The idea of decorating your new home can be daunting, but our Model Home Designer, Michael Ridge, gave me some easy tips on how to decorate your home to reflect your personal style without breaking the bank.

According to Michael, whether you build from the ground up or select a completed home, your Ideal Home can be viewed as a “blank canvas” with endless possibilities.

1. Find a common theme with fabric. Michael says she gets her creative inspiration by visiting fabric stores. Once she settles on a fabric, she then “ties in” the colors from the fabric to the walls.

2. Build on what you already have. If you already own a piece of furniture like a couch or dining set but feel it doesn’t quite fit the look you are going for in your new home, try changing the appearance with new pillows or accessories. Michael re-used the red couch and created an entirely different mood from the previous red, black and white color palate.

3. Make it your own. Just because you bought pre-packaged bedding or drapes doesn’t mean your room has to look like it was ripped straight from the page of a catalog. Michael believes that adding your own personal touch can be as easy as finding accent ribbon to tie curtains/towels and the right shade of paint to pull it all together.

4. Break it up. Alternate colors on different walls to define each space. Since several Ideal plans feature kitchens that are open to the living area, don’t be afraid to use a contrasting color from one room to the next as long as it blends with your color scheme.

5. Shop for bargains. Believe it or not, Michael finds the majority of model home accessories and bedding at places like Target, Bed Bath & Beyond, TJ Maxx and Ross! She shops around and keeps her eyes open for good deals that will ultimately complete the design of a room.

6. Don’t be afraid of color. Paint is an inexpensive way to give your room personality. Michael recommends taking your fabric samples to the paint store and holding them up to paint swatches to make your own color board and better visualize how everything will come together.

Have you applied any of these steps to your new Ideal Home? Send us photos that show how you personalized your favorite room.

As a mom, I’m always looking for new, fun places to take my son to burn off energy. Ideal Homes has developed some amazing playgrounds within our communities. Here are a few of my favorites.

1. Valencia in Edmond:

Kids love this towering pirate ship and its huge slide. This is only one of several playgrounds in Valencia’s 30 acres of parks and open spaces. Valencia is located between May and Penn, just north of 178^th.

2. Red Canyon Ranch in Norman:

There is a lot to love about this playground. It’s located on one of the highest points in Norman and has great panoramic views. Your kids will love the swings and the nearby nature trail. Red Canyon Ranch is located on E. Tecumseh, just west of 12 Ave NE (Sooner Road) in Norman.

3. Featherstone in Moore:

The playground in Featherstone is located beside the large pond in the center of the community. Featherstone is south of SW 149th Street on Western Ave.

What are your favorite parks in the OKC metro?

Langley Floorplan - 2,024 SQ FT.

Ideal’s Design Center manager, Dari Roberts, and her team design interiors for the company’s beautiful model homes. This summer, Dari will blog about quick ideas that you can incorporate into your summer makeover plans. First up: a study nook or home office.

“We took advantage of a hallway alcove to create a study area for kids in the Country Place model at 2340 SW 135^th. This home already had a beautiful home office, but we thought this alcove made a great place to do homework. You could do something similar in a closet or the corner of a bedroom. We used painted cabinets, but you could use a file cabinet with a painted hollow core door for the top. Add a chair and lamp, and you’re in business.

The chair and wall art look custom, but we found a chair that we loved and matching pillows. We stapled the pillow fabric around stretcher strips for an instant custom look.”

Dari’s Tip: This fabric has a bold striped pattern, so you should select your paint color after you select furniture and accessories. It’s a lot easier to match paint to fabric than the other way around.

At Ideal Homes we design every floor plan around livability. We strive to build new homes in Oklahoma City that work for how people actually live in them by looking at how our home buyers use their homes and customizing floor plans to fit their needs. We learn what home buyers need by analyzing feedback from several sources.

1.  Homeowner surveys. We ask every family in an Ideal home how they live in their home, what they like, and what they would change.
2.  Customer requests in the Ideal Homes’ Design Center. When we see a trend, we implement it in future designs.
3.  Ideal Homes employees. A large number of our employees are also Ideal homeowners. We get great feedback from inside our own company.

