Wednesday, November 18, 2015

Color Selection

Color Selection Meeting

Our Color meeting was scheduled about a week later, we met with Kristi and went back to the design center and started picking out our colors for the house. Kristi said the meetings usually last anywhere from 2-3 hours. I was hoping since we are going to do our own painting the meeting would only last like an hour, unfortunately I was mistaken!  Honestly the process was fun and went by fast. We went in thinking we were only going to get the basics and then upgrade things as we lived in the house, unfortunately that was a great thought but we ended up upgrading the Cabinets (which we had budgeted for), the Carpet, the Laminate, and the counter tops... Ouch that hurts the budget... tack on another $2000 to the overages.

We started out by picking the Siding and roofing - We chose Coastal Sage for the siding color, Grey for the Shutters, and I don't remember the name for the shingle, I can get it if anyone is interested.

For the kitchen cabinets we upgraded to the FlagStone Maple cabinets, we are also doing the fake wood laminate flooring which was one of our unexpected upgrades.  How awesome is that combination together?  We can't wait to see the two in the kitchen together!!


Our home will have 2-1/2 baths and we decided to go with a brown cabinet with a stone look vinyl flooring.  If you are interested in the names of the cabinet or flooring just send us a quick message!


We choose the Craftsman style interior doors which we love!! Best of all this was not an upgrade!  How awesome is that!!!


Before we left the office we setup our lot inspection and pre-construction meeting for the next week. We are almost caught up on blog posts as we just finished this meeting last week!


Making it Official

Making it Official

After we had our pre-approval for the loan and lot selected, it was time to setup a second meeting with Wayne Homes to make it official and put our $1000 down. We called up Kristi after we finalized on our lot to setup a second meeting to put our money down and make it official so we could get on the dig list.

We also had some little things that we wanted to change and some items we needed to remove in order to get it within our budget. So we sat down and walked through our original estimate and removed items that we could live without or at least without for the first couple of years. We removed things such as the fireplace, basement entrance from the garage, rough in for the bathroom in the basement, and some little upgrades we had added. In the end we decided to keep the 9ft ceilings in the basement and the egress window in the basement, because these are items we either couldn't go back and add or it would be extremely more expensive if we did in the future. We also talked through getting credits for the painting and some of the lighting fixtures, we also wanted to get rid of the plumbing fixtures and purchase our own but unfortunately they did not offer a dollar figure credit for those items so we decided to keep the default and upgrade as we live in the house. After everything was finalized we looked to be over by about $6,000, more than I wanted to spend but we felt comfortable that we could just put in some overtime to make up for the overages. After going through all of the upgrades, we had to choose some of not so  "pretty" changes such as double hung vs single hung windows, Dow board vs OSB, door styles, etc... We choose single hung windows vs the double hung windows, the main reason was we had double hung windows in our old house and every time we opened the windows it was a pain to close because the top windows always slid down a little bit, plus for the $80 upgrade per window, I think we made the right choice.  Also Dow vs OSB, Wayne Homes offers an energy guarantee if you go with the Dow rather than the OSB (they are the same price) I am not sure why, i'm guessing because their profit is higher on the Dow?  We ended up going with the OSB as the R rating was the same and we felt as though it would provide a sturdier home(no facts just my personal opinion). Ah finally we had completed all of our selections! Kristi printed off a large stack of papers and we got to work going through the paper work and signing on the dotted lines, after going through what felt like thousands of papers we fronted the $1000 down payment that Wayne Homes required.

Kristi then put together a binder which contained all of the papers we had just signed as well as a bunch of papers that explained the process and what tasks we needed to complete during and before each task. I was really impressed with the binder as it was really organized which I loved because I am sort of a control freak and need to know what is coming next in each phase of our project!

The next step! Colors Selection!!!

Finding our Lot

Finding the Lot

Our next step in the process was to finalize on our lot that we would build our house on. Originally we planned on building on some land which is family owned but it's not in the exact location we wanted.  Plus, we would also need a well and septic system installed. So before deciding on the lot, we decided to take a look to see what land was available in town by going to realtor.com. The selection wasn't great online but we did find a lot we liked.

After much debate and back and forth between living farther from work and out in the country we thought we were ready to make an offer on the lot in town. We called the realtor to inquire about the land, after talking with the realtor we found out the land had recently been foreclosed on because the owner ran into some hard times. My first thought was cool, I can contact the bank and get a really good deal! I contacted the bank and tried to get to the right department to discuss buying the land, ultimately after multiple calls and multiple hours talking with people we came to the conclusion that we wouldn't be able to purchase that piece of land for at least 6 months but that was not guaranteed and the guy I talked to said that he has seen land sit in foreclosure for years before being listed. Great, back to the search... I tried using the internet again, then even tried calling all of the realtors I could think of to see if they had known of any land for sale that wasn't online, ultimately we found that by just driving around town and driving down subdivisions was the best way to find land for sale. We ended up finding a very nice corner lot in a quiet sub division close to the school and catholic church.

