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.
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. We've tried to complete the first floor or at least have it ready for a housewarming party so the second floor and the basement are still a mess. Nevertheless, I want to show you how my fully-furnished main floor looks like. Again, if you wonder where I got certain pieces of furniture or decor, just write a comment below the post and I'll get to you quickly.
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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? About a month before the closing day we thought about pre-ordering what we would need the most immediately: a washer-dryer set and window treatment. However, it took us longer than we thought to decide on the window treatment and measure all of our windows so we placed the order at the very last minute. Now it has been a week since we officially moved in and we are still waiting for the window covers to come. We also bought some furniture. It is important to ask the PM whether your house is set up for a dryer with a 3- or 4-prong cord so that you could order correctly. Thanks to the July-4th sale, we got our washer-dryer set with a discount. We did some research and saw that the ones with the most and the highest rating are from Maytag and Samsung. We got the Samsung set below from Sears due to the high-tech functionality they came with (click on the pictures below to go to product page). I love that they offered free shipping and installing, let me schedule exactly what day I want them to deliver the set, and recommended what extra parts would be needed for installation. We had such a hard time deciding what type of window treatment we want. Blinds are a little too traditional for the style we're trying to achieve although they provide the ability to adjust amount of light you want. Curtains are nice but expensive and need to be washed regularly. Shades look modern but limit the ability to adjust light. For the look we want, we decided to get light-filtering roller shades for the first floor and black-out roller shades for the second floor and the basement. Roller shades usually come with 3 different level of how much they let the light come through: solar letting in the most light and providing no privacy, light-filter letting in some light while still providing a lot of privacy, and black-out or room-darkening blocking the light completely and giving the most privacy (so the best for baby's room). We ordered our shades from Blinds.com which will be delivered later a few days after we move in. Below is the color we chose for both Signature Light Filtering and Signature Blackout roller shades: 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:
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.
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