Tuesday, March 29, 2005 Tuesday, March 22, 2005|
Haven't written much on the house lately and yet people keep coming here with searches for Ryland homes or Ryland design center. Our house is coming along nicely, the drywall is done on the inside and the majority of the bricking is done on the outside. I believe that they are painting the inside today and then installing cabinets later this week. We had our pre-drywall meeting with our builder two weeks ago which went pretty well. I hired a private inspector to check out the house and he found several things that our builder agreed to fix. One thing that they didn't agree to do anything about was the windows, which as far as I can tell are installed wrong, according to both my inspector and the AAMA. However, after talking to the window rep (yes, I'm doing a lot of homework), I believe that Ryland will be responsible for any leaking so I'm more at ease than I was. The other items were fairly quickly fixed though I still need to get up on the roof and make sure the shingles have been repaired. One last thing to note: the siding is so poorly installed, one might think it was done by a blind man. Both the master bay window and the breakfast nook window have very crooked siding with large, visible gaps in places where there shouldn't be any gaps. We have a note in to get that fixed, we'll see what happens over the next few weeks. Overall, the experience has still been a positive one. I'm hoping we have a settlement date agreed upon sometime soon. If you are here because you're searching for information on the house building process with Ryland, feel free to drop me an email with any questions. |
Thursday, February 24, 2005|
The house continues to go up. They broke ground about two weeks ago and barring bad weather, it looks like the framing will be done this weekend. You can see pictures here from the concrete up through today, with a random squirrel thrown in for good measure. There are a ton of things left to do, both on the house and the wedding and we're really going to have to get a lot better at our time-management if we want to keep our sanity. It's really exciting though to drive out to the community and see new things about the house all the time. I originally thought that I'd only be out there once a week, on Saturdays when Kat was at her lesson. However, after 4 trips this week, I think I may have misjudged how often I'm going to want to visit. Tomorrow, we're going to do something really cool. Kat had a great idea (or stole it but who's counting) that entails buying a couple of Sharpies and writing love poems and love notes to each other on the frame. Then as the house is built in, we'll always know that we have something special with this house. Plus, like Katy says, in 50 years when they tear it down for something new, maybe someone will find some of them which would be totally cool. Assuming they have no security guard to throw us in jail, tomorrow night will be when we do that. |
Monday, February 14, 2005|
Ryland must be selling a veritable crap load of houses. Since I started writing about our experience, I see 2-3 hits a day concerning various Ryland searches. Right now, I'm number two on Google if you put in "Ryland design center" and the first link isn't a Ryland site. I think that says something, I just don't know what it is. 10:53:33 PM permalink What do you think? [] trackback [] |
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Quite a few house related activities this weekend. On Saturday, we attended the Homeowner's Information and Procedures seminar from Ryland or HIP. Mostly, like any major marketing tool, it was pretty much the opposite of hip. The two best parts were the maintenance/warranty sections and actually getting to meet some of the people involved, including our builder. The seminar in general seemed to be geared towards people who do little to zero work on their own researching what's going on. The first section dealt with the meetings you have with your builder, a really tiny section on your options and an even tinier section on financing, probably one of the biggest issues in building a house. The second half of the seminar dealt with settlment, maintenance and warranty. Overall, it seemed like CYA for Ryland (Ed. But dude, you got a TUBE OF CAULK! I know, that is exciting but I don't think bribery changes the CYA factor.) but you have to expect a fairly large chunk of that in something like this. Today, we met with our builder to go over options, details on what happens over the next 10 weeks (10 WEEKS?!? Holy crap, we'll have a house in 10 weeks!), and company policies on visiting the home site. The ground has officially been broken and we've passed plumbing inspection so the foundation could go in as early as Friday. Bozman Farms is apparently a much bigger deal than we ever imagined with a huge master-planned community, schools, parks and eventually retail and multi-family. All of this is good news to us, given that we'll be one of the very first houses built there. The experience with Ryland has been mostly positive to this point though we've hardly gotten into any of the details. I hope it continues in much the same manner. |
Monday, February 07, 2005|
The papers from Ryland Mortgage came in the mail today, preventing any real work or blogging over the last two hours as I read through them and tried to figure out if they were a good deal or not. The interest rate (6%) is not anything to write home about and I'm not sure if I'm that thrilled with it. When you throw in the cost of the Full House program, it's worth it to go with Ryland, but then you have to wonder about will interest rates go up, what are the closing costs and a million other questions I don't have time to get into right now. Suffice it to say, tomorrow night is going to have to be house and wedding night, as I have a laundry list of both things to accomplish. Not to mention that the whole "pay people for football pools" thing that I was supposed to do tonight didn't get done. Off to care for a sick fiance(insert carat here)e. |
Friday, February 04, 2005|
We have now finished up most of our requirements for getting the house building going. We have one more meeting, with the actual builder, and then we should break ground shortly and start to see some work being done. That's really all I have to say. 5:57:56 PM permalink What do you think? [] trackback [] |
Thursday, January 27, 2005|
So today was our second and final trip to the Ryland Design Center. Over all, things went rather well. Basically, for the uninitiated, you pick pretty much every thing for your new house at the design center. Things like countertops, floors, TechShields, etc. It's a fun but grueling process. Our design consultant was a lot of fun and actually made the process as easy as possible. At first, I was a little nervous (read: terrified) of how much we were putting into options but it turns out, we're pretty average. We had gone for our first meeting two weeks ago and had actually attended a preview the week before that. If you're building a house with Ryland or any other builder I suppose, I highly recommend going to preview if for no other reason than to not drive your design consultant batty. There was a couple with I'm guessing her father there today who were at their first meeting and had not attended preview. They had no idea what anything was, how things were going to go together and basically just wasted an appointment as far as I could tell. We ended up dropping about 8% more into options but I really don't feel like we went overboard. The things we got were definitely things we wanted, things that would make the house more livable and things that would help resale. Big ticket items of note:
Too many other things to really get into but overall, a good experience. We did find out some things that our sales consultant hadn't told us. Granted, we are the first people to buy in this community (Wylie), but still, I'd expect a little more knowledge from people selling me a house. First of all, our sales consultant said that arched entry ways were $125 each. Turns out, all entry ways are arched as part of the plan which includes dining entry and three family entries. That was good news. Also on the good news front, the outdoor fireplace was quoted as $2000 but came in $600 cheaper which is nice. On the flip side, we discovered that the fireplace in the family room is actually a see-thru to the gameroom so that ate up one full wall in the gameroom. Not sure how that will work out in the end but we got some kick ass tile to frame it so I'm coming around to having basically three fireplaces. We had to put down a deposit on the cabinets in our bathrooms because we chose a different color there. Apparently, most people pick one color cabinet for the whole house. Since we picked rouge in the kitchen, we weren't too interested in the bathroom ones be that dark. We also had to put down a little bit for going over our alloted option amount but it was negligible. We get all that back at closing so we can actually use it to pay closing costs. Other advice to give: make sure when you go look at bricks on other community homes that you are looking at a community with the same kind of houses. The community we went to was basically starter homes and so none of the bricks we liked were actually options for us. Also, if you go with a builder that uses Acme bricks, they have a website where you can see what the bricks look like on homes. It's not great but it's better than driving all over BFE finding homes you like the color of. That's about it on options and design centers. The mortgage people left a message today and so I'm guessing a chat with them and a chat with our builder will be the next steps. I'm hoping to break ground within 10 days or so. |
Last update: 7/29/2005; 10:51:41 PM .
