Building a table is hard!

We are only a little over 2 weeks away from closing!! What??!?!?! Where did the time go? Remember that I said I was going to build our kitchen table with my dad? Well, we started this weekend, and guess what .. we severely underestimated the time it would take! Haha! Oh well.

We worked on it all day Saturday and Sunday and got the top completed! This was the hardest part because you have to make sure the wood is all flush and flat, and wood is not perfect (who knew?), so all the boards were a little bowed in places. It took a lot of strength, quick drilling, and teamwork to get these boards straight and flush. I think it turned out pretty nice if you ask me!

We also got all of the wood cut for the legs of the table but haven't assembled it yet. This took a lot of cutting and prep work people!

So next steps include:

• Drilling some holes to prep the pieces
• Assembly of the legs
• Sanding everything (this is probably going to take forever)
• Stain (hopefully only 1 coat)
• Strategically sanding to give it an older look
• Polyurethane
• Attach the top and the bottom
• Done!

We also went by the house quickly this weekend to meet our fence guy. We talked to him and got things situated. We saw that they were installing carpet in the house so we didn't want to go in and get in the way!

Another change we saw is they put in the posts for the front porch (it's no longer being held up by scrawny looking wood).

She is looking pretty sexy if you ask me!

This week's Agenda:

• The deck
• Another round of grading (I think)
• Final touches and adjustments (straightening cabinets, fixing paint here and there, etc).

There's really not much else to do! It's mostly just fixing tiny things and putting final touches on stuff. Lanscaping won't be done until about a week before closing so we won't see that for awhile. So exciting! We are so excited to move, but it's coming down to the wire!

To Do List:

• Call water company
• Call trash company
• Call electric company
• Get cable/internet ready
• Pack
• Get blinds
• Get garage door opener
• Finish reupholstering the ugly couch
• Finish the table
• Finish up my Grad School classes

Ahhh! So much stuff!

Hope everything is going well for everyone else!

A Pile of Wood

We went by the house this past weekend and right now it doesn't look much different than last time, but everything done was very important.

This past week they water proofed the foundation. Pretty boring to look at but very very important. They also filled in our porch and our basement floor with concrete. This also means we passed our first two county inspections on schedule! Woo!
The most exciting thing we saw at our homesite was the giant pile of wood! Wood = Framing. This is when it starts to get exciting and look like a house! So pumped!

We also creeped in some of our neighbors yards that are mostly done. We noticed that they give us a lot of trees (unless our neighbors paid for some hefty lanscaping package). It's awesome that we get some trees, but the placement of the trees? That's a different story. They're planted in a perfectly straight line, all about 4 ft apart. It just looks unnatural to me. I know some people like lanscaping like that, but for me, I like trees to look like they naturally popped up where they are, AKA I like when nature looks natural. Hopefully, he'll let us choose where to put our trees because if not, I'll just be digging them up and moving them right after we move in.

The model in our community will also be done next week. I'm pretty curious to see what it looks like all finished so that will be cool. The sod at the model home is already dying though .. this scares me. Sod scares me. I'll probably be researching "how to keep sod alive" for hours, like a crazy person, closer to closing. If anyone has dealt with sod and has any tips I would love to hear from you! No one I know has ever had sod. All we heard is that it has to be watered non-stop, but also not too much or it will die. lol!

Our PM told us earlier last week that he would be off on Friday so we didn't get a call from him last week. I'm guessing he should be calling today on updates/schedules. My boyfriend will also be making his argument for pendant lighting or their need to commit to using Trex decking since that is what we have in writing. I'm hoping they're willing to just throw in some pendant lighting (I highly doubt they would pick using/paying for Trex, a brand name, before they would throw in some lights), but who knows. Most companies would do it no problem for customer service reasons, but Ryan Homes? Not always that easy to convince. I don't really understand their resistance to this type of customer service. If they had just said "We quoted you the wrong brand, and we really appologize. Can we throw in some extra outlets or lights to make up for our mistake?" we would be much happier and much more likely to recommend them as a builder to people we know. I guess they do fine without that word of mouth marketing, so it's not that important to them. As someone who works in marketing I find this odd, but whatever.

Anyways, here are some updated pictures!

Right

 

Left

Center

 

Basement & Pile of wood

Our Pile of Wood! AKA Our House's bones!

