Wednesday, July 31, 2013

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!

Wednesday, July 24, 2013

Magic Carpet Ride

Well, we finished with our flooring meeting and it wasn't as overwhelming as I thought it would be. Our SR was great and had our cabinet choices ready to show us with the flooring and counter top options.  She wasn't pushy at all, which was fantastic and let us introduce the idea of considering upgrades before showing us something that wouldn't work with our budget.  Overall, we had a great experience with Rite Rug and hope their installation of all the flooring goes just as smoothly!

I didn't think to do it at the time, but I should have taken a picture when we had about 10 carpet and 20 vinyl samples scattered on the floor of the showroom. Hopefully we didn't drive the SR too crazy, but I'm pretty sure she's used to this happening several times a day.

Here's what we went with:

Kitchen/Morning Room: Station Square X2112 Vinyl (Level B Upgrade)
Family/Living Rooms: Simple Touch 00102 Capri (Level C Upgrade with 8lb Padding Upgrade)
Powder Room: Station Square X2055 Vinyl (Level B Upgrade)
Stairs/Halls/Bedrooms: Collinsville 00106 Gentle Beige (Level B Upgrade with 8lb Padding Upgrade)
Hall Bath: Initiator 66180 Linoleum
Master Bath: Initiator 66180 Linoleum
Laundry Room: Initiator 66180 Linoleum

Those words probably mean nothing to you unless you've already been through this process.  I think our hardest decisions were the kitchen/morning room and the family room.  We knew we wanted to do some type of linoleum in the kitchen because we decided we could install a real hardwood floor down the road after the kid(s) have beat up the first floor.  I've been trying to do research on the vinyl floors that look like wood floors.  The idea seemed kind of neat, but I was afraid it would look too cheap.  Then, I kept going back to, well the only other option is fake tile, so is it that much worse to get fake wood?  I was pleasantly surprised with the look of vinyl hardwood and so we went with that, so no judging if you see our house and our "fake" wood.  Some day we'll have nice floors, but for now the durability of the vinyl will suit our needs better.

The other hard room to pick for was the Family Room. I knew that I wanted an upgrade in that room, but it also butts up with the stairs, which need to be the same color as the upstairs areas.  I knew we couldn't do a lot of upgrades with carpeting, so I think we found a nice compromise which will coordinate.  The Family Room carpet is sort of a multi-colored carpet and the stairs will be a solid color that matches one of the colors in the other carpet.  I'm not exactly sure how it will look, but I think (hope) we'll be happy with our choices.

Here are some pics of our choices.  These pictures don't really do any of the colors justice, though.

Kitchen Floor on bottom, with cabinet and counter selections.  I was originally leaning toward the lighter counter, but since the cabinets and the floor are both on the lighter side, it needed some contrast.

Standard Bathroom cabinets/counter.  We chose the top right flooring for the upstairs bathrooms.

Powder Room.  I really liked this one and would've liked to do it in all the bathrooms, but we decided to spend the extra money on the heavier carpet padding upstairs.

Family/Living Room carpet is the bottom sample, stairs/upstairs is the top sample.  The middle sample doesn't look as multi-colored in person.  I think it looks more blended.

Here are all of our choices laid out.  We definitely stuck to a neutral palate.  I think it will be more fun to add pops of color in other features of the rooms.

So, there you have it!  Now, I don't want to think about it anymore because I don't want to second guess myself.  I told our SR if she sees me trying to come back to change my mind that she should just lock the showroom doors and pretend to be closed!  A couple came in to re-look at carpeting while we were there and we found out it was their 4th time coming back.  The funniest part is that they ended up staying with their original choice every time they came back, which, from talking to our SR is pretty typical.

NVR Meeting

We recently had our meeting with NVR to discuss mortgage options.  I'm not the financial one in the family, so I don't really have much to say about this process.  The hubs is our main financial planner and with a baby at home, we opted to have him go to the appointment first to talk about all of the options, then I came later with the baby to sign everything. I think my hand still hurts from signing all the papers! From what he told me, everything looks good and I think he was happy with what they had to say.  I'm sure we'll be going crazy checking the interest rates for the next few months.  We can't really do anything about it too soon as it is crazy expensive to lock early, but within a month or two of closing, it will be interesting to see how everything plays out.

They said everything looks fine and we should qualify.  There's one little glitch with the hubs' work situation, so their main underwriter might not work out, but they assured us that they have others they work with and we should be okay.  I guess, worst case scenario, they decline us and then we can use our own mortgage company. The advantage to using NVR is that we get additional incentives in the house if we use them, but if NVR declines US, then we get to use our own company AND keep all of the incentives.  I don't see that happening, and it would probably be easier to just continue down the path with NVR since we've already provided our information and the process seems to be very time consuming.

