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.