Not So Inclined...

We were at the model home this weekend dropping off a check and signing another addendum to our agreement.  While we were there, we ran into one of our future neighbors who are also building a Florence.  Their house is about halfway complete, so we were talking to them about how everything was going and any hiccups they've had along the way.  They pointed out a few things and also offered to let us come take a look at the frame of their house. We took a walk down to look at their site and one of the first things we noticed is how high their house is and how much of an incline their driveway is going to have.  There must have been a 3-4 foot height difference from their house to the road, which is only about 30-40 feet away. It looks very steep and we are not thrilled with that.  We sent an email to our SR to see if ours will be similar.  Looking at the lots, we were expecting a somewhat level, usable driveway, so we will not be happy if our driveway has a giant incline up to the house.  I'm hoping that either ours will not be like that, or there's something they can do now to alleviate this because I'm very picky on driveways and even ruled out houses during our last house search because of the driveway.  I'm trying to hope for the best at this point, but I have a feeling that there won't be anything they can do about it.

Wrap-up Appointment and Mortgage Approval

Wrap-up appointment is done!  We actually had it about a week ago and it was much shorter than i thought it would be.  We had a few final changes - nothing major and some things that we have talked about before with our SR and wanted to double-check that it was added into our house plan.  It's funny to see how conscious we were in the beginning about what options we were adding, then in the end we ended up adding a few things that we previously didn't want to add in.  I guess when you see at the end of the day how little the mortgage changes when you add a few things, it's easier to throw those little things in!  I'm excited for the upgraded kitchen appliances and can't wait to start cooking in the new oven - hopefully we'll be moved in just in time to start Christmas cookie baking!

The last thing that we were waiting for to get the ball rolling is our mortgage approval, which finally came through!  There's one little issue we're waiting for word on about financing our closing costs and whether we still have that option.  We were under the impression after meeting with the NVR rep that we could roll them in if we wanted to, but were then told that we needed to do that with our RH SR before we signed all the final papers.  Hopefully it will still be an option and won't hold up the ground breaking.  We worked really hard to get all of our options picked in 2 weeks so that we could get on the schedule ahead of planned. As of now, we're scheduled to break ground September 4th.  I guess we'll cross our fingers that everything works out!

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!

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!

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.

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.