Waiting...

Less than a week away from closing on our current house, and the place is really looking bare. On Saturday my brother and I will move all of our furniture. Some to storage and some to my mother in-law's. After that the real waiting begins, as of right now the sales rep is saying we should be in our new home around the end of September. Can't wait!

Had to run by the sales trailer this morning to initial a correction on a change order, and took a ride down the street to see the progress on the Belgian block curb. They sure have made progress on the curb, and the two homes under construction in phase one are coming along nicely. Looks like there's another foundation getting ready to be poured too.

Here's the two homes under construction, they're both Ravenna models.

Final selections made.

We made our deposit, signed the contract, and things are moving fast. About a week after signing the contract we had an appointment for our flooring selections, mortgage and Guardian.

For flooring we initially chose,(what we put on paper), the resilient vinyl, but we really didn't care for it. Working through the options we already chose, we were able to drop a few things we really didn't need, or could do on our own later. Things like a service door in the garage we could do with out. These things, along with selling our house for full asking price, now allowed us to afford hardwood for the kitchen, and morning room. We also upgraded the carpet padding throughout the house. We kept the resilient vinyl for the two upstairs bathrooms, the powder room and foyer came with hardwood standard. Oh yeah, we chose gunstock for the color to go with the maple espresso cabinets.

A lot of our other selections I can't remember off the top of my head. Some that I can remember are the additional windows in the morning room, optional window in the loft, and the optional window in the master bedroom. Did I tell you my wife wanted a lot of natural light in this house? We did end up doing recessed lighting in the kitchen and a few in other rooms, also did under cabinet lighting.

It's now been a few weeks since contract signing, all selections are in, and our mortgage has been approved. Just waiting to close on our current house to make our final deposit and get us off contingency. One week and counting.

Here's a couple of pics of the block curb going in. First one is wifey standing where our driveway will be.

Our dirty lot.

Let the fun begin!

About a week and a half passed since going to see the model, and I get a call from the SR. He asked if we made it down to the model and what we thought of it. I tell him we really liked the model, but were still undecided on doing new construction or buying preowned. He was very understanding and told me when we were ready to give him a call and we could build our new home on paper. A couple days later we were in the sales trailer sitting down to put our initial options on paper.

Some of the more obvious ones were easy, like the morning room and finished basement. Others, however, weren't so easy. Do we really need a fireplace, or recessed lighting in the kitchen? After the initial choices, we then were faced with choosing a lot to build on. We looked over the sight plan at the available lots and just couldn't decide where we wanted to be, so we went out and walked through the muddy lots that will eventually be our neighborhood. Walking through the lots seemed to help a little, but my wife was still unsure. She decided to take her mother over to the area to get some help. I get a phone call from her while I was at work saying she had decided on a lot. Great! We put our initial deposit down and started looking over the ten to fifteen page option list.

Wow! So many options to think about. The whole thing was starting to feel so overwhelming. Adding options means the price goes up, and wanting to stay within a budget only seemed to make it harder. To compound this my wife was having second thoughts on the lot we chose. Our current home faces east and after noon the place gets very little natural light, another reason for moving out. The lot initially chosen by my wife would have the house facing south. The design of the Florence would have us mostly hanging out in the rear of the house, where we would again get very little natural light. Back to the drawing board, or more accurately, the sight plan we go. After much debate we ended up changing to a lot with a southern exposure for the rear of the house.

Next step, we needed to start making our final selections.

First time blogger.

First time blogging, but I just wanted to document the journey of our new Ryan Homes Florence Model being built, so here goes nothing.                                                                                                                                                A couple of months ago my wife and I decided to get serious about getting our house on the market and start looking for a new place to call home. Weeks of painting and prepping, mainly de-cluttering, finally paid off and we listed our house on March 2nd. During our house prep time we were constantly on Realtor.com trying to find the perfect house for us. Most of the houses we found were just ok, and if we found one we liked the yard was usually non existent or the neighbors were right on top of you. Getting a little separation from neighbors was one of our reasons for wanting to move. I came across a listing for new construction in our area and mentioned it to my wife. She was kind of interested so we decided to take a ride over to the sales trailer, model wasn't even under construction. We walked in and were greeted by the sales rep. who was great to talk to, answering all our questions about the community, like will there be an HOA, how big are the lots, etc...

In the sales trailer all the available models are posted on the walls with a picture, the floor plan, and some basic info about each one. We were immediately drawn the the Florence model, and were curious if they had a model in one of their other communities so we could see it in person. They did, but it was about a 40 minute drive. The SR thought they closed at 5pm and it was close to 4 already. My wife and I decided to give it a shot. We arrived around 4:45, and were pleasantly surprised to find out the model didn't close until 6pm.

One walk around the model and we fell in love. This home was everything our current home was not. My wife and I especially love the open floor plan, with the morning room. Now comes the fun part, deciding if building new construction is something we really wanted to do. The thought of living in a home that no one else had lived in was pretty awesome, but having to make every decision about flooring, cabinets, and options seemed overwhelming.

Well I wouldn't be writing this if we decided to buy a preowned house, so stay tuned for the rest of our journey.