Final walk through, check!

We just had our final walk though today!! The house looks beautiful! It has been tested and inspected and we are all set!! A few small things like a ding in our lamp post (which we noticed last week in our meeting with our PM) and a small ding on the microwave door, but that's no big deal, a new lamp post should be here very soon and will get replaced tomorrow. The microwave door will get replaced instead of taking the whole thing out. We also have some leftovers of our flooring that we get to keep in case we want to replace or fix something, which I was happy about.

We also got a call while we were walking through the house and we got our final approval for the loan!!!!!!!! FINALLY!!!!! We are all set for closing on Monday!!!! I am super excited!!!! Now we can finish packing this weekend and come Monday we will be home owners!!!  Super excited!!!!

Sod and lots of blue tape

We had a meeting with our PM today and the house looks BEAUTIFUL!! The other day hubby and I were worried because it seemed like there was so much to do in less then two weeks but now we are almost done. We got our sod and finally our columns! They had to actually make them because people fail at getting the right order. Our PM was kinda frustrated with the company they order from because the three times he tried to order it they failed! But the columns they made look beautiful!!! :) Although he now has to put a rush order on the railings to get them in before our final walk though. Also we have lots of blue tape on the walls and the touch ups begin. We are supposed to get our stove, washing machine and dryer tomorrow.

We have finally started the packing process. There will be no more moving after this. We have a lot of stuff for one little apartment. Almost exactly a year ago we were packing and moving to the area into our little apartment. I'm ready to get the moving process over and be in my new house!

Reason number 862 why I love my house! :)

Oopsie!

 One of the front porch windows got broken. We were doing so good about not having a broken window. I may have jinxed it when I was talking to a co-worker last week about not having broken windows. Oh well.

Looking into the house from front door

Formal living and dining room

Formal living/dining room and random transition strip. lol

Looking into the front door

Family room

Looking form the kitchen to the formal living/dining room

Pantry and blue tape!

1st floor powder room

"Mudroom" as RH calls it

Our landscaping tree!

Carpet is down!

Carpet is now installed! Woohoo! Just need to put the transition strips from where the carpet ends and the laminate begins. We need a few small things like door handles on the inside doors. Oh and the rest of the appliances might help. haha. But now for the pictures :)

Looking into the house from the front door

Living room and dining room

First floor bathroom

Looking into the family room from the kitchen

In love with it!

Pantry

Morning room

Hubby's head :)

Loft

Laundry room

1 of 3 spare bedrooms

2 of 3 spare bedrooms

Just waiting on the columns and railings

Absence and big update

Hey all,

Ok I know it's been a while since we have last posted. We are still building a house but just have been fairly busy and there was a period where there was a lot of waiting. To catch you up quickly and than some pictures!!

We contracted the house before the neighborhood was even officially listed, so we had to wait on the county to certify a lot of things and even Plat the lots. Once that was done and the roads were initially paved, our info was sent up to the VA Appraiser and that's where things got ugly. The VA Appraiser in this area has 10 BUSINESS days to do his appraisal, well 18 business days later he finally came through. This put us back about 3 weeks total. Good thing about it, he appraised the house higher than what we're paying :D

First some selection pictures (I know, we're very late getting this to you guys).

 

Kitchen Colors w/ Carpet selection

Kitchen Selection

Guest Bathroom

Outside color selections (Cape Cod style)

Master Bath!!!

Now that the selections are out of the way, here are pictures of the lot, and the ground breaking/footers.

Lot when first cleared

Breaking Ground - 1 (Our neighbors house is moving along quick!!)

Breaking Ground - 2

Footer!!

More of the Footer!

 Ok, so now that physical progress is being made we will make sure to get daily pics going! Things are going to start going really quickly from here. They said the foundation will probably be in progress by Thursday. Again, sorry for us going AWOL there for a bit but we will make sure to keep everyone in the loop. This is the exciting part here :)

Contract/Update

Tommy here,

So last night we sat down with our Ryan Homes rep and our Realtor and went over our contract and deposited our earnest money, we have officially hired Ryan Homes to build our house!! We are building the Rome Elevation C (although we are waiting to see the prices for elevation E which is set to be announced, it includes a front porch).

We made all of our color selections, although Ryan Homes does give you two weeks to where you can make any kind of changes, everything from a different home style to changes like siding colors and what not. My wife is more of the design person then I am so she may remember all of the choices, as I do not.

I do know we got gray siding and black shudders with the dark red door (I forget the name of the color, something with wine in it). We also got the cape cod style brick for the bottom of the house. Inside we chose our granite counter top color, but we are going to further explore our options on that by seeing more models. We got an in between color for the cabinets, like a medium dark wood (should have taken pictures huh?).

I'll break down and provide a list of all of the options we chose sometime, the big ones though being we got the morning room (actually was an incentive for using NVR), updated the kitchen with the huge island and got free granite counter tops! Added a fireplace, updated the master bath to include the partial glad stand up shower and soaking tub. I'll post a full list later.

Later today I'm going out to the lot and taking pictures before they clear it, try and get a picture series going from start to finish of the house build.

So begins the process...

Tommy here,

Rachel and myself have been looking at a few homes for a couple of weeks, maybe months now. We have found a couple that we like, but nothing that awed us, there was always something missing. The one house we loved, someone else did too and put in offer in and contracted.

We started looking into new construction and looked at a couple of model homes for various builders in the area. Of course all of the model homes looked good, but still nothing amazed us. We even looked at the other builder in the neighborhood we did finally choose and weren't hugely impressed. Then, we stumbled across Ryan Homes. The second phase of the neighborhood we chose just opened up for them, and we are only the second people to secure lots, the other house should be going up shortly.

To say it mildly, the Ryan Homes models amazed us, we looked at both the Ravenna and the Rome and decided with the Rome ultimately. It wasn't just the model homes either, we were also showed two actual construction homes, one with no floors yet (kind of weird seeing) and the other was a fully finished Rome that was just waiting for closing, it was amazing looking.

Yesterday we picked out which lot we wanted and put down the deposit to hold it. Thursday will be sitting down to go over the building contract. Both of us are really excited and we will post pictures as we go, let us know if you have any questions or comments!