Moving right along

It is so exciting to drive out the the house every so often and see so huge progress happening.The have got the roofing done ( not the singles ) The home wrap is starting to go on around the house, The showers and tubs have been delivered and are in the garage. They finally cut the window out for the master bathroom & still waiting for them to cut out window over the garage in the attic. Doesn't look like doors been framed in yet for Ethan's access from his room to the bathroom nor have the framed to the office wall against the stairs to be closed off and not open like they have it. When we do our walk through if its still not done we'll mention it. Oh they haven't framed in the overhang over the front door... not sure when that will be done. Seems like all the changes we did just haven't been done. However on the plans the office is closed off they decided to leave it open but we want it closed, the door to the bathroom in ethans room is on the plans to be there but they left it off and we added the over hang. I did get a response back from the builder that night. We got prices for adding in the utility sink in the laundry room and the cost for adding stone/slate to the front stairs (outside) I am happy that will be done. I really don't care for how thick the concrete is on some of the other homes and how stained the concrete starts to look. Here are some updated photos:

Its been a little while since I have updated. Not much has happened to the house. The roof framing is starting to go up so that is exciting. I have experienced a few frustrations trying to get answers to my questions. My realtor has emailed their agent and who knows where it went from there. SO I sit a week later with no answers. Today we drove by the house hoping to catch the builders and get our questions answered. No luck there was no one there which was nice because were able to sneak and and take a few photos. I decided when we got home to go straight to the source and contact the builder directly with my questions. I hate going over peoples heads but I need answers in a timely manner. So heres to hoping we get a speedy response. So with little to report I will leave you with some photos :)

Roof going up

Garage looking at the Laundry room and powder room

Laundry room

looking from family room towards kitchen & laundry room

standing in breakfast nook looking towards kitchen and dining room

Addys room

dining room from foyer

Ethans room

family room and stairs to the upstairs

front door and foyer < office to the right dining to the left

Master closets

Jay in the Master bath

office

they still need to wall off that opening to the stairs. This is in the office

Siding and Tiles and Stone oh my!!

Ok so going into today Jay and I pretty much had an idea of what we wanted. We've stalked plenty of houses and we knew what we liked. Today was easier than I thought, my indecisiveness was was in check today. First we chose Grey siding ( Flint ) only to be told the house that was being built next to ours was also going to be Grey. Grrrrrrr they had chose their stuff before us. So we continued to look and maybe a lighter grey but ultimately we decided to go with what we wanted. It is OUR house that we have to live in for a very long time and its what we wanted so oh well it the neighbor has the same color. They are not in the same model that we are. Next shutters... easy peasy black please... neighbors picked those to! Come on... next up on stone :) I was so happy to pick stone... I love love love stone and I think its going to be one of my most favorite upgrades. We chose a stacked stone in various greys. We are 95% sure that we are going with a red door but it has to be the perfect red, not any old red will do. Lastly for the exterior white trim. We moved onward to the interior. Again pretty easy! Cherry cabinets, Cherry hardwood floors, We decided against doing hardwood in the kitchen for fear of dropping stuff on it and denting it so we picked out a nice laminate. The same laminate will be in the laundry room and powder room downstairs so it'll tie in nicely. We picked our countertop, we picked a white with light flecks in it. We think it'll be a great contrast to the dark cherry. Oh we picked out a roof to :) We did carpet for the basement and all the upstairs room. That was pretty easy as well. All in all it only took us about an hr a lot of that was spent asking a zillion questions. Meeting with the mortgage broker tomorrow morning so she can get the loan application completed yah yah yah! The builders are going to finish getting the framing up, get the roof and windows done and then they said they probably won't do anything else until around middle of Feb since our closing date isn't until the 15th of April. They don't want to finish the house way before we close then just have it sit there so we understand that and agree. It'll be frustrating I am sure to see nothing happening on it for a little while but we totally understand. I will leave you with some photos from today..

shutters are a different design but same color.. also the stone is the one in the photo on the right

siding and the stone together. The stone will go all the way up the wall however.

