A Pop of Color

I wish that I had realized 5 months ago how great it was to have color in a room.
Everywhere we have lived (rented) we have always had white walls, or some boring ole drab beige or grey.
We've been eyeing colors since about the time they put a  hole in the ground to build a home for us. I've scoured Pinterest, read blogs and would just dream of all the colors I want to put on the walls.
I think every time we would go to Home Depot, we'd go to the paint department and pick out colors.
And all colors.

Seriously. Haha! I had (and still have) visions for what we wanna do. Grey for the main color of the house.  A dark blue in the morning room. Some kind of grey in the master bedroom. I was undecided on the master bath, but we are thinking some kind of light teal color. The basement we've always known. But that's a bit of a surprise for now.  But, think baseball <3
The upstairs hall bath I want a dark purple with a grey tone to it.  The theme in that bathroom is travel. And the decor is black and white.  So, I envision the purple color going well with the black and white elements in that bathroom.
Not sure about the other two bedrooms yet. But hey, it's our house and we will be here forever, so we have time.
I want some kind of fun green in the laundry room. Not lime green, and not mint green... but something fun and bright. And it's the laundry room. No one has to like the green in there but me, haha!

So yeah... colors everywhere!
And we have started painting! We were SO intimidated at first, but now that one room is done we want to just paint, paint and paint some more.

We started with the morning room.  We still don't have any furniture in there (well, except a corner book shelf) so it is pretty easy to prep the room to paint. I bought some painters tape that had drop cloth attached to it.  Hated it at first til I got the hang of using it.  I've since bought more for all of our other paint projects, haha!

And now the morning room!
Here are some before photos:

And, the after!!!  The color we used is Behr's EXPRESS BLUE.  And I. LOVE. IT. It pops so well up against the white trim and doors and windows.  We need blinds in here still, but I still love the light the flows through too.  I also got some WHITE curtains that we'll hang up soon! But for now... the color and the morning room <3

Cody and Crosley really wanted to show off the new color <3

We also decided to paint the entryway from the garage (aka the mudroom) this same color.  I loved it so much and thought it would be great there too (and then the house in the middle {aka the kitchen} will be grey)... and I was right! I was slightly hesitant because we painted the doors black in here and I was worried it was gonna be too dark.... but I am so glad we painted the entryway {mudroom} blue. It looks amazing! I'll have to update soon with photos of the entryway bench and hutch that we have too.  It's white and pops so well off of the walls.  I have to attach the hutch to the wall and haven't had time as of right now.

This wall is where our entryway bench and hutch go.

Basement door

Standing in the morning room looking towards the garage/entryway

Gorgeous, right?!  And I just love the color. And I love that it changes color in the sunlight opposed to the lighting when it's dark outside. So pretty <3

We aren't done though!! We also have another project we decided to start. That's a bit of a surprise still as to WHAT we are doing, but we decided to paint the wall that said project is going on.
It's in the loft.  We put a couple sample colors on the loft wall to help us decide on our grey for the house.  I can't believe I had picked such DARK colors to begin with! We definitely need LIGHTER for the entire house.

Anyways, the loft wall is MISSION CONTROL by Behr. It's definitely a darker grey and we LOVE it here! We love it so much that we also decided that we wanted it on the foyer wall on the main floor. Again, another project that isn't finished as we have bigger plans for it... but it's started!

Pictures!!

Loft- before photos. You can see in the distance there our 3 color choices that we were "between"

Before photo of the loft

Loft- After! Behr Mission Control <3

Loft- Behr Mission Control "after" photo

And here is the foyer hall--

Before (standing in the "living room" looking towards the foyer-- front door is on the left)

Before- Standing at the end of the foyer looking towards the front door

After- (standing in the "living room" looking towards the foyer-- front door is on the left)

After- Standing at the end of the foyer looking towards the front door

Like I said, we have other "plans" for this wall before it's completely finished, but that hasn't happened yet.

I also painted the wall that is behind the downstairs closet in the foyer. It's the wall between the "living room" and "dining room".... I painted it SILVER BULLET by Behr.  This is the color we decided to go with for the entire house. A friend has their house painted the same color, which is how we got turned on to it.  And, it's a great light grey for the entire house.

I've since decided that I'll be painting this the same grey as the foyer wall.  I have plans that require white furniture and frames on this wall, and the darker color will contrast the white stuff perfectly.  So stay tuned on an actual fully painted wall, haha!

And finally.... probably the best painting we have done so far... THE BASEMENT.
We are Reds fans (baseball) if y'all didn't know that.  So the basement is gonna be a favorite spot for us.  All of our memorabilia, decor... it's gonna be pretty damn awesome when it's done.  I guess you can consider it a "man cave", but honestly? I love baseball just as much as hubby does.... so it's OUR man cave.

