It may sound strange but my favorite compliment that my husband and I have received several times on our new home is: "I know it's new, but it looks like it was built in the 20's!"

Thanks, that's actually what we were going for.

We live outside of Nashville, TN, and while there are several areas of Nashville with some great bungalows in them, at our stage in life we couldn't afford to buy one and remodel it both, so we started looking for other options.

New subdivisions weren't all that appealing for while several had started going for the craftsman style look on the outside, not many had carried the craftsman ethos to the inside of the house. So we started looking for a piece of property outside of a typical subdivision.

After finding 2.62 acres outside the city, we started looking for a builder and digging through plans.

Picking a plan is easier when you want to build Craftsman, or at least it seemed that way to us. There are fewer options. You don't start with the huge plan books with thousands of options, rather you can limit yourself to several books and websites that have less than 100 plans each, thereby making the decision process easier.

We chose a plan called the Laurel from The Bungalow Company, a website we'd been stalking for some time after having renovated a 1920's bungalow in a small town back in 2005.

We wanted something with space to grow into, and an open floor-plan, something with an office, and all the bedrooms on the second floor as we haven't had any kids yet, and I wanted the master bedroom closer to the future baby's room. We were excited to find a stock plan that we felt was perfect, but the Bungalow Company will also work with you to change a stock plan, or start from scratch and design your own.

As the Craftsman/Bungalow revival is still relatively new, many builders don't know exactly what to do with it. We didn't get a builder who had ever built this style before, but he was willing to work with us, and he had an excellent trim carpenter who could really bring our ideas to life!

The key I think to having a builder get your house the way you want it is to create an idea file with really specific pictures in it. We actually created an entire pdf by scanning images from books we'd bought, adding pictures from the web in order to get certain things exactly the way we wanted them, and then typeing or writing specific instructions on them. I actually copied the ink drawings of the outside elevations to get the window lights (the number of divisions in your pane) correct window by window on all sides of the house!

One of the keys to true Craftsman style is excellence in craftsmanship and attention to details. This is true both of inside and outside details. I also think that continuity between the inside and out helps bring a house together as well as having it feel rooted to the piece of land that it sits on.

For example, the stone we used on the foundation is also the facing on our fireplace.

Another thing we did was use several kinds of wood and let them speak for themselves. The front door is red oak, the mantle black walnut, and the kitchen cabinets are hickory, and we left them all unstained, finished just with a clearcoat, which does a lovely job of bringing out the natural beauty of the grain.

We did stain the wood floors, but that was to make the bottom of the room darker, and provide a sense of an anchor for the room. Probably just a personal thing, but floors that are too light are unsettling to me.

We also decided to forego crown molding entirely and instead have an element of design that was unique to each room and made it stand apart. In the living room, it's the fireplace; for the dining room, it's the five-foot high wainscotting; and in the office, it's a coffered ceiling.

Other things we worked on was a color scheme that felt cool and refreshing. Now this is entirely personal taste as to what you choose, but I think some continuity between the colors is important, for example warm colors or cool colors. Our builder uses Porter Paints, and they've got some great color schemes, as well as some cool tools on their website to help you figure out your colors. I think a good rule of thumb is to look in your closet.

I wear a lot of neutrals and blue, with accents of red, deep orange, or fall shades of green, and the house reflects that (and will even more once we move in!)

Repeating certain geometric shapes throughout the house helps with the flow. Thus, the trim above the fireplace, the wainscotting, and newels on the stairway all have the same basic shapes, albeit in different sizes. For more on this see the photo captions in the slideshow below.