It has been quite a long time since I updated this blog. Honestly, we haven't had a lot of new things in our house since then so if you see there are not a lot of updates since our last post, that's the reason. However, we have been in the house long enough to show you how it has gone through settling stage and some "wear and tear".

The first thing we noticed is the quality of our wooden floor and carpet. We upgraded the wooden floor to Level B hardwood - Armstrong Rural Living Hickory engineered hardwood in Misty Gray and Level B carpet in Morning Fog.

• The carpet is the cheap type that wears out in a year or two, but we plan to replace it after that period anyways.
• For the wooden floor, the edges of the wood planks seem to get chipped easily when we don't even wear shoes in the house and didn't drop anything heavy. There are about 3 or 4 chips now in the kitchen and morning room area; they are not too noticeable so we could just use a wood marker to mark over them. We had never have wooden floor before so we don't know if this is considered "acceptable". We don't even know what caused the chips, or if they had been there since the beginning. If you have the same experiences with engineered wooden floor, please tell us your stories.

We moved in end of July 2017 and now it's Spring 2018, so our house has gone through last Summer, Fall, Winter, and a few weeks of this Spring. We've seen cracks at multiple places on the drywall. They all look scary, like something is very wrong with the structure of the house, but from what I read it's actually normal for a new construction during its settlement. We will wait a little longer toward the end of the first year before calling Ryan Homes service to come and fix the cracks because the warranty covers only 1 time drywall service during the first year. To know more about their warranty and home care tips, go to myryanhome.com.

It has been 3 months and 2 weeks seen we moved in yet we still have tons of things to get for the house. What we have done so far is getting some basic furniture, mostly on the main floor. I know the house lacks some other big furniture and decorative items (wall arts, figurines, flower vases, etc.), but we will add them little by little. So far, we have been very pleased with our purchases.

As you can see, we love using neutral colors for almost everything in our house. If you want to know where we got specific pieces of furniture from, don't hesitate to ask in the comment section. We are more than happy to provide you the details and links to the products.

To complete furnishing for this floor, we still need to find storage units to place near the fireplace, coffee table and accent chairs for the living room. Below are some ideas, what do you think?

Below are a few things we got from West Elm, CB2, and other stores:

Note: Photos of the actual products will be posted once we are done furnishing our home. (I can't wait!)

We finally closed and got the keys this past Friday!!! I still remember a day around 6 months ago when we went to Ryan Homes just to get some info about the models, the joy of picking our own colors and designs, and the excitement that had built up every time we went to check on the building process and saw how it went from dirt to a home. Time flies so fast. We went to the house after closing, took a deep breath and spent quite a bit of time in there to absorb the fact that this beautiful house is finally ours. After 5 years of living in an apartment, we will finally have a place that truly feels like "home", our first home together!

Now, I'm going to talk about the bad part of the closing day. This is all about how bad NVR service was. If you don't want to read the long story, our lessons learned (the hard way) from dealing with NVR Mortgage are the followings:

1. Expect requests for your employment information and bank statements every month since you turn in the loan application.
2. Expect them to ask you for the same information again and again.
3. Expect document requests at the last minute.
4. Expect to receive NO loan servicing and to do the work for them.
5. DON'T expect to settle your mortgage on time or even on the scheduled day. Information requests will continue to be sent to you on that day.

Below is our story of a settlement nightmare. There are 2 things that gave us a lot of frustration that day.

• We scheduled for the closing meeting at 10 AM at an NVR office 2 hours away from our apartment. That morning we found out that Matthew Tang (NVR Loan Officer) emailed to ask for my husband's employment verification the previous day at 2 PM (he could verify mine but had trouble with my husband's). Seriously?? Sending out document request at the last minute like this? We ended up rushing to my husband's company to get the document since he doesn't have access to it anywhere else. After sending Matt what he needed, we headed to the meeting but when we were half way there the guy emailed us again stating that the document was password-protected and he couldn't open it (why didn't he open it when we were still at my husband's office?). We didn't know there was a password to open the document so we had to return to my husband's office to find out what the password was. The password was sent and the guy called the 3rd time to ask for my husband's salary, which is ridiculous because (1) we had been sending him our pay-stubs since we started the mortgage process 4 months ago so I don't understand why he couldn't figure out the info on his own, and (2) this request came after the 10 AM scheduled time had passed (!) All of this could have been completed weeks ago!!! We got a call from another loan officer who informed us that they would have to reschedule our meeting for 4 PM. Ok, fine; now you can continue for the second part of the story.
• Before the email from Matt about the document being password-protected, we didn't know if we could even close because we couldn't reach Matt to verify whether or not NVR had had all of the documents they needed for settlement, so we called Rachel Fello who is the Settlement Processor of NVR. She seemed to be surprised about the situation and stated that she had not received the needed information from the lender (which is also NVR), yet she did nothing to try obtain the information before the settlement while we were already on the road. Also, on our way there to the rescheduled 4 PM meeting, Rachel called and said they had not seen the down payment deposited into their account, which is weird because we transferred the fund the day before. She asked us to verify with our bank; we had to drive around looking for the closest branch, found one and was told by the bank that NVR's account had received the fund the day before. We called Rachel and let her know; she said she couldn't see the fund because we used teller transfer instead of wire transfer. Shouldn't she have seen the fund in NVR's account as soon as it went to the account regardless of how it was transferred? Even if she didn't see it, shouldn't she have checked with NVR accounting department first before asking us to go around and verify it for her? Whatever excuse she told us, I just couldn't believe what I experienced. It was settlement day and it is her job to make sure everything was ready before the scheduled time at 10 AM; and loan processor and settlement processor under the same company were supposed to communicate with each other to pass over the documents. That is called loan servicing! The reality is we the customers had to run around doing the work for them.

The statement "you get what you paid for" is definitely applicable to NVR Mortgage. They give you $10,00 - $15,000 closing-cost help but they don't provide you the service you should get. Although if we had to choose again we would still go with them because we needed this help, my advice is if $10,00 - $15,000 is not that important to you, you should go for a better lender. I wish we were more aware of NVR's poor service so that at least we would know what we got ourselves into. 

It is only 5 days away from closing and I can't wait to decorate our own space! I know it will take a while before the empty house actually feels like "home", but I'm already in the "decor mode" so I'm putting together a plan for furniture and decor. Below is my plan for the main floor.