Selections, Lots of Photos, and NVR

Still trying to catch up with everything that has happened since beginning this whole thing. The day we signed our Purchase Agreement, lucky Friday, July 13, our SR took us to walk the lot. We’re one of the last houses being built on the street, so there was a wide variety of in-progress houses. As expected, the majority of the houses on the street are also two-story. I don’t know if this is good or bad regarding sun exposure to the structure.

Anyway, here's two photos of our lot.

After that and deciding on our final upgrades, Chris and I were able to make our interior design choices. Unlike many of the building blogs I have read, we were not told to go to a design center to pull our own selections together. Instead, the model home has a room dedicated to a display of pre-selected options. You can no longer only upgrade a single item of the package, the flooring for example. You must choose to upgrade the entire package. Here are the options:

Top L-R: Soho I, Sierra I, Soho V, Sierra V
Bottom L-R: Sierra III, Soho III, Barrington III, Saint-Pierre III

We chose to stick with the design packages included with the house for no additional upgrade fee. Those options are Soho I and Sierra I. The only difference is the color of cabinets and maybe the counters, but I can’t really tell/remember. We opted for the darker cabinets in the Soho I design package.

Here’s a closer look at the pieces with labels and locations:

The only pieces missing here are the cultured marble white for bathroom countertops and 6x6 white tile with white grout that will be in our roman shower. Yes, the tile and grout will probably be a cleaning nightmare.

Just under a week after making the above selection, Chris and I returned to the model home to make our exterior selections and meet with our Loan Officer (LO). The exterior options are not pre-packaged designs like the interior options. Instead, you look at the siding color options, stone or brick options depending on elevation, shutters, and door colors. I believe the only option for gutters and downspouts was white; they may have offered tan, but we stuck with white.

Our elevation has about 2 ft of stone on the front of the house at the bottom. Here were our choices:

Top L-R: Russet Terra Cut, Slate Terra Cut, Summit Terra Cut
Bottom L-R: Whisperwood Dry Stack, Osage Ledgestone, Saginaw Ledgestone

Truthfully, I can only see a minor difference in the options. Two are more grey than brown. Of course, Ryan Homes has a policy that you cannot choose the same exterior options that were selected by neighbors two houses in each direction. Because of this policy, we couldn’t select the two grey-er stone options. Ryan Homes also has purchasers sign a paper stating that with natural materials (stone, brick, granite, etc) variations may occur and the items actually used on the house may look different from the samples provided. We ended up going with the least brown stones in our opinion. Here are our exterior choices:

Stone: Osage Ledgestone

Siding: Flint

Board and Batten: Flint

Trim: Dove White

Shutters: Black

Door: Marooned

The picture was taken with the help of our SR. Chris really wanted a red door, but the red-red option was way too bright for my tastes. I was leaning more toward a black or dark-purple (raisin) door, so we compromised on maroon.

The last area for possible selections is with Guardian Home Technologies. They provide optional features such as interactive security, home automation, smart connections, home entertainment, and convenience. This actually translates to products and services such as security and monitoring, home theaters, audio, intercoms, central vacuums, etc. They are also the ones who we work with to determine coax and Ethernet locations.

As many others have shared, the salespeople often give these long detailed presentations providing information on their stuff while not providing pricing until the end when they give you a total for everything. We were not able to meet with our Guardian Rep (Chris) in person due to schedules not aligning, so we had a phone conference. Our Rep was pretty straightforward, but the majority of what they offer is for convenience. Chris and I stuck to the basics. We chose the locations for our Ethernet and coax and signed off on it a few days later.

Last, Chris and I met with our NVR Loan Officer (LO), Chris (are all the “Chris-es” getting confusing, because they did for me). Ryan Homes has a parent company, NVR, Inc. who also owns NVHomes, Heartland Homes, NVR Mortgage, and NVR Settlement Services. It’s a large company. Because they have all of these resources, they offer incentives to apply for a mortgage with NVR. In our case, they offered us $4000 off closing costs. After doing some quick calculations, we determined NVRs closing costs is about $2000 more than other institutions, but with the incentive, we will end up saving about $2000. We decided to proceed with them and applied. About a few weeks, we received our initial approval.

Now, if you’ve read other blogs about building with Ryan Homes, some people have good interactions with NVR, some have awful experiences. I have to say, and I hope I’m not jinxing it, our interactions have been great. Our LO has been accommodating during our initial meeting and application and several phone calls since. He always takes time to explain things clearly while providing real-world examples. Our Loan Processor, Nicole, is just as wonderful. She and I are in constant communication to provide documents as needed to make sure we’re good to close whenever that happens. Nicole has thanked me numerous times for being on top of everything and being easy to work with. I can only imagine some of the angry people they deal with on a daily basis.

Conclusions have never been a strong skill for me. So I’ll end this entry with the promise of more updates soon. Chris and I have our Pre-Construction meeting the afternoon of the 7^th, so we’ll find out a bunch more about our house and the process.

Cheers.