House Update - Stairs, Closets, Granite and Landscaping

Wellllll, it's been a big week at the house and I hope more stuff will actually get done next week. 

We decided to use the smaller ballaster (1 1/4") on our stairs.  There will be two per stair. 

Our curved stairs create kind of a weird bottom newell post.  Usually it would be round and the banister would wrap around but we didn't really want that look.  We hope we can do something like this.  This newel is almost like an octagon?

In other news, the quote for all of our closets came in almost 3 times our budget.  So now our trim guy is likely going to build them all for our budget number.  He's awesome. 

Granite is getting cut this week.  I met the guy out there again yesterday to confirm the overhang on our island around our sink.  We are going with 1" and the sides will have a 1.5" overhang and the seating area will have an 18" overhang.  I cannot WAIT to see the end result of all this stone being installed.  I hope it's more gorgeous than I thought.  We ended up doing Shadow Storm Quartzite in the kitchen! 

This is the island piece.  About 20" of the left side will be trimmed off.  The sink will be cut out of the middle bottom.  We have 3 other slabs of shadow storm for the rest of the kitchen and bar.

This is the piece of carrara marble we chose for the master bath and my dressing area.  We are hoping to get it all cut out of this one slab but we do have another one just in case.  

This is a piece of marble I think but it will be for a bathroom, I think a guest bathroom but not positive.  

We may use this piece too.  We are waiting to see how much carrara and shadow storm leftover we have because we may use some of that in the secondary bathrooms.  Otherwise we will use these remnants.  

And we may use this piece too for a bathroom.  We'll see.  

I didn't take any pictures but the landscape guy got out there on Tuesday  (finally) and cut a few more trees down and spread some dirt around.  It is looking more like a yard.  I think we are going to bring in a bunch of loads of dirt to raise the lot.  We'll see.  

Last weekend we bought a built in grill and it's getting delivered today.  We'll have the mason back over to build the grilling station when he does the front and back steps.  Yesterday I looked at bluestone tops for the grilling area and the hearth of the outdoor fire place.  Oh la la!  Also, may do a bluestone entrance like the below on our driveway, we'll see.