Cherry cabinets and the corian counters

Led lights for under the counters

flooring for the kitchen, laundry and powder room.

There's snow in our house!

Eight inches of snow busted up our plans to meet with the mortgage broker and the builder to pick out all of our siding, flooring, shutters, doors, so on a so forth! Oh well mother nature loves to play hard ball what can you do. We are set to meet with the builder tomorrow morning and the mortgage broker on Sunday. We dug ourselves out today and went to Lowes. I never really liked going to Lowes. I never had a reason so the whole place bored me to death! Today I was excited hahaha. We went to look at lighting for the Foyer, lighting for outside on both sides of the garage, we looked at nifty kitchen faucets, checked out some counter colors, LED lighting for under the cabinets, light plates and dimmers, window shades... and lots of other stuff. Pheww overwhelming! My indecisiveness was in over drive today! TO MANY CHOICES!! How do I make the right one! After that we of course decided to drive by and see how our home was holding up in its first snow :) There was snow so deep upstairs lol. It was a hazard climbing up snow covered stairs but it sure was fun to see it coming together even more. They opened back up the foyer and its going to let in so much light! We get more and more excited every time we go out there. Our laundry room is HUGE I am so glad it was extended out. We did find a broken joist that we will have to address tomorrow because I definitely want it fixed. Well here are a few photos from today Front door bottom of our room from garage. The open space is attic space. Laundry room, garage door is on the right powder room on the left, laundry room straight ahead broken Joist thats gotta be fixed. standing in the kitchen looking at the breakfast nook I would have gotten more photos but my battery died on my phone... whoops!!

Fun stuff tomorrow!

Tomorrow we have some more fun stuff to go through. Well I hope its fun but I have a feeling its going to stress me out and I will second and triple guess all my decisions because thats how I roll! We have to first meet with the mortgage broker to go over a bit of paperwork that needs to be completed within 10 days of us going under contract. So we'll get that out of the way tomorrow. After that we head to the builders office to pick out our siding, stone, shutters, doors, floors, tiles, molding, counters, cabinets, lighting and I am sure there is a TON more. I think we want to go with a gray siding, black shutters and a red door.... we'll see how many times that changes tomorrow lol. That is definitely one of the things I should try to improve on for 2014 BE LESS INDECISIVE. Fat chance on that! I will update hopefully with photos of what we've picked out later tomorrow. Here is todays photo. I know they were trying to get as much done as possible to prepare for the snow. Hopefully it doesn't hold things up for to long.

Move this here... move that there...

The house was already going up before we officially purchased it and luckily they were still in a phase where things could be changed. Here are a few things that we did : Our front living room will be an office with 15 light doors, the front will have stone where it is marked on the previous blog, the front door will have an overhang, we made a couple slight changes to the kitchen, the sink is not going to be catty cornered like that because its going to take up a huge amount of space and we will loose storage space underneath so we have moved it so it is facing the family room. Our laundry room has also been extended which is accurately shown on the plans ( thanks to my photoshop skills lol ) we have also made some changes to the master bathroom. The shower will be moved to where the toilet is shown and it will be a 5 ft shower not a 4 ft and the toilet will be moved where the shower was. We are undecided on whether we want to enclose it or leave it as a knee wall. Theres lots more I can share but I feel I'd go on for days lol. I'll update a little later. here are a few photos from our visit today. Henshaw family in front of the garage Second floor framing is up so much progress in one day standing in Addy's room yahh the stairs are in. Thats going to be the office behind them His and Hers closets. I am not sure either of us will be able to fill these closets but hey what the hell!