Finally our minds had been made up so we called the developer who owned the lot and made our offer, unfortunately there was little wiggle room with the lot price, but after some back and forth we came up with a number where we both agreed. Awesome! We setup some time that Friday to sign the purchase agreement, then called Wayne Homes to make it official and get the process moving!

Saturday, November 14, 2015

Construction Loan

Construction Loan

At this point we felt comfortable enough with our pricing and our house plans that we needed to contact the bank to make sure that we could get a construction loan for the amount of house we were planning on building. Luckily for us when we bought our first house we took out a construction loan to fix the place up. So we felt like we knew the process well and really wanted to go with our local bank who have always treated us right and we felt always had our interest at heart. Also luckily for us we had planned on buying an existing home so we had already been in touch with our bank and had been pre-approved for an amount which was higher than we felt comfortable spending, so we were pretty sure we shouldn't have much of an issue with this phase.

So we called up the bank to setup a meeting, during our meeting with the lender we let them know how much we were looking to spend on the new house and the lot which he was completely okay with. After getting the actual dollar amount approved they explained to us how the construction loan worked and that we would be making interest only payments until the construction is completed and then we roll the loan into a conventional 30 year mortgage. I have to say that our process was simple, but I think this was due to the familiarity we have with the bank and also the bank has with us. I have read other blogs where finding a lender takes months, luckily for us it was simple and now we could move on to finding the lot we would build on.

First Meeting with Wayne Homes

First Meeting

We setup a meeting with a salesperson from Wayne Homes in Cygnet, OH. The salesperson that we met with was Kristi who was awesome! She was so nice and helpful and had a lot of great ideas. Our meeting started off with us touring the 3 models that they had on site, the models were beautiful and we specifically fell in love with the Covington model, unfortunately that house plan was out of our price range. After looking through the houses and knowing that the model's had the top of the line finishes which we could not afford, we sat down with Kristi in her office and discussed exactly what we were looking for concerning bedrooms, bathrooms, and our budget. We started off the meeting by drawing up a plan of the Hampton and going through some of the upgrades that we were looking to add in. After thinking about it for a while and deciding that the basement wouldn't provide me enough room for the "Man Cave" we expressed our concerns and told her that we really loved the Covington model and wish that we could afford that model and asked if she had anything that would fit within our budget that had a similar floor plan. Much to our surprise she had recently drawn up a floor plan for the Cedar Hill that had a similar main floor layout as the Covington!  Once we saw the floor plan we knew that was the one! I felt pretty bad because we had just spent about an hour going through the Hampton layout, luckily a lot of the things we added to the Hampton were not necessary for our new layout so going through adding a little bit of lighting and a couple of other changes went quickly. Kristi then provided us a hardcopy of our estimate and a paper which included the PPI costs that we would need to pay for, this list contained items like extra permits, site survey, driveway installation, running the water/sewer from the road into the house and a couple of other things. BAM! That's when we saw the price of the extras and I think the initial estimate was around 20k for the PPI items on top of the original house plan! Our hearts sunk but we had hope.

After leaving the office I criticized the PPI list and found that what they were estimating was quite higher than what I realistically thought we could complete the items for. I also called around regarding some of the permits/tap in fees and luckily those were also higher than what the village was going to charge us! Sigh of relief! We could move on to the next phase of the process.

Why We Chose to Build

Why We Chose to Build

Before we get into the fun stuff  we thought it would be a good idea to give everyone a little background on how we got this point and decided to build our home rather than going with the conventional route of buying an exiting home.

We originally bought our first home in 2010 which was a foreclosure home in a small town that was in-between where I work and where my wife and I grew up. We completely remodeled the house from top to bottom and love the process and loved the house but found ourselves always back in our home town spending time with family and friends. We finally decided to put the house up for sale and move back home, our plan from the beginning was always to buy an existing home in town. After finally selling our house in February there wasn't really anything on the market which we really liked, so we initially moved in with our parents and thought we would buy something in the spring/summer as there would definitely be more houses on the market at that time. After much waiting Spring/Summer came and went and we still couldn't find anything we liked or thought was priced right, so we decided to take a look at building a brand new house, which we thought for sure we could never afford. After meeting with custom home builders and getting quotes from 250-330k our dreams were smashed and we were thinking we would never get out of our parents!

I drive I-75 everyday and passed Wayne homes twice a day for the last 5 years but really didn't want to go with a big corporate builder, after giving it some thought and looking at the basic pricing online we decided to setup our first meeting with a Wayne Home sales rep. This is where our journey begins!!





Welcome

Welcome to our Home building Blog!


This is our very first blog and we intend on keeping this up to date as we go through our Wayne Homes building process. We are looking to provide a bunch of pictures, opinions, and personal insight into our journey.

We are creating this blog for family, friends, and others looking for unbiased information regarding the Wayne Homes building process. I know we spent a lot of time researching the builder and read through the good and the bad reviews. During our research we really couldn't find many first hand account negative reviews, most were from people who had friends or relatives who built with Wayne Homes. We are going to provide our unbiased documented process for everyone to see and I am sure we will have our ups and downs but we are really expecting this to be an exciting and joyful process!

Thanks for visiting and I hope you have as much fun following our building journey as we are hoping to have during the journey!!