One example of feedback we’ve taken directly from our homeowners and applied to our floor plan design is the addition of more flexible space. Through a combination of the avenues above, we learned that many homeowners were using formal dining rooms for home offices, playrooms, craft rooms, music rooms or home gyms. Families were using the extra space to meet their unique needs. We knew our floor plans needed to reflect that. Ideal Homes responded by including more flex space in homes that offered different options for the space and provided plans with more flexible layouts that could meet a variety of needs.

New homes in Oklahoma City should reflect how you live.  We always encourage feedback.  Feel free to visit any of our furnished model homes and give us our thoughts.

Over half of Ideal Homes home buyers are purchasing their first home.  One of the challenges of home ownership is saving money for that intimidating down payment.

Preparation for your down payment is a challenge. Spending money without being mindful of budget is easy; debit and credit cards = quick swipes to purchases. Saving money conversely is not so easy. Saving money is important. What if you’ve had your eye on a new home in Oklahoma City?

If you are a renter, the possibility of home ownership seems more and more appealing with each passing rent payment. The benefit of tax deductions and the building of equity make initial sacrifices of spending to save for a down payment a little easier to support. Where will the money come from? Where will you find your down payment and all those other new home expenses?

Chances are, the money may be easier to find than you think. The first place to start looking – your spending habits.

If you arrive at work every morning with a cup of coffee from your favorite coffee shop, how much does that put you back? Let’s assume $4. Multiply that by five days a week, and you’ve consumed $1,040 worth of caffeine in one year. If your significant other does the same thing, together you’re spending almost $2,100 on hot beverages. Consider the alternatives: invest in a coffee pot and make your own at home, satisfy your super Joe addiction only two days a week or find a convenience store that sells the stuff at a quarter of the price.

It’s 11 a.m., and you’re hungry. Where will you and your co-workers go for lunch today? Restaurant meals take a big bite out of your pocketbook. Let’s say you spend $10 a day. Over 12 months, those lunches eat up $2,600.  If your significant other eats restaurant meals daily as well, the two of you rack up $5,200 in restaurant expenses each year. The alternatives: brown-bag it or check out the $1 menu at many fast-food places.

If new homeownership is on your horizon, make a plan. Set a budget and watch those expenses. It may stretch your spending resolve initially, but in the end it will be well worth the sacrifices made.

Contact us and ask us for additional tips that will help you take the first big step to home ownership.

Congratulations! You’re the proud owner of a new home (hopefully an Ideal home). You’ve survived moving day with your marriage, your relationships with friends and family, and your back mostly intact. 

You’ve unpacked at least 100 more boxes than you packed, and the garage is still stacked to the ceiling. In spite of your best efforts, the coffee machine and your favorite t-shirt are on the missing list. And, worst of all, your house just doesn’t feel like home yet.

Consider something green and growing. Indoors or out there’s no quicker way to make your home feel welcoming than festive container gardens.

Tip #1: Just buy them. If you have no inclination toward planting and tending, you can find patio pots in a wide variety of colors at garden centers, hardware and home centers, and the plant tents cropping up in parking lots all over town. Do decide in advance if your container garden is going into sun or shade and pick accordingly. If the tag doesn’t give you this information, be sure to ask. Getting this part wrong will doom your pretty pot from the start.

If you’re sick of unpacking, grab the kids and take a swing at planting your own pots. Here are some ideas.

Tip #2: Pick your container carefully. Clay, stone, concrete and iron pots are gorgeous, but once you fill them with plants, they are very heavy. Resin and Styrofoam offer a lighter choice. These have improved so much that you can hardly tell them from the real deal, and many of them survive the winter better than clay pots.

Tip #3: Pick colors that look good with your home. Here are some sample palettes that always look good together.

