Anyone can do a normal color session Part 1: Just not earth-colored
We experience a completely different kind of color session with our builder, because he and we are probably not the usual kind of builder and builder. This has advantages and disadvantages. The disadvantages are suspected during the selection process, while the advantages only became apparent afterwards. But let’s start from the beginning:
What is a color session anyway?
As the name suggests, it’s all about the colors and, in a broader sense, the materials. For a standard color session, there are two scenarios in which all the materials to be installed individually, such as floor coverings, kitchen furniture and appliances, doors, fittings, roofing, etc., are selected.
Either the entire range of standard materials is available in Modelhome, for example, or the builder will take you to a DIY store where you can select these items with his expert advice. If you do not find what you are looking for in the materials included in the specifications of the building contract, you should consider whether you want to pay for the so-called upgrade or whether it is acceptable to cut back on your ideas and which ones are not.
Those who have the choice are spoiled for choice
With our builder, all doors are open to us, or so we thought. Disillusionment soon set in when we were asked which doors these actually were. We were given a few addresses to look around, such as a tile market, a paving market, a store for worktops, a website for kitchen furniture and so on. Two opposites meet: we, who are never satisfied with standard and our contractor, who almost only installs standard. In short, we couldn’t find what we were looking for. So what now?
Let’s start with the exterior materials. The selection of the roof is very important. First of all, we wanted a roof with blue flat tiles. As we couldn’t find a store for this, we looked around on the Internet. It’s great that you can research almost everything on the Internet these days. We didn’t like any of the blue tiles from the various suppliers.
Useppa Island roofs as a model
We continued to look for the “shake” bricks (mixed colors), which we also liked so far. Unfortunately – and I would say it feels like 80 percent of houses are covered from head to toe in earth tones – these mixtures are also mostly earth tone colors. We looked at every single brick and couldn’t get excited about any of them.
All that remained was a color for the roof that wasn’t actually a color at all. We came up with it more out of despair or disillusionment. You have to ask yourself whether it’s not really your own fault. So we took a very sober approach and thought about which houses we actually like best in this area.
Then it was easy: they are the ones with the white roofs against a blue background with white clouds. Not kitschy? But that’s how it was. We looked up all the nearby houses with white roofs on Google Earth and drove around them. We saw many white tiled roofs that looked rather gray instead of bright white. We were told that this was due to the damp and was therefore out of the question for us.
So we were a bit smarter again, but still didn’t have a roof. Thinking about it again, it was actually the bright white roofs that you see from the boat off Useppa Island or Cabbage Key. And they were all made of metal. Initially, we didn’t even consider such a roof because we saw them as suitable for commercial buildings.
But we slowly became more and more comfortable with the idea. We looked for all the white tin roofs in the vicinity on the virtual earth again and drove over them. Most of them were nice and white to ok and even looked really great. To finalize our decision, we even drove to the manufacturer in Sebring for advice.
We drove back with a color sample and an idea of the shape and fastening as well as the knowledge of all the advantages of a sheet metal roof. After all, we couldn’t imagine any other roof.