Moving is hard

I finally have access to the interwebs folks! We just got our internet and cable connected on Sunday, so freaking crazy! Anyway, that's my excuse for being gone for so long, plus the whole moving thing. Good news is we are all moved in to our house, not that we aren't unpacked nor do we have anything in the slightest semblance of order but we are working on it. Let me tell you having four days to get out of the old house and into the new house was crazy hard. It was so stressful and tiring but so worth it since we are in OUR house. We are homeowners, it still doesn't feel completely real, like some days I will be sitting in the living room and think "Oh my gosh, this is our house, we own it!" It sounds weird but I still do that sometimes about being married. I think it's the whole feeling like a grown up thing, I still see myself as a kid in college (and act like it).

Anyway, we are completely loving our place for the most part, there are a few minor annoyances but nothing too major. For example we don't have sod so our yard is just mud right now so we have to walk the dogs, which we haven't had to do in nearly 2 years.We freak out at any damage we do to the house (like a hunk of drywall that was taken out when we were moving furniture in). Plus no one can find us, since we aren't on Google Maps, people like the pizza delivery dude and our internet and cable provider. Other than that things are great. We've been working on organizing and unpacking, slowly but surely. We need to get our butts in gear though because the first weekend in February we are having a house warming party and I would like to have most of the house set up and organized. I actually planned the party to motivate us a little more, I think it's working.

Anyway, that's my little update, I've got a lot to share about the projects we've completed since moving in and all the projects I want to undertake in the near future. I promise to post a little more often now that we have our connection back up!

Building: Final Walk Through

Well our final walk through was yesterday and it went well. Basically we met with our contractor at the house and he walked us through the operation of all the things in the house (furnace, hot water heaters, etc.) along with some care instructions for the first year. We also looked for any trouble spots in the house to be fixed in the next week before we close. There weren't very many things to take care of, a lose floor tile, some spots that needed touched up with paint, one of the windows needs replaced, plus we need the right stove. We also were informed about problems to watch out for and what to do/who to call. I really can't believe that we move into our house next Tuesday, it's crazy. I can't wait to share pictures after we move in!

Kitchen is done!

Good news our appliances were delivered yesterday, check it out:

Bad news, our stove is not the right one. At least we think it isn't the right one. As we understand it the models change frequently so the model number doesn't match the one that we picked 6 months ago. However, the original stove we upgraded to was suppose to be a five burner but this one is only a four burner. According to our contractor even if the models changed we should get a model similar to the one we picked out, meaning a five burner, which he is working on for us (thank goodness he is so awesome). Although this is kind of a pain, it worked in our favor for the fridge because we got a really awesome fridge instead of the original model we were suppose to get. I suppose we can handle the trade off.

Oh and P.S. We move in less than 2 weeks! Woot!

Building: Getting close

With all the hub bub of the last week or so we haven't had much time to see the house and progress, but boy has there been some. Take a look:

Landscaping and driveway are done

Lighting in kitchen and breakfast nook

Foyer light

Master bath lights

Master bath tile/bathtub

Master bath shower tile

Kitchen floors

Master bath floors

Plus we also have flooring in the entryways, laundry room, and other bathrooms! Woot! We also have a date for the final walk thru which will be on December 19th. We should close within 10 days of that date, barring any major complications. I'm hoping there isn't anything major because we need to be out of our rental by the 31st of December. Yikes. Cross your fingers and toes for us folks, it's going to be close.

Building Progress: Eeeeee!

I'm so excited! I went out to the house yesterday and saw this:

Check out that siding! Woot! I'm hoping they will be back to finish the front between today and tomorrow since the weather is going to be nice. Moving on to the inside:

 

Top picture: Master bedroom/Middle picture: Master bath/Bottom Picture: Foyer

We have drywall y'all! We have finally moved out of framing. I'm excited mostly because our contractor (many moons ago) told us that from drywall the house will take about 6 to 8 weeks to finish, leaning more towards 6. Given his determination and some discussion reassurance from some folks that live in the neighborhood we will be in before the end of the year. Let me get a wahoo!

