My Favourite Part- Colour Selection

I loved this part of the whole process.  If you ask Ben, he'd probably say it was his least favourite.  Dragged my teenage daughter to Di Lorenzo and Home Option Gallery to get her help with my choices.  She will tell you that whatever I chose was all her ideas.
I was quiet impressed with Di Lorenzo's tile selections and realized from experience that it was well worth paying the extra money it might cost to upgrade tiles as when selling your home, prospective buyers have bathrooms and kitchens at the top of their lists.  We were also quiet happy with the choices shown by the Home Option Gallery, they cover so much.  Visited the PGH brick display at Schofields very hurriedly one Sunday.  Ben and my daughter weren't too keen on looking at bricks.  We immediately liked the darker bricks and when we asked about the upgrading, we were quoted some ridiculously high amount.  Made our decision to stick to the standard brick very easy.  In hindsight I wished we could have chosen from Australs range of bricks.  They seem to have more variety.  The only two dark bricks that PGH seemed to have were Espresso and Apollo.  We chose Espresso, it was the cheaper option.

Here are our exterior colour choices:

Brick - PGH  Alfresco-Espresso
Roof tile- CSR Monier - Sambuca
Windows- Airlite- Woodland Grey
Garage Door - Steeline- Paperbark
Gutter - Woodland Grey
Fascia - Paperbark
Driveway- Stencil concrete - Sandy Beige

With the interior we pretty much stuck to the black and cream theme.

We had our colour selection appointment on the 7/09/10 and between 9 am and 12 noon, we had pretty much finalised all our colour selections and the kitchen selection.
With the kitchen, I did go a bit overboard, but then again I do believe the kitchen needs to be impressive.  I chose to increase the size of the island bench and upgraded to the Night Sky Caesarstone.  Also added two sets of pot drawers and a pull out spice rack, need the space for all our Indian spices.   Also fitted out the Butlers pantry with a sink and moved my dishwasher under that sink.  Of course I had to have the soft close doors as well.  Tired of listening to my teenage son slamming the kitchen cupboard doors.  The majority of my extra cost came from these kitchen upgrades.
Since we were finished so early,  our Colour consultant checked to see if Di Lorenzo could fit us in that afternoon for the tile selection.  Normally it's a separate appointment.  Luckily they were happy to accommodate us. This is when my husband made a graceful exit and left me and the daughter to it.
We had a basic idea of what we wanted.  Just stuck to the standard tiles for the main tiles and upgraded to mosaics for the features in the shower niches etc.  Our biggest dispute was the kitchen splashback, she wanted a mosaic, which was going to cost about $3k , I wanted a very nice large glass tile with silver flecks through it,  which was only going to cost about $500.  I won.
The only thing left to do now was meet for our electrical appointment which was scheduled for a week later.
Ben and I met with the electrical consultant and pretty much completed that within two hours.  We stuck to the basics in the hope that our electrician son would fit our down lights in for us when the time came.   I did get the ducted vacuum system though.