Foliage (leaves)

• Red, silver and blue
• Dark green and lime
• Dark green, red and variegated (2-color)

Flowers

• All one color – any color, just vary them from light to dark
• White with anything – makes all the other colors show up better. Try Diamond Frost euphorbia. It works in sun or shade and makes any pot look professional.
• Cool colors – pink, purple and blue
• Warm colors – red, orange and yellow

One Last Tip: Thrillers, Fillers and Spillers. Choose one attention-getting plant to be your focal point, at least one plant that will drape over the side of the pot and medium-height plants to fill in between.

So that’s it. If you need more ideas, check out www.ProvenWinners.com for ideas and pot recipes. And enjoy going green!

There are a lot of resources on-line that give great tips for moving into a new home.  Here are nine that might come in handy:

• Make an investment in your marriage and friendships – hire movers.  Don’t eat for a month, sell your car and ride a bike to work, sell a kidney…just do whatever it takes.  Hire people to carry and transport your stuff! You will not regret it.
• Ok, ok, hiring movers won’t work for everyone.  If you can’t hire movers, start sucking up to your truck-owning friends several months before the move.  Do not wait until you have announced that you’re moving.  That’s too obvious.  If you have friends who own trucks, think strategically.  Birthday cards, un-solicited acts of kindness, etc.  The key is getting them to a point where helping you move is their idea.  Or better yet, the idea of the truck-owners spouse.  Here’s what you want her to say, “Honey, did you hear that ______________is moving?  They’re so nice, why don’t you offer to help them.  You have a truck and they are our only friends who remember our birthday and offer to bring ice cream when they go to Braums.”
• You also need at least one “geek friend” to help you move.  Who else is going to reconnect all your electronics?  Research shows that 95 percent of cussing occurs when working on electronics.  Ok…that’s made up, but it seems right. You can use the same tactic mentioned above to recruit your geek friend.  Do not make them carry stuff.  They have one job – to get your TV, Computer, and Stereo working.
• Personally carry and transport your own underwear.  No matter who helps you move, at least one box always gets dropped with the contents sprawling out all over the place.  That box is always an underwear box.  Take that one on yourself.  
• Guard all remote controls with your life.  They always end up in a box with dishes or socks or garage stuff.  You can lose lots of things and get over it, but you do not want to lose the remote control to your TV.  You won’t go buy a new one because you’ll convince yourself that, “it’s got to be somewhere.”  But you’ll never find it.
• Threaten to fire all of your service providers (phone, cable, internet, etc.).  “Since I’m moving I think I’ll take this opportunity to switch providers.”  Maybe you’ll get a cost reduction or cool incentive.
• Do not put boxes with household items in the garage of your new home.  Period. Put them in the house.  If you have to walk around something it increases the likelihood that you’ll open it and put it away.  If you set it down in the garage, even for a moment, you will never open it.  Even if it’s full of cash.  You’ll always say, “It’s out the garage.  I’ll get it this weekend.”Go meet you rnew neighbors instantly.  Don’t wait for them to come to you.  They are secretly making irrational judgments about you by the stuff coming out of the moving van.  Go to their house and say the following, “Hi, we’re the ________________.  We are so excited to move in.  We’ve heard great things about the people who live here.  If we ever do anything to annoy you, please do not hesitate to tell us – we have thick skin.  Once we’re settled we really want to get to know you better.”  Then say something nice about their home.  Now you’ll get the benefit of the doubt.
• Finally, set up the guest bedroom first.  If you have family in town to help you move, they will most likely offer to stay at a hotel or with another relative.  This seems like a good idea, but it is not.  Insist that they stay with you.  When you’re moving in, they are not family any more, they are your workers.  You do not want them to leave.  Who knows when they’ll be back.  As soon as you release them…you lose control!  If you allow them to leave the premises, they tend to take long lunches and run personal errands.  Take advantage of them while you have them there.
• I hope that helps.  Happy moving.

Day 3 was a huge day as the home went from a slab to having walls and a roof. It was amazing to see it come together right before our eyes!

The teamwork between the Ideal Homes team and our trade partners, suppliers and vendors has been incredible. Our trades have not only supplied the labor and materials to make this build possible, but they have worked around the clock in muddy, cold, icy conditions to make this dream come true for the Skaggs family.

