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Buying a New Home

Buying our First Home (New Build!)

Before we bought a new home from a builder, we had many questions about the process and had a hard time finding good information about the process. In an attempt to answer some of those questions this will be the first of several posts about our experience buying a home.

building a home

Our main reasons for having a home built (rather than buying an existing home) were to get the type and size of home we needed for a price that we could afford. We hadn't planned at all to build a home at this point in our lives, but it turned out that financially it was the best option for us.

Our Criteria

These were our criteria 1) location, we knew what school we wanted our kids to go to and wanted to live in that neighborhood, 2) size, we have four children and wanted to make sure that we had enough room (including the yard) for us to be comfortable, 3) price, we are a single-income family and wanted to make sure we were comfortable with the mortgage, and 4) light, our family is happier in an open well lit home, with lots of natural light.

We planned to buy an existing home with these criteria, but when we looked we couldn't find one, but in that process we toured a home that we really liked, that was a bit out of our price range. So we contacted the builder to see if they could do something similar, but within our budget. They agreed and so our process started.

My Questions

I'll talk about that process in later posts, but first these are some of the questions I had going in:
1) How does the land get purchased? Do we have to start making payments on the land during construction?
2) When do our mortgage payments start?
3) Will the house be done in time? (I was starting a new job and we needed to move)

1) At least in our case, the builder purchased the land from the seller after getting our ok on the lot and the price. The builder included the land purchase price in the final cost of the house, so we did not make any payments on the land during construction.  2) Again in our case no payments started until we were able to take possession of the house. 3) Our builder gave us his build timeline and he met it. He promised us between 3 and 4 months and finished in about 3 and a half. This was partially because we used a floor plan that the builder already had, rather than using a completely custom plan. It was just in time for me to start my new job and for the kids to start school.


In future posts I'll explain our meetings with the buyer, how we customized our home, organizing our garage and closets, creating an indoor play space, repairs after moving in, and putting in our yard.
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