Week 9 - Preparing to Break Ground

Not much new to report this week, we're just waiting for ground to break!  We went for a drive to see our lot this weekend (even though we know nothing is scheduled to happen until next week).  It was a neat surprise to see some construction equipment parked on our lot, even if just to see something different and to get even more excited about what is to come!

Week 8 - Pre-Construction Meeting

On Monday we had our pre-construction meeting.  It was nice to meet our project manager; he was friendly and informative.  We went through the blueprints and initialed a lot of stuff.  It is a shame that you can't get a copy of those, just for the novelty factor, but apparently at some point someone had a copy and gave it to another builder to build outside of Ryan Homes so now you can only get a quick peek at the pre-construction meeting!

Our build is still on schedule as to what we were told when we first chose our lot; our house should be ready for closing mid-May, and ground will be broken the week after next barring any major weather issues.  Our project manager assured us that possible weather delays are built into the schedule, so while they technically have a ton of leeway with the completion time, they expect to remain on schedule, especially since our community has many other builds to go following ours.  He also told us that we can expect biweekly updates from him, usually on Fridays, and that we are free to contact him with any questions or if we want to see the house up close (absolutely no visiting unsupervised in our community for liability reasons).

We also took a look at our lot again today - everything has been cleared and readied for ground breaking!  We are looking forward to following the progress over the next couple of months.

Week 7 - NVR Approval

This week we got a call (followed by a package of paperwork) alerting us to our official NVR approval (though it isn't really that official - since we don't close for several months, I'm pretty sure we have to go through the entire process again closer to the end).  We also were able to speak to our underwriter for the first time, and we are very pleased with him!  It has been frustrating to continue to have little to no communication or response from our loan officer so far, though he was very friendly and helpful the one time we were able to speak with him.  The underwriter has also been very friendly and helpful, but with the added bonus of prompt responses, which we value greatly!

We will continue to gather the paperwork we anticipate needing closer to closing, and we hope to avoid some of the delays and annoyances others have mentioned by getting in as much as we can as early as we can.

We also finally were able to finalize our backsplash and bathroom listello choices.  We are very happy to have finally found what we know we are sure we want and to have just about all of the other paperwork finalized now that we can finish up all change orders.

Week 6 - NVR Initial Info

We finally received our "overnighted" package from NVR on Monday (we had been told it was sent last Wednesday, but the package clearly showed it was sent on Friday for the next business day).  There was a ton of paperwork to go over.  We scheduled a phone meeting with our NVR guy for that Monday evening to go through it all together, but he never called.  We let our sales rep know, and then we heard from our NVR guy first thing the next morning.  He was very apologetic and rescheduled a phone meeting with us for Friday.  We spent a lot of the week researching what everything in the mortgage paperwork meant since this is our first mortgage.  When we finally did talk to him on Friday, we found him to be very friendly, helpful, and straightforward, and, as we have been a little leary given the almost nonexistent communication, we were pleasantly surprised.  The good faith estimate from NVR is pretty good; the rate is great, but the closing costs are a lot higher than we were expecting, largely due to living in a high tax area and the very high NVR administrative costs.

Prior to finding our Strauss, we had been pre-approved by a small bank recommended by our realtor.  The small bank greatly impressed us; we were able to speak directly to the VP who personally handled all of our information, was very communicative and prompt with information, and was immensely helpful with explaining our likely options to us.  When we surprisingly found the Strauss, we were offered the common incentive of $12,000 for a finished basement if we went with NVR.  We shared this information with our realtor, who was pretty sure the small bank wouldn't be able to beat that (since not using NVR would mean a $12,000 higher purchase price), but she asked if she could share the information with the VP anyway.  Surprisingly, we heard from her the next day with the message that the VP would like to try to beat the $12,000 incentive.  We had a phone meeting with him after our meeting with our NVR guy, and he sent us his good faith estimate with a great rate that did actually end up beating NVR's offer slightly, even with the additional $12,000 tacked on to the purchase price.  We were pleasantly surprised.  Our sales rep said that NVR works very smoothly with Ryan Homes, and that despite our initial disappointment in our NVR loan officer's communication, he was really one of the best and it was just a crazy time.  He also told us that NVR would probably fight to keep us since our credit is excellent, so we will contact them tomorrow to make them aware of the offer from the small bank to see if they can at least meet it.

Since there is so much time before we close, nothing mortgage-wise is actually final yet, so we still have a long time wait to see what the actual rates and costs end up being.

Week 5 - Christmas Break

We traveled out of state to visit with family for most of the Christmas break, so there isn't too much new and exciting to report this week.

We stopped in to see our flooring lady twice over the weekend (on Saturday and Sunday) to look again at what we had chosen and to take some better pictures of some things.  We had wanted to think a few of the tougher choices over (all were minor), and we were able to come pretty close to finalizing our selections.  We are having a surprisingly hard time deciding on the kitchen backsplash and bathroom listellos, I think because they were items we had never really considered before, so we still don't know exactly what we want.  We spent a lot of our vacation down time looking at examples of each, too.

We also took a couple of road trips to visit several of the other Ryan Homes communities within a reasonable distance of where we live, including in two neighboring states, so that we could take a look at their models.  We wish more people did a Strauss model, but for our purposes in looking, the Mozart models are just about as good since the majority of the both models are the same, and even the single family home models are fun to see since at least in terms of color and flooring choices, they options are the same.  It has been a lot of fun seeing in person some of the design choices and room set-ups in the models.  We have found that a lot of the models share a lot of our choices, so it is especially nice to see them life-sized and still love them.  We also now have some good ideas of what we will eventually want for painting the walls and a few decorating ideas.

