We're Building a House!

This is my first time "blogging", but I thought it would be fun to write down my thoughts (it also might help keep me sane throughout this whole process) and serve as a archive for our thoughts/decision making processes.  I also hope it will be informational for other people who are thinking of building a house as I found so much information online through other people's blogs and want to return the favor for future homeowners! So here is a brief synopsis of how we got to where we are today:

We were married in 2014 and after a year of living in an apartment, we decided that it would be a good time to buy a house and start investing in some equity.  I must have looked at over 500 houses on Zillow over a period of a few months.  The only houses that we really seemed to like were newer homes and we always got pulled in by those "to-be-built" homes that look so great on Zillow but don't really exist yet.  So we started looking at Ryan Homes online.  There were a few communities that we liked on the map and scheduled an appointment with Ryan Homes.

On the day of the appointment, we talked with a sales rep for almost 4 hours, reviewing who Ryan Homes was as a company, walking through the model home, asking LOTS of questions, visiting potential lots, going through floorplans, walking through a just-finished home of the floorplan my husband fell in love with, which was a Landon, and then building a cost estimate.  The Landon is a new model and I wasn't able to find much information online about it except on the RH website.  So at the end of the day, we walked away with a ton of information and a lot to think about.

The next weekend we went and visited another Ryan Homes community, which was a lot smaller and not really in an established area of town, which were both downsides.   We built a bunch of different scenarios in Excel (I'm a financial analyst, so what else would you expect?) and after considering our options, we made the heart-heavy decision to pay off our student loans this year and buy a house next year.  We were both disappointed by this decision, but thought it was the most fiscally responsible thing to do.

The next week, I got a call from our SR at the community we first visited asking if we had made any decisions or had any questions.  I told him our decision and why we made it and he asked if we would like to come in again, crunch through all our numbers and options, so that we had all the information available to make an educated decision.  We agreed and scheduled a meeting for the next weekend.  We spent the next couple of days making more spreadsheets, more scenarios, what/if statements, and went into the meeting feeling pretty well informed about where we were financially and where we wanted to be in 5 years.  We also spent time researching blogs (when you type in Ryan Homes in google you get a bunch of nightmare negative comments that pop up.  It's not until I found the RH blogs that I began to feel more comfortable with the idea of building a RH home.  I should have known better anyways - the people who give poor ratings are often a small percentage of all the people who could give ratings).  And in the blogs, there were people who had negative things to say; but they also told how RH responded to their requests and more-often-than-not, fixed the problem).  Anyways, in all this research we learned a lot.  Some of the more important things to know when getting to know Ryan Homes:

• to focus on the structural, electrical, and plumbing changes when adding options.  Things that will be difficult and expensive to fix after the house in already built are the things you want to spend the mark-up price on.  Things like lighting fixtures, hardwood floors, etc., we can do our selves for a lot cheaper (plus then you don't have to pay 30 years of interest on it)
• Questions to ask: i.e. who knew that the garage wouldn't come with floor drains in Ohio.  Hello, have you seen how much snow we get?  Anyways, if you want floor drains this cost extra (and would be insanely difficult to put in after the house is built, so we splurged on the $500 drains).  Also when going through the model home, point at everything and ask "is this an upgrade".  More often than not (i.e. window placement, fireplace, island, washer/dryer), it is going to be an extra cost if you want your house to look like the model.

Anyways, we had another meeting with our SR, and talked through all our options (i.e. getting rid of mortgage insurance by paying the premium upfront).  We also had a heart-to-heart regarding mortgage rates.  I had done quite a bit of research about mortgage rates, their historical trend, and projected forecast and what it would mean to wait a year to buy a house.  Right now, mortgage rates are in the 3.65% - 3.85% range.  If we waited another year, there would be a good chance for rates to be increased above 4%.  Plus, right now the Landon floorpan is ~$20,000 underpriced due to how new it is (other floorpans were priced at $110/sq.ft; our Landon would be priced at $80 per sq/ft).  The only bad part was that the base price had increased $4,000.  But, the new incentive for April was free granite and cabinet upgrade I, so we basically got $10,000 of free upgrades (that's the markup price; probably not the actually price if we did it ourselves).

So long story short, we decided to build a house!  There was really only one lot that we liked (it's at the top of hill, amazing views, and has greenspace/woods behind it - no backyard neighbors!).  This lot had actually already been sold, but something happened with the previous buyers, so it came back on the market (lucky for us, because this was the best lot available, in my opinion).

So here we are; we've signed the contract, scheduled our loan application, our color selection meeting, and our Guardian meeting.  We still have to schedule our flooring appointment, but I'm just busy trying to get everything everything ready for the loan application.

Phew!  That's a lot, but it gets you up-to-speed.  Until next time...