It has been just over a year (1 year and 6 days, to be exact) since we broke ground on our new addition. Since my husband and I (but mostly my husband) have done 80% of the work, it has taken much longer than we initially projected. Travel, work, socializing and the like seems to squeeze in between stages of construction and renovation. Oh, and inspections. We are fortunate to know people in the world of HVAC, plumbing and electric, so having those parts covered were big money savers. My husband did almost all the plumbing himself; his father is an electrical engineer and did all of our wiring; a good friend of ours owns an HVAC company who did most of our heating and A/C work (although he and my husband did a lot of the busy work themselves after hours). Knowing all of these people in the industry also led us to great contacts for other parts of the job - the 20% we contracted out (drywall finisher, carpenters (who framed the addition after the slabs were poured), and siding contractors). So, had it not been for us doing most of the work, we would have paid LOTS more and it would have been done probably last fall. But I am fine with how it has turned out. We made a lot of design changes along the way, as well as some mistakes. I can't wait to post the final outcome.
Picking Out Stone
Yesterday, my husband and I finally chose the stone that we will use to compliment our clay colored siding. We opted to incorporate stone on portions of the house in order to sort of "keep up with the Joneses" since the new houses in the surrounding developments and area are doing something similar. Our house is a 1978 rancher and in order to get it to stand up to the current trends, we felt this was a good option.
We chose Mainline Cobblestone (pictured below) 
and we plan to use a grey or muted grout color. We liked that this stone has varied colors - some bold and some muted, which will make the areas we are using the stone pop against the siding. We also plan to get dark brown or dark reddish brown shutters and paint our main entry doors some sort of deep red (final decision on this is yet to be determined and we will wait until the rest of the house is done before deciding on the door color).
I will blog about how the stone veneer looks once it is up, but that will likely be several weeks, if not, months from now.