We are building a new home!!!
I have been wanting to move for a couple years now. We have lived in our current house for almost 13 years and have made a lot of changes to it. We completely remodeled it after we bought it and before we moved into it. We gutted the kitchen, tore out walls, re-ran all the plumbing and electrical, added a bathroom upstairs, and made a master suite. Over the years we have also finished the basement, added another closet in the master and added a pantry next to the kitchen. We turned it into the best house we could and made it work for our family. The only thing we couldn't change was the dinning room. There isn't one. Our kitchen table is in our kitchen and there's no other place to put it. We keep the table pushed up against the wall and when it's time to eat, we pull it out and add chairs as needed for the amount of kids we have. Since there are 8 people in our family, there's just not enough space anymore. Anthon has been saying that we could add onto the back of the house and make a dinning room, but it's time for a big change. It's time to move. We have been very happy in our house and neighborhood and ward all these years, but it's time for us to move.
I have been looking at houses online and in person for about a year, but Anthon was not ready to commit to a move until last March. That was when we got serious. The market has been really crazy over the past 2 years and everything has been going up in price. At the beginning of the year we had talked about waiting until the market cooled off a little bit, but after a few months we realized now was the right time for us, despite what the market was doing. We started out looking at existing homes, but realized we wouldn't be able to find exactly what we wanted unless we built from scratch. Our current house was built in 1906 so we also just wanted something new instead of an over 100 year old home.
We drove by many new build areas. I looked in a lot of model homes. We wanted to stay close to our office because Anthon works a lot and I work there 3 days a week. My mom watches Sophie in the mornings on Monday, Wednesday and Friday and brings her to preschool on those afternoons so we wanted to stay near her too. We realized our best option was Vineyard. It is a newer city that has apparently become the fastest growing city in the U.S. In 2010 there were only 139 residents. In 2017 there were over 6,000 and by 2018 there were over 10,000. Big builders bought up a bunch of the land in 2016 and have been cranking out houses ever since.
We currently live on a half acre so the only thing we didn't like about Vineyard was the fact that most of the lots there are very, very small. Like .13 acres is a pretty typical size. We found a neighborhood that had .20 acre lots so we started looking into them. They had a house plan that we liked and would work well for our family. Even though we have a kid on a mission and the other 2 older kids are not far away from that, our family will only get a little smaller temporarily. Once the older 3 graduate, go on missions, and start to college, marriage may not be too far off and at that point our family starts to get bigger. If we are going to move, we want to move to a place that will work for us for a long time so we are planning ahead to what our family will look like in the future. (There was a time while we were looking that I thought about getting a home that was about the same size as we have now and then plan on only staying there for a few years, but rather than moving twice, we figured getting a bigger house that will last us for a long time would be better.)
We found a house and a lot that we liked with that builder, but it wasn't everything we wanted. It was good, but not great. I was really unsure about what we should do. We wanted to make a decision fast because we knew it would take a while to build it, but we just weren't sure. It was general conference weekend that week and I decided to focus my prayers on asking the Lord to help us know if we should build with that builder or not. After listen to all of conference that weekend, but Monday I still wasn't sure. While I was driving on the freeway that day, I saw a billboard that said, "Their upgrades are our standards. -Flagship" I knew this was a builder in Vineyard that I hadn't looked into yet. One of the crappy things about building new is that you don't really know what the price of the house will be until you have already committed to buy it. The builders usually "include" really cheap features and then charge you to upgrade to nice features. This is one thing that Anthon and I really didn't like about the game of building a home. So when I saw that billboard, I decided I should check them out.
On Tuesday I drove to the Flagship development that had 6 model homes. I went into the first one and talked to an agent that was inside. I told her what we were looking for and she told me to walk through the last 2 model homes. So I did. They were beautiful and big and perfect. I went back to her and she showed me a map of the lots they have available. They had 1/3 to 1/2 acre lots!!! I texted Anthon and said, "I found our house." He called me a little while later and I told him about what I found. That night we drove around the neighborhood together and we made an appointment to meet with the realtor again on Thursday. On Thursday we walked through the models together. We decided the largest one was what would be best for us. It was a hard decision because it is a large home, but we wanted to be able to have a future basement apartment and the largest home was the only one that would fit a basement apartment and still have enough room left in the basement for us to have a theater room, game room, guest bedroom and bathroom. It also was the only floor plan that had the master bedroom on the main floor (and wasn't a rambler) and we definitely wanted to have our master bedroom separate from the kids area. The floor plan was perfect for our family. I originally was thinking of building on an almost 1/2 acre lot in their neighborhood across the street, but Anthon saw that the neighborhood the models were in was right next to a huge splash pad, park, soccer field, tennis courts, basketball courts and there was a cul-de-sac that had all the lots available. It didn't get more perfect than that. Now we just needed to find out what it was going to cost us.
