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!!!