Lot 31

After much thought, and quite a stress headache from thinking to much we decided to put an offer in on a house that was already going up in the neighborhood. It happened to be the model that I liked even though we never got to walk through it I liked the outside and the layout of the plans. So we wrote it up and added in all the extras.... They countered back and after consideration we accepted. It was official we had just bought a home! Just like that BADA BING BADA BOOM! Some may think it was to fast of a decision or that we didn't think it out long enough..... to that I say you're wrong and and keep your opinions to yourself because we really aren't interested. We know what options were avail to us and it wasn't as if we haven't looked at anything in the area over the past yr. Believe me we have, just not in a we are serious and ready to buy way. With that said we are happy with our decision and hope that everyone will be as well. What may be important features in a home for your family may not be so for ours. Just remember that when lending out advice :) For the most part people have been genuinely excited for us but there is always the few that love to spoil ones happiness with their negativity. Here is a few photos of our home :) everything has been reversed so that it represents how it'll actually look Downstairs Upstairs

Our house style

I thought I'd post a few photos of our style of home we were looking for :) I like the brick on most of these homes but I really like stone also.

The start of our search

It was official it was time to start looking for a house! We are crammed in a small 3 bedroom and as a family of 5 we are bursting at the seams. We've talked about buying for a long time but I have never felt truly ready. Its a HUGE commitment! We were looking to buy a house in South Carolina when we had accepted the job down there. Housing market there is great. You can get gorgeous homes for a fraction of what it costs here. One of my biggest fears was getting to the bank and finding out we qualified for much less than could buy us a decent home & whats the point of buying a home you're not truly going to love. Jay made the first move and made an appt with the realtor and lender much to my objection. Guess I had no choice but to go along with it. I gathered everything we needed ( this is where organization is key! ) We needed tax returns from 2010, 2011, 2012 , W-2's from those yrs as well , Pay stubs for 30 days , bank statements from the past 2 months OUCH right after Christmas and booking our Disney vacation... 15 pages later . Couple other things we needed and we were off. Ran the credit.. phewww , figured out debt to income ratio & we were golden in that dept. It pays to not have credit cared debt boys and girls!! Finally comes the question of where we want our mortgage. We had discussed it privately and we both came up with a number we were comfortable with. That put us right in or just over the $250,000 area but if we wanted or needed we could go much higher than that. For me that was the biggest hurdle and we'd gotten through it quite easily. Now that we were pre-approved it was time to get moving! We always placed ourselves in the 250k range and had looked quite often online in the area for homes that fit into that budget. So we knew what was out there was slim pickings unless we wanted to move out of our school district which neither of us wanted to do. In this area there is a ton of new construction, there is more to choose from by way of new construction than re-sell. This was a list of our MUST haves - 2200+ square footage - 4 bedrooms - 2 1/2 bath - CR school district - had to have quick access to rt 1 ( that made our search areas even smaller ) - open concept kitchen and living space - 2 car garage - storage areas This was our list of "would be nice if" - Hardwood floors - basement but not a deal breaker if it didn't have it - Fireplace - yard - 2 story foyer We did find a house that I loved when I looked online at it but when we looked at in in person I knew immediately it was a no go. There was NO storage, no pantry in the kitchen, weird colored painted walls which I know can be re-painted but they were very high ceilings that'd require a professional to be brought in, Master bath was very outdated, garage was painted purple, YES purple... and not even a Ravens purple lol it was a lavender I could go on and on but bottom line is it wouldn't have worked out. There are a ton of foreclosures and short sales but we weren't interested in going that route. Our only other option was to go ahead and build a home exactly how we wanted it and thats just what we are doing!!! We drove through many neighborhoods and found a few we really liked. One of my favorite neighborhoods is Sandy Hill. I love the houses that are going up in there right now but that would have pushed us up into the 300k plus range and neither of us were willing to compromise our lifestyle to be tied to a house. So we settled on Pickering Pointe or Riverside. We heard however that there were issues in the past with the builder so we went to meet with builder from Pickering Pointe instead. It is a small neighborhood with maybe 30 homes in there. First impression of the builder off the bat was great. They were very personable, easy to talk to and spent a lot of time answering our many many questions. We walked a couple of homes that were built for other families but not moved in yet and were impressed with the craftsmanship we saw. We stopped our house hunting search there.