Guardian Appointment / Adding a few upgrades

Well, we finally got the Guardian appointment out of the way.  I've been a little skeptical of this appointment because I had in my mind that it would be a really push salesman trying to get us to sign up for everything that they have.  Luckily, I was pleasantly surprised that it wasn't that way at all!  We went in with the mindset that we needed some cable jacks and a plug above the fireplace for our TV.  My husband got to the appointment about 20 minutes before I did, so I missed the first part.  Our rep quickly got me up to speed on everything that I missed and some of the things that he had already spoken to my husband about.  Everything looked good with the cable/plugs in the rooms.  We didn't realize that we would need additional jacks for running the cable box/BluRay player from the side of the room.  Obviously, not an option we had to do, but it will look much nicer than a bunch of cords hanging down, or having our stuff up on the mantle.

We were toying around with the idea of getting a speaker or a pre-wire for a speaker on the back of the house for when we have a deck, but decided that we can get away with a wireless speaker if we want one out there.  The only other thing we were considering was a basic security system.  I think we liked it mostly for the fire monitoring, but weren't thrilled with the $50/month, 3-year commitment, so we'll opt not to do that.  Overall, it was a great meeting and our Guarding Rep couldn't have been a nicer guy to work with.
At the end of the day, here's what we ended up adding with Guardian:

The house comes with 3 cable/1 telephone jacks, so we got cable in the Family Room, Living Room, Master Bedroom, and telephone in the kitchen
3 additional cable jacks for the 2 other bedrooms and the loft
outlet above fireplace for the TV
cable/HDMI outlets for wiring TV

We have our wrap-up appointment coming up in the next few days, so I'm anxious to see where that will put us on the building schedule.  Buyers are usually given 3-4 weeks to get all of the appointments done/make selections, but since we have a vacation coming up in a few weeks, we wanted to get everything done sooner.  We've also been making a few changes to the upgrades we have in the house, or at least considering the following:

Light/Fan in morning room
Light Pre-Wire in living room
Bronze light fixtures (not an upgrade, just a preference change)
Upgrade kitchen sink faucet
Upgrade fireplace surround to granite instead of slate (see pics below)
Upgrade kitchen appliances to Deluxe 1

I've been doing some research on the appliance options and have decided that we should upgrade.  There are quite a few levels to upgrade to and I never really looked into what the different options were.  I enjoy cooking/baking, so we will definitely get use out of the nicer stove.  The Deluxe 1 option comes with a convection oven.  I was a little hesitant at first about picking this option, but I've read good reviews on the stove and how evenly convection ovens cook.  I was mostly hesitant because the temperature/timing is different in a convection oven vs. conventional, but I think with some practice I'll really learn to like it.  The other nice features are that the oven comes with 5 burners and one of them is a "powerboil" burner.  I can't wait to start cooking with it!

Here's the pic I found on another blog.  We really liked the tan colored granite instead of the slate, although we ended up picking a slightly darker tan granite than this.

Fireplace with slate option.

On a side note - I've only been slightly worrying about our flooring/counter top choices.  Every time I start to second-guess myself, I try to force myself to stop thinking about it and realize that I went with my gut instincts on everything and even if I went back to look at it all over again, I think I'd stick with what we have.  The hubs asked a few times if we should consider upgrading our kitchen cabinets to another color, but then we thought about how we'd have to re-pick all of our flooring, so we're staying with what we have.  I can really see how easy it would be to start changing all of your choices, though. It's a lot of pressure!