House Update

In the upper left you can see part of our family room.  This room opens with sliding doors and windows on the sides to the back porch.  You can see the doors in the bottom right picture.  This room is open to our kitchen which is behind where I was standing to snap this one.  It will have coffered 10 foot ceilings.  We have picked out a dark coffee/espresso stained hardwood to go through the entire first floor and up the stairs and upstairs hallways.  

The upper right picture is of our garage.  The garage is detached and in the back corner of our property.  The driveway will be narrow and follow along the east side of the house.  Between the house and the garage is where you will find Kendall swimming in our pool.  We haven't ventured out to meet the pool guy yet.  Nothing fancy, but hopefully as nice as we can afford.  A salt water pool is a must though.  You can see the cedar shake and window trim on the garage.  My plan is to hang some wrought iron with coconut liners from those windows.  I've also been eyeing up a wooden seahorse at a store around the corner from us that might look great hanging on the wall between the windows.

The bottom left picture is of what will be our future summer kitchen.  A Floridian summer kitchen means a completely different thing than a Pennsylvania summer kitchen.  These are outside and usually on your back porch.  Ours will have a sink on the left , grill in the middle and fridge and the lower right.  We've picked out a granite counter top but still need to pick out the brick face for it.  It will have shake around the back side and end.  There will also be beautiful slate on the back porch on top of the concrete. I can't wait to see it all come together.

The lower right picture is of the back porch taken by the front door of the garage.  The back porch will run the entire width of the house.  We have it wired for cable so we can watch our favorite football games from the pool!  The  ceiling is one of my favorite parts.  It's a paneled board ceiling - as are all the porch ceilings on our house.  There will be two big panama styled fans out there to keep us cool in the summers.  I want to try to find some type of fire pit (for real wood fires, not that fake gas fire stuff) with a screen so we can continue our tradition of roasting marshmallows with friends while we sit around and enjoy a few beverages.