Home Management

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 exca...

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. 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, ...