Skip to main content

Meeting with a Home Builder

Meeting with Our Builder

During the process of having our home built we met several times with our builder. These meetings served various purposes from paperwork to making decisions about different aspects of the home. 

The initial meeting focused on giving our final approval to the floor plan and how the house would be situated on the lot (we had already discussed most of this via email). We also went over the timeline for building the house and the kinds of options that we would have within the floor plan we had selected. We could choose among various flooring options, counter tops, interior paint colors, and exterior finishes and colors. But we didn't really get to see these options during this meeting. The builder did take time to answer many of our questions. Here were a few of our questions.

Q: When you pour the concrete can we have you pour additional slabs for sheds, etc?
A: Yes, we would do that towards the end at a cost of $4 per square foot.

Q: Could the excavator dig out a place for us to put in a trampoline?
A: No, too much liability with the possibility of workers falling in.

Q: Would it be crazy to have you put in a twisty slide from the second floor down?
A: No, not crazy, if you figure out where you want it we can put it in?

While we decided against the slide (for now), because it would take up too much space out of one of our rooms, we did have them pour an additional concrete slab (much cheaper than having it done later) and decided that we could take care of the trampoline ourselves.

In our next meeting we met with the interior designer to go over options for the interior parts of the house and for the exterior colors. They brought flooring samples (carpet, liquid vinyl plank), tile (for the bathrooms), and countertop options. Some of them we made selections on right away, others we wanted to take more time on.

These were our two main meetings and most of the rest of the decisions were made over the phone or email. At the meetings our real estate agent was present (and very helpful) and the builder's agent was also there. Our agent made sure that we got answers to our questions and if the builder was hesitant to do something we wanted our agent pushed things along enough to make sure we got what we wanted.

In my next post I'll describe and show photos of the modifications that we had made in order to make our home unique and to fit in the storage that we would need. 

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Toddler Bunk Beds--DIY

Build your own Bunk Beds Toddler Size! In this post I provide the measurements I used to build bunk beds to fit toddler sized mattresses and link to the plans that I modified to build these toddler bunk beds. When we were expecting our third child we lived in a small apartment at the University of Utah. The apartment was great, but the bedrooms were small, so to maximize space we wanted to have our 5 year-old and 3 year-old use a bunk bed that would accommodate the smaller toddler size mattress. We searched all over and could not find anything, not just anything affordable, but nothing at all! Turns out toddler size bunkbeds can't be sold because of some regulation or another. So we decided to build our own. This was my first real building project and other than one shop class in 7th grade I haven't done a lot of work with wood. I did enlist the help of a friend who had worked quite a bit with wood and who had a lot of the tools. We started by choosing a straight forwa...

Sugar-Free Jam with Stevia

We recently decided that we wanted to try making our own sugar-free jam and wanted to try using stevia as well. After listening to the book    The Case Against Sugar   by Gary Taubes we decided that we need to drastically reduce the amount of sugar that we eat in our home. While this hasn't been too bad for Joanna and I, it is harder for our kids. We wanted something for the kids to put on their sandwiches, pancakes and similar things and so had been buying sugar-free jams from our local grocery store. But these were expensive. We checked in speciality stores as well as online and couldn't find anything cheaper. Since we've made freezer jam in the past we thought we'd try the same with sugar-free jam. We bought a box of peaches, since they were on sale at our local Sprout's Market and about 7 boxes of pectin ( Sure Jell No Sugar Pectin, 1.75 oz (Pack of 2) ). Now a note here about the jam, it isn't actually sugar-free since there is sugar in the peaches...

Easy, Low Cost Investing with Acorns

Easy, Low Cost Investing with Acorns A few months ago I signed up for an Acorns account. At the time it seemed like a simple way to save a few extra dollars every month (money that I wouldn't have done anything with anyway), and it wouldn't feel like a sacrifice. For the most part that has been true.  How Acorns works.  When you sign up for Acorns you link one or more checking accounts to your Acorns account. Acorns then monitors the transactions in your account and rounds each of of them up to the nearest dollar. So if I spend $3.12 then Acorns records a "round up" amount of $0.88 or if I spend $198.97 then Acorns records a "round up" amount of $0.03. Once the total of my round ups gets to $5.00 Acorns withdraws that amount from my checking account and invests it in my Acorns account where it can earn money on the stock market. This process allows people to begin investing in the stock market for a very low rate (most of the time you have to start...