Week 4 - Guardian Meeting

We had our Guardian meeting on Thursday, and the Guardian rep was great - friendly, helpful, informative, and fine with us sticking to the basics.  Following the advice of many of the blogs, we went into the meeting with a plan to keep things simple, and we knew what we wanted and what we didn't want.  Surprisingly, when we brought up a few of the smaller things we had considered adding as extras after reading through other people's blogs and suggestions, he very honestly told us that we didn't need them and that they weren't worth the money.  He also didn't pressure us at all when we told him up front that we weren't interested in any of the speaker or sound systems.  He stuck to what we needed and gave us great advice.  We are looking forward to meeting with him again at the pre-drywall meeting!

We met with our sales rep this weekend to complete the change order resulting from our flooring selections from last week (unexpected lower price than we budgeted for!) and to make sure that everything else we wanted was listed correctly and included.  Our sales rep has been phenomenally helpful and has really gone above and beyond for us so far.  We are very happy to be working with him on this process.

Week 3 - Flooring Meeting

This week was mainly spent pre-planning for our flooring meeting and reading up as much as we could on these early stages of building with Ryan Homes. (The blogs by fellow Ryan Homes builders are so helpful!  They are actually why we decided to start our own - we hope to be as helpful for someone else along with documenting our journey for our family.)  We revisited the model Mozart in our community to get ideas, and we traveled a bit to take a look at a nearby Strauss model in another community.  We, of course, also scoured the blogs to check out some of the choices others have made.

By the time we met our flooring lady (who was phenomenally helpful, pleasant, and patient!) at our flooring meeting, we had a good amount of choices either chosen or in the works, but we also still had a lot left to explore.  We were surprised at how difficult some of the smaller choices we hadn't given much thought to were.  Once you think about living with the choices for a lifetime, and once you see just how many good choices there are, it can be hard to make a decision!  One unexpected bonus (especially after reading a lot of the other blogs) - we had budgeted for level C hardwood in the basement foyer and the entire first floor.  We fell in love with one of the flooring samples that was actually done as a large area of the showroom floor, and when it came time to finalize the numbers, we found out it was actually level B (we had assumed C given the size of the planks and the overall look), so we ended up saving money by surprise at our flooring meeting!

We finally heard from our NVR guy via email on Wednesday (we had been told by our sales rep the Wednesday before that we would probably get a call from him within the next 24-48 hours, so as a week went by, we were starting to worry a bit).  He said he was going to overnight us a package with their good faith estimate and all of the many other important papers to sign.  We still have not received the package, but we've been reassured by our sales rep that this is a particularly busy time of year, and since we are not closing until May and have very good credit, they aren't really worried about us right now.

Last but not least, our Guardian meeting is set for Friday.  We've already chosen what we want from them, and it is nothing elaborate, so at least that one should be easy!

Week 2 - Signing the Contract

Things have moved quickly since unexpectedly deciding to build our dream home, a Strauss, last week.

We put a hold on our lot on Sunday and placed our "hold" sticker on the community map.

We looked through the model and the open Strauss again on Monday.

We came in for our 4+ hour meeting to sign the sale papers and to begin choosing our options and upgrades on Wednesday.  (We will share when all are finalized.)  We put our "sold" sticker on the community map, but since it was late in the evening by the time we were done, we weren't able to put the "sold" sign on our lot.

We went back over the weekend to look through the model again, look at some color samples, begin planning our furniture, and just to overall dream a bit.  We also brought our baby boy to take a family picture as we placed the "sold" sign on our lot.

We have heard from the flooring people but not NVR or Guardian yet.  We will be meeting at the flooring place next Sunday to choose our colors.

We are expecting a busy couple of weeks ahead!

Week 1 - Finding our Forever Home

Welcome to our blog!  We are so excited about building our new Strauss with Ryan Homes, and we've been inspired and greatly helped already by all of the great Ryan Homes building blogs out there.  We are hoping we may be able to provide some information that is just as helpful to someone else as well as document our building journey.

We named our blog Sinfonia Domestica because one of the first things that just "felt right" about the Strauss was that it was named after the favorite composer of my husband, a classical musician.  Sinfonia Domestica is a symphony written by Strauss for a large orchestra.  The music is all about his harmonious life with his family, particularly his wife and young son.  This really seemed like a special connection to us as we currently have a 7 (and half or so) month old son whom we adore, and we also have a daughter on the way!

We have been looking for a home for our growing family for a while now, but we've wanted to really wait until we found our perfect home, our forever home.  We've seen many houses, and we just have never gotten that feeling.  We had ruled out new construction early on due to both our budget and the scarcity of new construction in our area.  Over Thanksgiving weekend, during which we had purposefully taken a break from the ever-more-stressful house hunting, on a whim, we happened upon a new Ryan Homes townhouse community in the area we had been hoping to move to and simply thought it might be fun to look through the model and dream a bit without the stress of "actually looking".  We were unexpectedly in love at first sight.  We knew almost immediately we had found our dream house, and when we found out it was something we could actually afford, well, it just felt right - a dream come true.

Our Ryan Homes townhouse community is relatively new and selling at a rapid pace.  While we were looking through the model, we personally witnessed at least two other couples choosing lots and putting down deposits.  We looked through the model, a Mozart, extensively.  After we got all of the information and floorplans, we knew we wanted a Strauss for the extra living space it would provide for our growing family.  Our extremely helpful (and busy!) sales rep let us know that while there was not a model of the Strauss, there was a recently completed Strauss with many of the options we wanted that was being readied for closing, and he let us look through it.  We knew we had definitely found our forever home after seeing that house.  We looked through and discussed the details for a couple of hours, and then we went home to think some more.  We were back before close that evening to officially choose our lot and to put down a deposit on our family's forever home.