P.S. Happy NaBloPoMo! Good luck to anyone attempting it, you are a better blogger than me.

Cast your vote!

Ok y'all, time for another poll. You have all seen recent developments with the house so I think it's time to place some bets on when we will be in the new house. Again I will give you a few weeks to choose from and the poll will be open until October 31. If you want to wager on an exact date leave a comment perhaps a gift card will come to the person that guesses closest to our move in date.

Building Progress: A lot can happen in a week!

The last two weekends and the week in between have been super busy. Two weekends ago, I had to work on Saturday and then Sunday was Andy's birthday. My parents also came down with the dogs on Sunday. They went on vacation this last week (lucky them) and we got to dog sit. They stayed with us Sunday and flew out Monday so we took them over to the house on Sunday and they saw this:

 Between the four dogs and work this last week zoomed right by, we got to stop at the house once during the week and saw this:

We arrived Friday night with lots of plans for the weekend. Andy's mom was in town so we took her and Andy's brother and sis-in-law over to the new house where we saw: 

The busy weekend flew right by and we got to Monday when my parents returned. We picked them up from the airport and drove to the house to get a picture and saw this progress: 

My parents were amazed at the progress that was made while they were gone, quiet honestly seeing it in picture form I'm pretty impressed myself. These pictures don't even show the inside progress, which is pretty amazing as well. I guess I'm going to have to start trekking into the house as well during my visits, I will have to remember my hard hat. 

Building: Progress report!

Alright, y'all, it's that time again. We have some major progress to report on the house. It's crazy what can happen in a week. Last weekend we had a basement with a first floor, it kind of looked like a stage, and now, well just see for yourself.

I mean really??? It's really starting to look like a house, I'm so excited but also kind of freaking out, I mean we are going to be home owners. Crazy.

Building: The Progress!

It's about time for some progress pictures. I haven't had much to show you, just some dirt and you don't want to see that but now there is something there! Yay!

 

 

Excavation!

The hole, one from the back and one from the front!

Footers from the back of the house!

Stuff to build the basement.

 

 Voila! A basement!

The basement, with the tar seal started! (I love that you can see our shadows in this one!)

Nearly fully sealed and the garage and front yard leveled out!

Well that's about all we've got, these have taken place over the last month or so. Our contractor e-mailed us today and told us our lumber is being delivered tomorrow and framing should start this weekend. Things have been moving a little slower than everyone thought they would, the brick layers were behind in their work which put us behind, but we are excited with the progress so far and can't wait to share more with you.

(I'm)patiently waiting

Except I'm not patient and really neither is Andy. We barely made it 8 months before we moved in together, we were engaged before we got the ring, and we talked multiple times about eloping before the wedding (but feared death by family). We are not patient people. We can wait, just not very long. So it seems a tad silly to me that we are building a house. I mean really, us building a house? I can barely wait for paint to dry on my DIY projects and we decided to wait 6+ months for a house. I think we are crazy.

This is only coming up now because there is nothing coming up house wise. We have made our structural decisions, picked a lot, and chosen the interior aspects. The only thing left to do is wait. We have to wait for the permits to come through before we can meet with our contractor and discuss our build. We have to wait for the build to start and once it does we have to wait months for it to be finished. Once it is finished we have to wait for inspections to pass and do the paper work. It's a big waiting game. It was all so exciting (and still is the majority of the time)  because we were constantly picking and discussing and going to the design studio and the model. Now that the selections are made the glitter and sparkle has settled and we I realized that the majority of this build will be spent waiting. Boo.

I do believe that waiting for the permits will be the most boring part of waiting because there is nothing to see. We go to the home site a couple times a week and the most exciting part so far is that they have paved our road and put our street sign up (I'm not saying that is boring at all, in fact I cheered when both of these things happened). Our plot is still just a little piece of dirt. Once the permits go through and they can start building I have a feeling it will be more exciting because we can stop by every day and see the progress (did I mention we get our own hard hats to wear when we visit the construction site?). So I'm impatiently waiting for the government to give our contractor the go ahead so we can get this party started and I can do something other than twiddle my thumbs.

