Our new home has been coming along. We have been fortunate to have fairly dry weather most of August so that work could keep progressing.
In June we secured our lot and signed our purchase contract. We drove by it plenty of times knowing we were waiting for the closing of our old home before construction could start on this one.
On July 24, the day after we closed on Longstone, we went to drop off our final payment before construction could begin. Our lot had been staked out with the footprint of the house.
On July 30 we attended our pre-construction meeting with our Ryan sales rep, project manager, and Realtor. More about that later...after the meeting we went out to the property and our project manager walked us through the layout of our house and showed us where everything will be on the property.
This is a north eastern view and is at the back right corner of the property looking at the street.
Our project manager told us that he was planning to have the foundation dug out the following week and the foundation itself poured. I never believed it. I've remained skeptical of all time lines and will continue to be so. Delays happen and I don't want my heart set on a date or time that the home is finished. But...turns out our project manager wasn't too far off on this one.
Sure enough we went up on August 4 to find this big machine on the lot.
The footprint of the house had been spray painted on the ground.
We were excited to see that something, no matter how seemingly small, was happening.
On August 6 we were stunned to find...
Not only did we have a hole in the ground, but the footings had been poured too!
The big square of dirt is where the garage will be.
Gavin loves the construction and checking out the progress. We are driving him back and forth to school until the house is finished. Every day after school he asks if we can drive by the house. He loves all things construction.
One of our traditional selfies on our latest adventure!
Two days later, August 8, we came back to find the foundation poured.
Our new project manager (new to us, not to project managing thankfully) let us know on Wednesday that framing was expected to start Friday. Today, August 31, I stopped by to see how things were going. The floor joists are going in! The doors above will go in the morning room on the back of the house and exit to the backyard.
Apparently the garage and basement floors get poured after some of the framing goes up.
Our bathtubs were delivered as well. Unfortunately we've had a ton of rain the last 24 hours so everything is completely soaked. This isn't the first home ever built so I'm going to relax and not worry about it.
We're looking forward to what happens this week!
Now I have a few tips from our journey so far if anyone ever decides to build a house:
#1 Go into the selections meeting with what you want already in mind. I've heard horror stories of selections for options taking hours upon hours. Brandon and I were determined to not have that happen. We knew the things we were looking for before we went to the meeting. We had a list and we stuck to it. For example, when our floors were replaced at Longstone the salesperson we worked with told us that his company supplies the flooring to Ryan homes. He advised us to never upgrade the carpet. The carpet will last plenty long and the added expense of an upgrade won't be rolled into the mortgage. Instead, he suggested upgrading the padding. We had that item on the list. We were done with selections in 60-90 minutes.
#2 A friend suggested asking if the builder does blind installation. We asked about this at our selections meeting and our builder does offer blind installation as an option. We went for it. I like the idea of the blinds already being in, we don't have to rush for additional window dressings, and we won't destroy our brand new house fighting with blind installation on our own.
#3 When making your structural changes be absolutely sure you are looking at the floor plan for the chosen elevation of your house. What the heck is the elevation? It's how the face of your home looks. Different elevations of a home call for different numbers of windows, window placement, peaks of the roof, etc. Something that was very important to Gavin was that he get two windows in his bedroom. In fact, it was so important to him, that it was the key to selling him on the idea of moving. When we looked at the floor plan during selections, it turned out the one on the brochure that we made changes off of was not the floor plan for our elevation. So, when looking at making structural changes, one of the kid's bedrooms showed a double window. The other bedroom had a single window which meant we added the optional second window to that room. Fast forward to our pre-construction meeting and we find out that the elevation we have does not have the double window in the one bedroom. It's a single. We were angry. Our sales rep had to send a request to add an additional window through about four different people, all of whom approved it. We also discovered a window on the first floor that we thought was a double window is also a single. Had we been looking at the floor plan for our actual elevation we would have made some other changes. Lesson learned by us and now wisdom imparted to all of you.
I'm sure we'll have some more tips to share as the process moves forward and I'll continue to share those as well as pictures of our latest progress.
Have a great holiday!
No comments:
Post a Comment