Last night, we held a Realtor night in our Extreme Makeover Home Edition VIP tent where central Oklahoma Realtors  had a chance to come out, see the site and have a great meal. Even with a little rain, we had a wonderful turnout and received so much support from the Oklahoma real estate community. Thank you to everyone who attended!

We’ve officially kicked off our Extreme Makeover: Home Edition build.Yesterday was an exciting day, starting off with Ty Pennington’s famous, “Good morning, Skaggs family!”

The Ideal Homes team, along with Xzibit, Jillian Harris from The Bachelorette, Ty Pennington and the designers. braved the mud and the ice in Lexington to put on our blue shirts and take part in the Braveheart March. It was an emotional moment when the owners of Ideal Homes and the Skaggs family met for the first time. 

A team of volunteers worked through the night to prepare the site for the home. Today, we’ve encountered some unique challenges with the mud and melting snow, but the foundation had been poured. The energy is high, and we’re well on our way.

Norman, Okla. (Jan. 23, 2009) – In conjunction with ABC’s Extreme Makeover: Home Edition, Ideal Homes and the American Red Cross will host blood drives across the Central Oklahoma area. The drives begin tomorrow and continue through Feb. 8.

First Lady Kim Henry will show her support by donating blood on Monday, Feb. 3 at the Heart of Oklahoma Red Cross Chapter in Norman. Tentative time for the First Lady’s donation is 3 p.m.  

“This is a community effort. In addition to building a home for a deserving family, we hope to help the entire metro area through the blood drives we are planning as part of this extraordinary week,” said Todd Booze, Ideal Homes president of construction. “We ask people from across the area to answer our call for donors.”

Blood drive locations are listed below. All those coming to donate will receive a commemorative Ideal Homes Extreme Home Makeover: Home Edition T-shirt and a coupon from Whataburger:

For blood drive information updates, please visit www.IdealExtremeHome.com.

Ideal Homes has accepted ABC’s Extreme Makeover: Home Edition’s challenge to build a new home for a special family in the Oklahoma City area. Ty Pennington and the design team will kick off the build when they knock on the door of one of five deserving families on Feb. 1.

About Ideal Homes: Founded 20 years ago, Ideal Homes has consistently set the standard for innovative homebuilding and has been nationally recognized for the quality of its products and processes. Now Oklahoma’s leading homebuilder, the company is locally owned and operated and is the winner of the premier Professional Builder of the Year Award for 2010, from Professional Builder Magazine; America’s Best Builder Award for 2007, from Builder Magazine; and the prestigious National Housing Quality 2006 Gold Award from the National Association of Home Builders Research Center. Ideal Homes is a member of the National Association of Home Builders, Central Oklahoma Home Builders Association and the Norman Home Builders Association. The company has developed and builds in 17 communities throughout the Oklahoma City metropolitan area: Deer Creek, Edmond, Moore, Mustang, Newcastle, Norman, Oklahoma City, Piedmont and Yukon, and in Stillwater.

About Extreme Makeover: Home Edition: The Emmy-award-winning reality program, Extreme Makeover: Home Edition, now in its seventh season, is produced by Endemol USA, a division of Endemol Holding. It is executive-produced by Anthony Dominici. David Goldberg is Chairman, Endemol North America. The show airs Sundays from 8:00-9:00 p.m., ET on ABC.

How to Donate Blood: Call 1-800-GIVE-LIFE (1-800-448-3543) or visit bloodisneeded.org to make an appointment today. All blood types are needed to ensure the Red Cross maintains an adequate blood supply. A blood donor card or driver’s license or two other forms of identification are required at check-in. Donors must be in general good health, weigh at least 110 pounds and be at least 17 years old. New height and weight restrictions apply to donors younger than 19. Visit bloodisneeded.org to learn more.

About the American Red Cross: The American Red Cross shelters, feeds and provides emotional support to victims of disasters; supplies nearly half of the nation’s blood; teaches lifesaving skills; provides international humanitarian aid; and supports military members and their families. The Red Cross is a charitable organization — not a government agency — and depends on volunteers and the generosity of the American public to perform its mission.

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