraint of the site, so there's not much we could do about it, but it does make washing the car less convenient.

That's about it for the things we wish were different. We also already have a list of improvements that we want to make over time, starting with...

More built-ins! If I have my way (and I will eventually), we'll have built-in furniture added wherever it is practical (and some places where it's not). In particular, we want to build a daybed with bookshelves into the office with a custom desk on the opposite side. This would provide a private, quiet place for reading or working on a laptop. We want to add window benches on the stair landings and add some built-in bookshelves in a few places.

On the topic of storage, we need to get some in the garage (and get rid of all of the give-away items stored in there, but that's another topic). Right now, everything in the garage is either still packed in boxes or is sitting on the floor. It is neither organized nor space efficient. Getting shelves in the garage is on our short list of important projects.

Even higher on our short list is landscaping. We moved in six months ago, but winter isn't the best time for putting in landscaping. It would have been a great time to start planning then, but we didn't. We've finally started to work on plans for improving our exterior. More on that later!

All in all, we are still glad that we decided to take on our house building project. There's nothing quite like living in a home that was designed to fit your life.