So- we painted the stairway in the basement RED.  It's Behr's 100 MPH, and it's amazing! I seriously feel like I'm in GABP when I see this!

Painting has seriously made SUCH a huge difference! I love the pops of color throughout the house and can't wait to paint more and finish up some of our projects!  We have also started decorating some of the areas that we've painted, and it's awesome!  I am loving making this house our home!

Leaks Resolved...... JUST KIDDING!

I literally was writing a post last Monday to tell y'all that our leaks have been resolved!  That they finally patched up the tiny hole in our ceiling and it looked like new.

And then I got home from work on Monday night, and we had this:

Yep.  That would be wet ceiling.  Again.  Same general area, but a little farther over than the last two times.
I'm upset.  So very upset.
So, I fill out the service request.  Wait nearly a full day to hear from the service manager, Jared.  I send him a couple of text photos of the leak.

I hear from him the next day (Wednesday) and he has pulled our plans and has an idea of where it is potentially coming from.   I have MORE news for him, as we have another wet spot that has shown up.  This spot is VERY close in proximity to where to hole was just patched up from the first/second leak....  See:

He tells me that he's escalating the issue to critical (or whatever the proper word is here. I don't really remember), and the plumbing company should DIRECTLY contact me to set up a time to come out.  That was Wednesday around 330pm.

By Thursday around 1, I hadn't heard from the plumber.  So, I called Jared (service manager) and left a voicemail.  I need to know WHEN we need to take time off so that they can resolve this.  This is the so-very-frustrating part.  We have to take time off.  We both work 9-5 jobs.  Circumstances at MY job right now don't allow me to take immediate time off with something like this.  It must be planned.  Hubby works as a contractor.  That means that he DOESN'T get paid if he doesn't work.  Anyone that needs to come out to our home for repairs and such (with this leak and other service requests) works the same fricken hours that we do.  So one of us must take off to be home with people coming for repairs.  It sucks.

So yeah, not long after my voicemail, I get a phone call from the plumber wanting to set up a time to be out to the house.  He can be out as early as 730 in the morning.  So, hubby gets things situated with his work so that he can have the morning off.

Friday morning.  It takes nearly FIVE hours for the plumber to finish and fix the leak. So that's FIVE hours that he hasn't gotten paid because he's at home dealing with this.

Check out the text message photos I get along the way:

Go ahead.  You can laugh at the ridiculousness of this whole thing.  It's okay.  I did.

This plumber was pretty thorough in his work.  He was measuring before he cut... he found a leak.  A small one.  He had to cut into our subfloor to get to the cause of the problem to fix it.  It was a very slow drip, which is why we aren't getting a waterfall of water every time we use the tub in the master bath.  And that's also why we keep on getting wet spots on the ceiling.  Slow drip means it can travel up and down the pipe and start dripping at different places.  That's why it's showing up on different places in the ceiling.
And that's why it hasn't been caught until now.

Leak #1 was "caught" at the shower.  Fixed after 3 holes were cut into our drywall in the bedroom, leak soldered and everything was fixed.

Leak #2 was "caught" at the cold water knob on the master tub.  Fixed and now we just have to wait for us to have time off to repair the drywall with the drywall guy.

Leak #3 is this one.  I am HOPING it's the culprit and has been the entire time.  It's fixed.  We now just have to deal with a nearly 2 foot square of ceiling missing in the kitchen.

Wanna guess for how long?!?!  OVER TWO WEEKS! The service manager wants to use a particular company that he knows does great work on textured ceilings.  Their EARLIEST appointment is Nov. 15 and Nov 16.  I was told it's going to take two days to do the repairs.

Cute, right?

So now for my irritation:  Why listen to me when I originally say it's the shower that's leaking.  Just to appease me?  I had a hunch that it might have been the shower because of the changing colors of grout we had right behind the shower.  Weird part is, they DID find a leak (I was told) and they even soldered something together so it wouldn't leak.
And then the day before they're supposed to fix the drywall in our kitchen, it starts leaking again.  It took a small amount of investigating, but they determined it was the cold water knob on the bath tub.  Now, that thing was broken, was replaced, and now it's leaking.  So yet another resolution.  A couple days AFTER we get the drywall in the kitchen F-I-N-A-L-L-Y replaced and patched up, and we have ANOTHER leak.
Like I said, this plumber sounded like he was pretty thorough.  He found a couple of spots that we should have checked out.  One of them is the grout at the bath tub.  It's on the outside of the bathtub, and logistically, I am not quite sure how it would leak from there, but we are going to have it taken care of.  I think.

You can see how it's cracked and pretty much looks like it's not attached to the tile at all.
It looks like shit.
I really hate how half-assed half of our bathroom looks.  We paid a ton of money to have it look like it does, and it's just not good.