PAINTING

Quick question for everyone: Is anyone considering painting before their 10/12 month inspection? I know they recommend waiting a year until you paint because there will definitely be nail pops and repairs made to the wall over the first year. We were talking to family this weekend and they were just saying how much easier it is to paint before you have a bunch of stuff in the way and you're unpacked, so we were thinking maybe we should paint now and then just touch up the areas that are repaired? What are you guys planning to do?
 

Meeting with Creative Floors!

We finally had our meeting with Creative Floors. It went pretty well! The people there were really friendly and honest. They couldn't tell us directly where we were getting ripped off but they kind of hinted at where we could do things cheaper ourselves and things that we were actually getting a deal on.

One thing to note that I talked about last post is that Ryan Homes no longer offers laminate flooring! Apparently the laminate they let you choose from was pretty cheap and was squeaky and loud and they just had way to many complaints about it, so they had to get rid of it as an option. I don't know why they wouldn't offer some better laminate but maybe bump the price up a little? Who knows ..

One thing they said we definitely cannot do cheaper later is bathroom tile. Initially we weren't going to get tile in the master bath or secondary bath but they convinced us (and my boyfriend really likes the tile so the thought was already on his mind). The upgrade is around $1300 for the master bath tile, level C (Level B is barely an upgrade and Level D has prettier glass accents). It's a lot of money but it's nice tile and it goes all in our shower and covers our whole bathroom floor. Once we realized it went on the floor too we were sold. We ended up spending an additional $300ish on getting tile on the floor in the secondary bath (You can get the secondary bath to have tile on the floor and the shower but it's about $700ish and we figure we'll have a shower curtain that will cover the shower anyway- The shower walls will just have standard white tile).

 

Master Bath Tile (Upgrade C) & Cabinets (upgraded to white from oak)

 

Secondary Bath Tile & Cabinets

I've officially decided we're getting cheap vinyl in our foyer, kitchen, and morning room. I'm going to (try) to install laminate flooring myself. I'm pretty crafty and good a working with my hands (my dad taught me a lot) so I think I can do it. The flooring people told us that we can actually just install the laminate over that vinyl and the vinyl will serve as a really good moisture barrier and will absorb sound too so that's awesome! It'll kind of serve as an expensive layer of padding lol. He said it's not worth the headache of ripping the floors up because they're under all the cabinets and the island, because the floor is put in first. We also got the same vinyl in all of our bathrooms and laundry room to keep the house looking consistent.

We decided to upgrade to carpet pad A. Standard carpet pad is just awful and is only guaranteed for the life of the carpet while the upgraded carpet-pads (both A & B) are guaranteed for the life of the house (so if anything goes wrong at all with the padding they will come out and replace it). We thought about upgrading to B but after speaking with the flooring people they told us it wasn't necessary. Carpet pad B is a little thicker and has a guard for spills and things like that so if you have an old dog who has a lot of accidents or maybe your kids spill stuff a lot then it might be worth it. Neither apply to us so A was good!

As for the actual carpet we kept the standard carpet. It is REALLY cheap carpet but we were figuring we could replace that later. Well .. after doing some math and looking at prices of carpet online it looks like Ryan Homes is actually cheaper than if we were to do it on our own. Significantly cheaper once you factor in the company ripping up old carpet and then installing new carpet. I just don't know if we can want to put in another $1300+ (we would probably get Uprade C). So now I'm doubting our choice .. We've been trying to make an appointment to go back but they are SO hard to get ahold of. Kind of annoying.

*** FYI - When deciding carpet be aware that everytime you add a different carpet you get charged a $200 fee (ex. standard carpet upstairs, carpet C downstairs, Carpet B basement: This would be an extra $400 on top of the price difference of carpets). It's really stupid. They would argue that it costs them more to pull more than one carpet but it definitely does not cost them even close to that much. It's more of a "because we can" fee, but what can you do? Still good to know beforehand though.

Carpet (Standard-Darkest color offered) & Vinyl



Selections with our cabinet choice

 

So overall, I feel pretty good with my choices but I may see if we can figure out how to add in upgraded carpets. I think it would be worth it, at least for downstairs. Only bad part is that the flooring place is impossible to get ahold of. We need to make all of our FINAL decisions soon and we can't get ahold of them .. Frustrating. We may have to email our sales rep and let her know. We're supposed to meet her on Sunday for our final choices meeting but I don't feel comfortable doing that unless I can go to the flooring place again. Never a dull moment ...