We had to sit down with their realtor and choose everything that had to do with the structure of the home. We told her what changes we wanted to make to the floor plan, added lights, made the kitchen island bigger, chose the heights of the ceilings, added double sinks to two of the bathrooms, added an extra shower head in the master shower, etc. First we added everything we would possibly want. Then, when she showed us the price, we started taking away things that we could live without. We found a balance of things we felt we needed and a price we could afford. (We would still have to do to the design center to pick flooring, colors, cabinets, etc. so we knew an unknown amount of money was still to come.) We thought we were just there to get a price and then we would go home and think about it, but instead the realtor wrote it all up, turned it into an offer, we signed it and then she took this picture and said, "Congratulations! You just bought a home!"
We are smiling in the picture, but inside we were pretty confused. We still didn't have an actual price of what the home would cost and we didn't realize when we woke up that morning we would be "buying a home." After we left and had time to think about it, we realized more and more that that was the home and location we wanted. We still had to wait to hear back from the builder if our offer would be accepted or if we would be ok with a counter offer they would make.
On Friday, they countered. On Saturday, we accepted their counter. It was official. We were excited.
A big thing that matter a lot to us was whether we would be able to do our own HVAC or not. The other builders that we talked to all said no. At first, the agent that we were dealing with on this house told us they don't let anyone do any of their own work, but then she said we could talk to the CEO and ask him. The Monday after we signed, Anthon went to meet with him, ready to give him a big speech about the quality of work we do, the experience we have in new construction, etc. but when Anthon met with him and he saw Anthon's shirt with our logo on it he said, "Oh yeah, I've seen your trucks driving around. Yeah, you can do your own HVAC." It was that easy and we knew right then that our house just went from awesome to amazing.
We had picked all of our structural choices and changes before we made the offer, which included moving a wall to create more space in the master closet, 9 foot ceilings in the basement, a basement entrance for the future basement apartment, re-configuring the basement bearing walls for the future apartment, opening up a basement wall for a future game room, vaulting the loft area, adding double sinks to the master and upstairs bathroom, adding a wall to separate the kids' bathroom sink from the toilet/tub area, extending the length of the kitchen island, adding doors to the front office room, and adding a second shower head to the master shower. (We quickly realized that their sign about upgrades being their standards really only applied to a couple of things, but they made up the difference by making some things that you would think would be standard, an upgrade.) We had to make an appointment to go to the design center to pick everything else for the house within 21 days of signing. This was the most stressful thing for me. I wanted to go to the Parade of Homes before having to pick everything to get ideas, but that was about 3 weeks later than my deadline. I had them give me a list of every single option and I read through that many, many times so that I was familiar with all the options and prices. We spent 2 hours with the designer seeing everything and making choices, but when our appointment time was up, we still weren't done. She said we could make one more appointment, so we did. After that appointment, everything was set in stone and could not be changed. One of the more frustrating things about this builder is that if you want anything that is not one of the included options, then it's a "custom" option and you have to pay $250 just to get a quote on what it would cost to have that. After you get a quote, you either say yes or no to the quote and either way, your $250 is gone and there's no more questions you can ask. The only thing we did "custom" was extending our island. Since the kitchen is set up in a way that the sink has to be in the island, I wanted to make sure we had enough space on the other side of the sink for the kids to sit and eat at.
Anthon and I had to create a floor plan for the basement that would accommodate a basement apartment so that it could be built initially with the bearing walls in the right places. They didn't have a plan for that, so we use a software that we have for HVAC to draw it all out to scale. The builder submitted it to the architect, he made a few minor tweaks and then it was ready to submit to the city.
We signed papers to buy our house on April 12, we went to the design center on April 26 and May 1st, we signed final approval papers on May 15. After that I was told the plans would be submitted to the city and they would be able to start in about 3 weeks. So we waited...and waited....and waited. I kept checking on it and they would tell me, "The plans will be submitted tomorrow, so check back in 3 weeks." So 3 weeks later I checked back and the told me the plans were even submitted yet, but they will be tomorrow, so check back in 3 weeks. So I did, and they said the plans STILL hadn't been submitted! They didn't submit that plans until July 8th. Meanwhile, I would drive by the lot every couple days and just look longingly at the dirt, hoping there would be a hole there someday.
That day finally came on July 23rd. The guy digging the hole probably thought I was a little weird for being so excited about a hole. I yelled to him, "Thanks for digging our hole!!" On August 5th they poured the footings and things have been progressing nicely since then.
And here's the back:
Since we were able to do our own HVAC we put in the best of the best. One of the cool things Anthon did in the basement was underground duct work for the future basement apartment. This will make it so the vents are in the floor and there isn't any duct work dropping the ceiling in the basement. I didn't know what underground duct looked like until they put it in.
We are only about 3-4 weeks away from being able to close so a lot of fun things are happening on the inside now. I'll post about that later. We are so excited about our new house!!
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