Chinaberry Update: Brick, Faucets, Shingles, and More!

I’m so excited to finally be able to share a few updates on the Chinaberry House with y’all! I know it’s been a while since I share the plans, but if you’ve ever been told that building a house is a test in patience, you’ve been told correctly. We’ve been blessed with a great builder who has been masterfully navigating through the building process during a pandemic, but some things are even out of his control. So while things are moving slowly, they’re moving and we’re just so excited.

As I explained in the post about the plans for the main house, the style of the house is very “farmhouse.” And while we love that, we wanted it to be a little more classic and maybe a touch more “Southern.” Now, that’s a term we use loosely. I’m not exactly sure what a “Southern” house looks like, but that’s what we’re going with, so bear with me. To do that, we removed a few of the design elements that made the house look super farmhouse-ish. We eliminated the post brackets and exposed rafter tails, for instance. We also removed the gooseneck lights.

Another thing we did was to add a considerable amount of brick.

The real challenge came when choosing that brick. As with so many things in the building industry right now, production on building materials hasn’t returned to pre-covid normal. Many kilns are running at a greatly reduced capacity which means that many brick makers aren’t producing their full lines. For us, that translated to us picking something we loved to then be told we couldn’t get it.

Heather and I were set in that we wanted something that looked reclaimed, but we didn’t really have the budget for actual reclaimed brick. Heather also loved a few samples of brick that we found that had a little bit of color on it – almost like the bricks had been part of a painted sign on the side of a building or something. After a considerable amount of research, we came across the Silo Square brick from Cherokee Brick. We instantly knew it was the right choice.

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It’s got the salvaged look that we were hoping for and the little pop of blue color that Heather loved. We opted for a flush mortar joint in a slightly off-white color to give it even more of that classic, old-timey feel. It will look a little different than the pictures above, but we’re super excited to see it.

One of the other decisions we had to make early on was about plumbing fixtures. Much like the brick situation, the factories that produce the faucets and such aren’t running full-steam right now, so they’ve reduced their production to their most popular lines. (Y’all see a pattern here?) Our builder saw this one coming, too, and had us make these selections early as a result. He’s a big fan of Delta because of their warranty and really pushed us in that direction. For the majority of the house, we chose the Cassidy collection from Delta combined with a few pieces from the Linden collection as well.

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These fixtures have that old school yet modern feel that we’re going for and since we’re using a pop of brass on many of the drawer pulls, decided to go with brass faucets as well. Technically, I think this color is called Champagne Bronze, but you know what I mean.

The other thing that we picked out was shingles. This isn’t super glamorous or earth shattering, but it’s an important part of the process. While the mock-ups for the house include an all metal roof, we decided to shingle the main part of the house and go with metal on the awnings. We wanted something with tan tones as to match the dark tan metal, so we went with TAMKO Heritage Natural Timber.

One of the things that was super helpful in picking out the shingles was that the company gave us addresses of houses that had recently used the colors of shingles we were looking at so we could ride by to see the colors on actual houses. We had nearly decided on one color based on the samples in the showroom, but then completely changed our minds when we saw that color on a house. It looked vastly different installed.

In terms of actual progress on the house, water and power have been run to the site and we’ve entered the framing phase. We can even start seeing rooms take shape. After the foundation was finished, several of the rooms felt a little small, but now that the walls are going up, it’s been a huge relief to “feel” the space and realize that it’s hard to gauge that based just on the foundation.

It’s crazy to say this, but it’s even starting to feel like home. We’ve worked so hard to get to this point, I just love being there. It’s almost to the point where I go by at least once a day. I could sit on the top of the hill and just take it all in for hours… you know, if it wasn’t a thousand degrees! Gracious, its hot! I have mad respect for the folks that work out in the heat all day.

So there you have it, a little (or big!) update on Chinaberry. I hate it’s taken me so long to get it put together, but it’s here nonetheless. As always, we appreciate y’all following along!