The second thing that the plumber found concerning... The grout in the master shower.  This one bothers me and not long ago I noticed it.  I'm worried water could be seeping through this as we use this shower EVERY day.

At this point, I really just want them to pull it all up and re-do it.  There are so many shoddy pieces of tile, wavy parts of tile and terrible grout application.

It's so frustrating.

And I have so many questions still.  Are they replacing the ceiling where the drywall-strip is wet?  It's also cracked about 6 feet along that strip (assuming it's where that piece of drywall ends).  Or are they just going to patch up that hole?

The grout debacle:  that was originally on our 30 day.  So our service manager has given that back to the PM to handle.  I haven't heard anything yet.  I don't even know where to start and what to do about that.  Communication is such a big deal to me.

And then, I feel like this whole thing needs to be escalated and talked about with Ryan Homes.  I want them to know my frustrations and what we are dealing with.  The money we are losing out on because we have to be home because their sub-contracted companies don't do the hours we are home.  And the frustrations we have dealt with.  And the amount of water we have used just to ensure we don't have leaks anymore.

So I'm working on figuring out how to go "higher up" with all of this.

I don't want y'all to think we hate this whole thing.  The leak.  Yes.  Hate that part.  But our home?  We love it.  It's our space, we adore the house and all the memories we are making. It just stinks that those memories include all of this headache with the leak.

Keep your fingers crossed that this doesn't become "leak- apart 4".  That's not going to bode well for anyone.

We DO have lots of projects in process!  Door painting, deck staining... and we are hopefully gonna start painting the inside of the house soon too!!

Leaks.

I think there should be a witty title for this post.

But there's not.

We have a leak.  Noticed it yesterday as we were leaving for work.  It's in between the morning room and the kitchen.  It leaked some yucky brown water onto our granite counters which caused it to stain. And- THERES A LEAK.  In a house we have been in for less than two month.

A leak.

So, we unfortunately had to go to work and couldn't stress right then and there about this leak in our house.  Luckily it wasn't leaking heavily.  As soon as I got to work and a computer, I got on the Ryan Homes site and filled out the service request thingy to have it documented and get someone out to look at it.  Also, because it was a leak, I emailed our PMs so they were aware of it.  I want this thing fixed as soon as possible.

Here's the link to the service request in case any of y'all need it: Ryan Homes Service Request

Now, before I get into this whole process, I want to explain a couple of things, and refresh y'all on a couple of things.

First, way back before we had drywall go up, we went to visit the house one day and noticed a pretty big leak from the kitchen to the morning room on the beam that pretty much connects the two rooms together.  We took photos and were going to address it with the PM when we had our pre-drywall meeting.

Here's the post from Week 5 where we were getting HVAC and such put in... we have a photo that I'll post below of the beam between the morning room and kitchen. It was leaking REALLY bad.

You can see the beam where it's broken... The water was dripping heavily right there.

Well, that's exactly where our leak was coming from yesterday.  So at this point I'm thinking it could have been from that area.

The other potential culprit-- something that I brought up at our 30 day follow up.... The grout in our master shower has spots that are way darker than other spots. The handyman just put some grout over the top of the spots that looked darker.  I was concerned that it looked "wet" even after it had dried to begin with.  I noticed it a lot when I was sealing our grout.  I asked our PM at the 30 day if it could be a leak.  He said that if it were a leak we would see it through the walls or elsewhere causing issues.

So, I thought that seemed logical.  Made sense.  Didn't really make sense why our grout would be two different colors.. but hey, I'm not the expert.

Here's my post from our 30 day that talks about all this stuff:  30 Day Post Settlement Follow Up!

Okay, so now back to the service request online.  It was super easy.  I entered our zip code, then our address and BOOM! Filled out the request and hit submit.  A few hours later some guy called me.  He left me a voicemail as I was at work and couldn't get to the phone.  In his voicemail, he wanted clarification as to whether or not it was a "beam" like what I described, or if it was part of the HVAC system.  I clearly knew it was a wooden beam as I had the pre-drywall photos and knew in the back of my head that one day we'd have a leak here.

So, I called back.  It's a general number and I talked to a gal named Morgan.  I explained the situation, and when she pulled up the request, the guy that left the voicemail had switched the ticket from an "other" ticket {I chose "other" because they didn't have anything for leaks inside} to an HVAC issue.  Without me calling or saying anything.

That rubbed me the wrong way.  You know what they say when you assume things, right?!

So,she fixed everything and said that the info would be forwarded to a guy named Jared, who apparently takes over service requests past the 30 day follow ups.  I mentioned that our PMs already knew about it, and she said that they would also be notified of the service request.

