Wednesday, December 21, 2011

More Options, Harder Decisions

I was just thinking the other day that it's been more than a year since we had everything on our house re-done.  Time sure flies!  And I am still really liking the green siding, which is really good since we're 'stuck' with it for a good long time now, huh?  We're still appreciating how nice everything turned out, maybe not every time we pull into the driveway, but often enough.  I guess it was worth all the decisions we had to make in choosing everything!

I was talking to someone not too long ago about building a house and all the choices that have to be made - from siding, shutters, and shingles to carpeting, paint, and pendant lighting - so many decisions!  I said I thought it was easier when we first built the house because there were limited options to choose from.  I don't think we had more than 10 choices for siding colors and shingles, if that many.  And we couldn't choose the same ones that our immediate neighbors had already picked - which is good so you don't have identical houses sitting side by side, but that limited the options even more.  There were a few options for carpet colors and vinyl flooring patterns, and maybe 2 or 3 cabinet wood colors and styles.

We did have a few more choices when it came to picking out the lights in the house.  They gave us a total budget and sent us to a lighting store to pick out the lights for the whole house.  An entire store full of lights of all types - ceiling fan lights, fluorescent lights for the kitchen, the pendant lighting for over the bar and the dining room table, the lights to go over the mirrors in the bathrooms.  It took a while, but we picked out our lights, and I'm still happy with them, so I guess we did OK.  Imagine if we'd had a website like LampClick to choose from.  It would have taken weeks, instead of one long afternoon in the store.  I don't even need any new lighting right now, and I'm still browsing through the site picking out things I like.  There are so many options!  You can browse by style, finish, price, and even height and width.  You can even shop by room!  With all the tools for narrowing down the options, it might be a lot easier to find just the right lighting than I originally thought - given all the options.

When we were picking new siding, new shingles, and all the other details when we had to get them redone last year after the tornado, the decisions were so much harder than when we first built the house - because there were so many more things to choose from.  The new contractor gave us many more options to choose from than our original contractor.  I don't know if it's because there are more options out there now, or if the builder got especially good deals on certain things so that's all they made available for us to choose from, which probably helped to keep the cost of building the house down.  While it was easier to make choices when there were limited options to choose from, in the end I'd rather have more options.  It may make the choosing harder, but the end result is more likely to be something we're going to like for a long time.