Our next meeting is with Rite Rug to discuss flooring.  I'm both excited and nervous for this appointment.  It seems like a fun thing to do, but also seems like it might be a tad overwhelming.  I've never had to pick out flooring for one room, let alone a whole house!

Saturday, July 20, 2013

Initial Exterior and Cabinet Colors

I tried to get a pic of the color selections we made for the exterior


Brick: Olde Columbia
Shutters (left swatch in my hand): Berry
Siding (middle swatch): Irish Thistle
Door (right swatch): Raisin

We drove around some other plans trying to find examples of our options to see what it would look like.  The Irish Thistle siding is a relatively new option, so we couldn't find many houses that had it, and any that did had stone accent instead of brick.  The stone looks great with the color, and we would totally be using it if we had no budget, but we're stuck with brick, so I hope this will look good.  The nice thing is, RH has designers that have pre-selected which color options you can go with.  That makes the process MUCH easier and I don't really have to worry too much about how it will look, since a professional has already signed off on it! :)

We also picked our cabinet color.  We went with the level 2 upgrade to the Andover Maple.  We tried to stay bare minimum with a lot of things in the house that we figured we could upgrade later ourselves.  Cabinets seem like they would be a lot of effort to change later, so we figured we'd spend a tad more money on them to get some nicer ones.  Now, we need to pick counter tops.  We're just doing Formica, but there are about a dozen options to choose from.  I narrowed it down to two that I like. Here's a pic of the cabinets with the two counter top colors I like.  I'll have to wait until we meet with the flooring people to make a final decision, but I'm leaning toward the one on the left.  Any thoughts??


So, we have a lot to do in the next few weeks!  We have meetings scheduled with each Financing, Flooring, Guardian, and our final meeting with our RH SR (Ryan Homes Sales Rep) to finalize all the details/pricing of the options we picked at all of the other meetings. Then, I think we play a waiting game until our pre-construction meeting.

Friday, July 19, 2013

SOLD

I feel like this may be our last night of freedom before we get caught up in the whirlwind of emotions of building our house.  We signed the papers, put in our hand money, and are set to close December 10th!

It's funny, everyone kept asking us if we were excited, and I think I am excited, but I just have too much to worry about right now to really enjoy the fact of what will soon be our new home.  I'm currently stressing over how are we going to move everything, where will it go, should we rent an apartment or should we bunk up with our parents for a few months...

I am excited, though, and look forward to seeing the whole process of building our house.   Here's a picture of us with our lot just after we slapped on the giant SOLD sign!  Hopefully we're still smiling by December...

The sign wasn't crooked the other day. Hopefully it's not a bad omen.


They said we should expect to get a few calls in the next two days to set up a bunch of appointments for financing/flooring/guardian, etc.  I'm both excited and nervous to make all of the final decisions for the house.  I can't imagine building a house from scratch.  Luckily, we have limited decisions we need to make, but they still make me nervous!


This is not our house, but it is our model.  Our colors/landscaping will be different.


Here are some of the details we've chosen so far:

Home: Florence Model
Options: Elevation B
2' Garage Extension
Garage Door Opener
2 piece plumbing rough-in in basement
Morning Room
Kitchen Gourmet Island
Cabinet Hardware
42" Wall Cabinets
Gas Range Hook-up
Microwave
Slate Fireplace in Family Room
4 Ceiling Fan Rough-ins
Kitchen Recessed Lights
4 Recessed Lights in Family Room

We tentatively decided on our exterior colors, just in case someone pics a lot near us and chooses and color that we want.  So, we're doing Irish Thistle Siding, Redish Brick, Berry shutters, Raisin Door. I'm sure we'll add a few things before the end of the whole process.  It's so hard to pick exterior colors when you're looking at tiny samples and trying to envision what it will look like on a whole house.  I'm already starting to second-guess our brick color choice, but I'm trying really hard to stop worrying about it.

Tuesday, July 16, 2013

It Starts.

We currently have a hold on a Ryan Home site Lot and are going back in two days to sign everything and start our journey.  It's funny, if you would've asked me 2 years ago if we would ever consider building a Ryan home, I would've laughed and told you that I definitely don't want to live in a "cookie cutter" home.  So, how did we get here?  Did we drink the koolaid?