Until next time folks.

Building: The Interiors

Yay interiors! The interior selections is the most exciting part of building. It's really the one way to make our house our own. About a week and a half after we signed our contracts and made our structural selections, we had our meeting with our designer to make all of our interior selections. Yes you read right ALL. Our appointment was scheduled for 3 and a half hours to give you an indication. Andy and I headed to the design center around 11 AM sat down with our designer, H to discuss all our selections.

The first portion of our meeting we reviewed the selections we had made so far. We had made some general selections in our initial meetings, like to have tile in the master bath and kitchen but not any actual color selections. After reviewing those items we headed over to the exterior portion of the selections to choose our siding and shutter color. I have to say this was probably the most difficult decisions because it can't be changed easily, light fixtures and hardware easy peasy, siding=not so much.What made it a tad easier was the fact that quite a few houses in our future community is some shade of tan. While tan is lovely and I liked some of the selections in that shade range, Andy and I decided to be different and choose from the shades of grey and one shade of green/gray since not nearly as many houses are this color. We ended up with a platinum grey which looks almost white* and midnight blue shutters (which will also be the color of our front door). After that we went over to front and interior doors, from there we choose door fixtures, after that cupboards,  then counters, then flooring, then tile, then trim and paint.

The process was relatively simple, the designer just walked you through all the choices you had to make showing you the different options you had with each area. It made it really easy because M/I has different levels for everything, in our house level 1 was standard so if you wanted something greater than that you had to pay more. We got a deal with some things like level 2 cupboards and stainless steel appliances, which were an upgrade promotion they were running when we signed. The fact that each upgrade ups the total price of the house really made us think about what was important to us and what we didn't really care as much about. I found that having limited selections set up in levels really made the process easy and we were done pretty quickly (Only 2 and a half hours instead of 3). I would explain our final selections but I don't have pictures to do them justice so I'll just post the one I have.

Obviously it's hard to envision it when you have no clue what the house looks like but I promise you that I think we did a fabulous job and it will look fantastic once it is done. I promise at some point I will get some more detailed pictures up here and explain exactly what each thing is in boring minutiae detail (like when I run out of stories to tell you about building). Maybe I'll even let Andy post about that, because honestly I think he is more excited about the selections than I am.

Hope I didn't bore you too much folks. Until next time...

*We now are reconsidering this color because we have finally seen a house with this siding and it looks dirty white and it's kind of blinding. Instead we are leaning towards a Cape Cod Grey which is darker. The midnight blue shutters will remain. Thoughts/opinions anyone?

Building: Choosing the lot

Once our floor plan and structure options were selected we had to pick a lot. This seems like it would be easy. Ha. Yeah. Okay. We were not decisive in this matter. The problem is that the lot was such an important part to us. We wanted to have a nice yard for the dogs, we didn't want to have too wonky of a yard, we wanted to be in a good position on the street, and most importantly Andy wanted the majority of the house to face east (Why? Ask him). So we took a look at our little lot plot map and we talked and thought.

We thought how about an edge plot with no neighbors behind us. Sounds great right? Well Andy went and took a look and we realized that the lot is on a decline and not going to be of much use to us without a deck. On to another lot. The second lot we picked was irregular, which required a little extra fee but the back yard was going to be bigger. Again we went to take a look and found that an extra 3 feet of yard isn't worth the fee. Back to the plot map. We ended up selecting the second lot from the corner that is "normal" sized. We would have went with the corner lot but we have dogs and they bark at passersby and we aren't allowed to have a privacy fence. So we went with the second one in, which I actually like quite a lot (ha ha ha, get it?).

Next time, our interiors. 

Building: Choosing the home plan and floor plan.