Our PM responded to my email pretty quickly, saying he'd try to get the plumber out.  He also asked if we had used the master bath recently.

We mentioned that we both work 8-4:30, so we need some kind of notice if the plumber can come out, so we can get off of work early, if it was even possible.  Also told him we hadn't used the master bath in at least a week (but I promise we use the shower every day).

It took several hours for a response, but he let me know that the plumber could be out the next morning at 7:30, and asked if that would work.  I immediately text hubby and he was able to ask his boss for the morning off so he could be home.

When we got home from work yesterday afternoon, it didn't seem bad.  The leak had dried up and was just a small blotch of yuck on the roof, and the spot on the granite had dried and wasn't visible anymore, and the granite looked good.  I was happy about the granite.  I was so ready to be demanding and require they replace that piece of granite if it was stained.  So they can consider themselves lucky about that one, haha!

So hubby stayed home this morning and waited for the plumbers.  I made my way to work and got text message updates the entire time.  They showed up around 7:45.  It was one of our PMs and 2 plumbers.

The first text I got said that he heard one of them say "ut oh".

Well that's fantastic.

And the verdict?  It's the master shower.

When hubby told me that, he got a string of angry face emojis. I fricken CALLED it.  I asked about it and it was brushed off.  Y'all have NO idea how upset I am over this.

So, now they must cut holes in our drywall to fix the leak.

One giant hole is cut in the drywall.  Guess what?!  NO LEAK.

Seriously.

So a second hole is cut.  Luckily they find the cause of the leak here and get their tools out to solder it back together so it no longer leaks.  And we now have two gaping holes in our drywall in the master bedroom.

And then the downstairs.  They had to cut a hole in the ceiling and then take apart the drywall where the beam is between the kitchen and morning room.  All of that has to "dry out" for a week and then they'll replace the drywall and patch everything up.

Have  I mentioned to you guys how stressful this has all been and how many tears I have shed?

Wanna see photos?  Cuz I have them!

I'll caption each one with what it is.  There's a few tile photos from our master bath showing the different colors of the grout, followed by the photos of the work they did to make holes in our walls.  All of these photos were taken with my phone so they won't be the best quality.. haha!

This is the leak.  the top of this is the ceiling and the other is the "beam" that separates the morning room from the kitchen. The leak is on the kitchen side.

A bit of a better photo of the leak.  When we "found" it, it was actively leaking, although not a waterfall, just a drip.

This is the beam between the kitchen (left side) and morning room (right side).  you can see the damage it's already caused.

Another angle of the beam and the damage.

Another closer angle of the beam and the damage.  You can see water spots and cracked drywall here.

A bit better lighting of the photo above.

This is in the master bath.  This tile is OUTSIDE the shower, but it's a new bit of one of two things... Either bad tile work or it's cracked because of the water leaking from behind this wall.

Another shot of the tile outside the shower that I noticed this morning while snapping photos.

This is inside the shower, right below the shower knob.  Notice the two different colors of grout.  One is lighter while the second is darker.  We haven't used the shower for a full day since this shot, but this is how it has looked since we first moved in and started using the shower.

More dark grout.

A wider angle.  Below the knob you can see how it's a darker color grout than all of the rest of the grout surrounding the shower.

This is the area of granite that was "stained" when we initially noticed the leak.  Thankfully it all looks okay and there's no damage to the granite.  For a funny-- that outlet (and all the morning room outlets) don't work.  Sigh.  I swear home ownership is fun.

The first cut.  I lost it when hubby sent me this photo.  Full on tears.  They're cutting the walls in our brand new house.
Also note the Happy Hooker shirt.  At least that made me laugh for a brief second.

First cut.  After this was cut, they made the revelation that it wasn't leaking from this area and still had to find the source of the leak.

So now we have TWO holes in the drywall.  That second hole did find the leak and at this point they soldered it to fix it.
Hopefully.

And now back down to the kitchen.  Prepping the area to cut out damaged areas.

Hole in the ceiling and pulled off the stuff on the beam so everything can dry out.

And Crosley.  Because he's smiling and looks like a grown adult dog here {He's not even 7 months old yet!!!!}

Sigh.

We have holes in our walls.
And a leak (well, hopefully a fixed leak now).

I haven't been home to survey all of this yet, as I've worked all day.  Luckily it's been a slow day so I have been able to stew over this all day long and look at these photos.  (Sarcasm there if you didn't catch that).

I'm exhausted from this day of stress.  I'm upset that our brand new house has issues like this.  I'm even more upset that I specifically ASKED if the different color grout could mean there was a leak and was told no.
And now I get to worry for the next forever about mold and mildew right there.

I'll update all of you guys once it gets fixed, but this is our current hell.