Here's the cliff note version:

Should we look for a house?
Sure, can't hurt?
Wow, there's nothing out there.
Would we consider building a Ryan home?
Probably not, but it can't hurt to meet with them.
Wow, they're pretty nice homes. Let's look at lots.
This one seems like the best lot, should we put a hold on it? Sure.
Should we do this?  Is this where we want to live? Yes! No! Maybe.... No! Yes! No! Yes! ... back and forth
No, we do not want a Ryan home.
Look for house, look for house, look for house.
Three months later... Should we consider a Ryan home again?
Might as well, since we can't find anything else we like.
Are there any sites left that we like?  That one will do!  Put a hold on it!

Here's the Long Version:
In late March, my husband brought up the idea of looking for a house.  We just had our first child in November and are currently living in a three bedroom townhouse.  I love our townhouse and probably would've been happy to stay here another few years, so the idea of moving hadn't crossed my mind, but he mentioned it so I figured what could it hurt to just start looking?  We called our (amazing!) real estate agent and asked her to send us the multilist of houses for sale.  It was a little disappointing to say the least.  We then spoke with a mortgage guy to see if we could stretch our budget a little bit further, and he assured us we could.

The only problem was for the price range we really wanted, we would have to go in contingent on selling our house. In light of this new info, our real estate agent suggested we consider building a Ryan home.  We weren't exactly thrilled with this idea, but figured could it really hurt to just go talk to them?  We made an appointment and to talk with the sales rep.  The pricing didn't seem too ridiculous, but our biggest concern were the lot sizes and privacy. So, after a few meetings, we decided to walk the sites and actually found one that wasn't too bad. Sure, you're still close to your neighbor, but the back yard was pretty long.  We figured we'd go ahead and put a hold on the site, since we really had nothing to lose if we changed our mind.  For the next week we struggled with a decision.  Is this what we wanted?  Would we be happy here?  I'm pretty sure we changed our minds 3 times a day, every day for a week.  I would go to bed one night convinced we shouldn't proceed, then we would talk ourselves back into the next morning.  It was getting tiresome!  In the end, we decided that it wasn't REALLY what we wanted so we halted the process.

We then dove back into finding a house.  I scoured FSBO houses, the multilist, craigslist, etc.  Then it happened, we found a near perfect house on a beautiful plot of land.  It was flat, it was private, I fell in LOVE! We rushed to look at it the day after it came on the market and decided we would put an offer in that evening.  Our agent called and found out that there were three other offers in the works for the house, so we would have to put in a good offer.  We called our mortgage guy to double check that in this price range we would not need to go in contingent on selling our place (which he told us previously we wouldn't). Well, I'm not sure what changed,but we would've had to go in contingent on selling our house, so it wouldn't look good going up against three other offers, so we decided not to put an offer in.  I was crushed.  I really thought this was the house for us.

So, we continued to look for houses, but decided at this point that to get what we wanted, we would need to sell our place, so we decided to put it on the market.  It took a few days to get everything cleared out and cleaned up, but we got it listed and decided to list it high since we weren't in a rush to leave.  The first couple days it was on the market, we had no showings.  Finally, we had one showing but they wanted to put in a low offer and we basically told them to not bother since we weren't going to consider anything low, yet.  Then we had another showing and got an offer the same day.  We countered and she accepted our offer!  So, now we REALLY wanted to find a house since we need to be out of our townhouse at the end of August.

I'm not sure who mentioned it, me or the hubs, but the idea of building a Ryan home came back up again. I think my first impression was to laugh. After everything we went through a few months ago, are we REALLY going to bring up this topic again.  Then we started to take notice of other Ryan homes for sale in neighborhoods around us... and how QUICKLY they get resold.  Would it really be so horrible to live in a Ryan home?  We went to an open house one Sunday to look at an older Ryan home.  It wasn't much cheaper than we could build new and was much smaller.  So, I guess it came down to we might be sacrificing a yard to build, but we couldn't find a house that had a nice yard, anyway.  Is it our ideal situation?  No. Will we be happy here?  I think we will be.  I guess on days that I start to regret our decision, I can just go make some yummy comfort food in the huge kitchen and get over it quickly! :)

So, we went back to meet with Ryan homes again.  Unfortunately, prices have gone up a little and we couldn't get the kind of lot we were hoping for, but we're at least getting one with trees behind us, so we'll have a little bit of privacy.  Who knows, maybe we'll really like neighborhood living!  Neither of us grew up in big neighborhoods, so it will be a new experience for us and at least our little one will have lots of friends to play with!  So, we have a hold on a lot in a Ryan homes plan in the Pittsburgh North Hills area. We go back in two days to give them our hand money and sign some papers.

I've read several other blogs that people have written about their journey with Ryan homes and they have been really helpful in helping to make our decision to start this process, so I decided that I also wanted to document everything to share with others who were in our boat.  Plus, it gives me something to do in between taking care of an infant and playing candy crush :)