I have already talked about how we fell into building but I wanted to discuss it a little more in detail. When we started we out we had several options to chose from as far as home plans went and all were within the price range we were comfortable with, so how did we choose? Well the great thing about our builder is that there are a lot of model homes to look at and they also build a few houses to sell later which we could also view. First we had to make sure that the houses we were interested in were available in the community we were interested in because different communities offer different homes to choose from. The community aspect was a very easy selection; it was simply a matter of elimination. We didn't want Columbus City Schools (that knocked out 2), we only wanted to spend X amount of dollars on our home (that took it down to 7 to choose from), we didn't want to live south of I 70 (which took out 3), and I needed to be able to commute to work easily regardless of the branch I was working in, this last qualifier left 2 communities to pick from, one was in the 270 loop and one was not. We chose the community that was out of the loop. See, easy peasy.

When we selected the community our selling agent (from here on out called P) let us know which plans were available in that community, then took us to see the homes. That day we saw the Rosemary, the Camellia, and the Sage. On paper we liked the Sage or the Lavender the best, but I am here to tell you that if you ever consider building see the house in action before making the commitment. We both loved the Rosemary straight off, the Camellia was way too narrow feeling for us and the Sage's plan felt too choppy in action. Based on our reaction to the Camellia and the Sage, P said that we wouldn't like the Lavender and didn't take us to see it. Basically it came down to a feeling and we felt the Rosemary would work best for us.

Once the home was chosen and the contracts signed you have 14 days to make any wanted structural changes to the plan. With every home plan there are structural options, from simple things like a pantry to big things like a bonus room. It's pretty strange, but we had basically no qualms about adding a 4th bedroom and bonus room, an island, and an extra window over the kitchen sink. The only two things we were really stuck on was a deluxe master bath and a basement. We ended up opting in on both of those options mostly for the resale value it would add and that was that. The really scary thing is that we totally agreed on everything (I know, right? Has that ever happened in the history of home building).

Next time: Choosing a lot, corner or no corner that is the question.

Building: The starting point

As you know we kind of fell into building. I don't want to say that we rushed the decision but we definitely jumped to it quickly. Given our not so great house hunting path over the past few months, I think that building had been crossing our minds for a while but Toledo didn't have the same opportunities for building as there are in Columbus. Regardless I want to take a little time and talk about the starting point and how we came to decide on the builder and plan we chose.

Going into the process we had to factor in that certain builders only built in their own communities while other builders would only build on land we had purchased ourselves. Taking that into consideration, we knew that we would automatically have to eliminate any builder that would only build on land we owned because we didn't have the land or the time/money/energy to purchase land. After eliminating that round of builders we went through the list of builders that we could afford and took a look at floor plans, location of communities, and tried to find reviews online to help us decide We focused a lot more on the overall look and location of homes at first deciding to research reviews once we found a couple of builders we really liked. Once we found a couple builders that seemed reputable we did some more digging and research through online boards and Google. Through that process we narrowed it down to Dominion Homes and M/I Homes but the more I dug, the more negative things I found about Dominion whereas M/I had a good mix of reviews. Plus we both liked the look of M/I a little more. So off to M/I we went to talk to them about possibly building with them.

Stepping the M/I show room it was pretty impressive but we had some questions and really wanted to see an actually house. The woman we met with was super sweet and informative, she took us to some models and let us walk around, answered every question we had and put no pressure on us whatsoever. After seeing some of the potential houses and options she asked us to pick one we thought we liked best, put in some options and gave a ball park figure for the price of the house and our monthly payments so we would have a good idea to think about. She sent us off with her e-mail address and phone number so we could contact her if any questions came up and sent us on our merry way.

We headed home with a lot to think about and consider. We talked it over, wrote pro/con lists, but found that we the more we talked and wrote the more we wanted to build with M/I. Once that decision was made we had to decide which plan we liked best. We knew that if we were going to build we wanted to get a house that had room to grow since it seems pretty silly to buy a brand new house and have to move in a few years when we grow out of it. There was one house in particular that stood out for both of us that met our needs list: 3-4 bedrooms, at least 1.5 baths and a good sized living area. That house was the Rosemary plan.

Now that we had a builder and a plan we had to go through all of our selections, which is a story for another day.