Good news came on 2/21/17: OUR LOAN HAS BEEN APPROVED!!! Now, let's talk about upgrades for flooring and wiring! I won't be telling you the exact price for each upgrade because they change the pricing quite often, not mentioning location difference. However, I would say you might want to have a budget of $10,000 to $15,000 for flooring and maybe an extra $4,000 to $8,000 for wiring upgrades. We met Gary from Guardian, the wiring company on 2/24/17. We talked about TV cable & phone, where we want our TV to be mounted to the wall, data outlets, surround sound system, and security system. The key here is to make sure you know what you need vs. want because they have so many cool stuff. Ryan Homes come standard with the minimal numbers for each of the types above so I think everyone would buy some extra as we did. They said people typically would spend from $3,500 - $8,000 for wiring and I'm glad we are at the lower end of the range. Below are the 3 phrases of the wiring process:
Today we met Mary, the design consultant at Interior Specialist to go over our flooring and tiles. The place is quite large and there are a lot of selections, but they have contracts with many other builders so there are only certain choices can be applied to the program Ryan Homes has. I recommend arriving an hour earlier and ask someone there to quickly show you what available for Ryan Homes so that you have time to take a look around. Below are some backsplash options at Level C upgrade.
Some photos of what we chose: The shower floor in the master bath will be the ugly pre-made white pan and there is no option to do better. What we really want is a tile floor that match the wall and the bathroom floor, like in the photo below. Mary said we might be able to talk to out PM to get it done for about $1,500; we just need to let her know once we get the approval because they do have the matching shower floor tiles with the gray ceramic tiles we chose. Of course, this must be done prior to the deadline for flooring changes stated in the contract. As mentioned above, we upgrade the vinyl floor in laundry and basement bath rooms to ceramic tile, and the vinyl floor in morning room and mudroom to hardwood. You can tell we don't like vinyl at all (lol). For the hardwood and carpet, we were so tempted to have hardwood floor for the entire main floor, but we decided to keep carpet in the family, dining, and living rooms at the end. To be honest, the quality of hardwood and carpet choices available isn't very good so we decided not to spend too much now and redo our floor later with much better quality hardwood/carpet.
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So we signed the purchase contract on 2/7/17 and met with Jessica from NVR Mortgage on 2/10/17 to apply for a loan. The meeting was straight forward so there isn't any thing to talk about. Below are our choices showed on the floor plan:
On to a little more exciting part, we met Teresa again today to pick up the colors for the exterior, cabinets, counter top, and the vanity top for the master bath. As you can see, I'm trying to make the design as modern/ contemporary as possible with a lot of gray. I wished they had black cabinets but the Scottsfale Maple Espresso is dark enough so it's ok. Having been married and living in an apartment for almost 5 years, I and my husband finally made the decision to buy our first house together! We have always wanted to build a new house because we love customizing our own space, so we did a little research and decided to go with Ryan Homes, mainly because of the location. They have so many models but only a few are available for certain neighborhood. You can go to their website to find out what are available in your location. There are 7 single-home models in the neighborhood we've been looking at (ranking from the smallest to the largest): Earnest Hemingway, John Steinbeck, Venice, James Michener, Milan, Rome, and Torino. The moment we walked in the Torino decorated model, we fell in love with the floor plan and space. However, after a lot of thoughts and discussions we decided that Milan would be a better fit for our needs and budget. We know that we would need to budget at least $50,000 above the stated sale price for options and upgrades. Our Sales Representative's (SR) name is Teresa. In our first meeting Teresa helped us create an estimate of the total price with options added and our monthly payment. Because it was just an estimate, there were a lot of assumptions such as interest rate, closing cost, and some fees. If we went with Ryan Homes in-house financing company - NVR Mortgage, we would get $15,000 credit for the closing cost. We also asked to get the Master Selection Sheet to have an idea of the price of each option. This list doesn't include all of the upgrades for flooring, tiles, and wiring (cable/phone/sound system/security). The Process Teresa didn't automatically tell us what to expect in the process so we had to ask and here is what I came up with:
There will be a timeline when I know exactly the dates. |