Archive for November, 2006

Moved In!

// November 29th, 2006 // No Comments » // Life

We moved into our new house on 11/21 and it looks awesome! We still have a few contractors coming and going fixing a few things, mostly electrical stuff. It’s been a long process but we’re finally in. It’ll be nice to have our first Christmas there in a few weeks.

All said I can’t say at this point whether I’d build again, or recommend it to others. It’s probably too fresh on my mind and has been a huge emotional strain this last year. We also had the unique experience of having friends build for us, which I’d say in our case worked mostly to our benefit. But we’re glad to have the “builder relationship” put to rest so we can resume being just friends again.

I will make a couple of observations though.

  1. New houses aren’t perfect. They come with their own dents, dings, oversights, and idiosyncrasies.
  2. Mixing friendship with business can work out, with lots of patience and understanding on both sides.
  3. EVERYTHING can be fixed. So just because there is a huge hole in a wall 2 days before you move in, doesn’t mean you’ll ever know it was there on move-in day, so relax.
  4. For some reason the frame inspection occurs well-after the frame is actually constructed. In fact I’m not sure how you would correct frame problems at the stage the frame inspection occurs. Fortunately we passed ours on the first try.
  5. Our bank (Capital One) was amazingly flexible in just about every way and I highly recommend them.
  6. We built for $86/ft in an area were new houses are selling for $115/ft+. WooHoo!

In all I probably worried and micromanaged way too much, as I’m prone to do. In a handful of cases, it paid off, sometimes in a big way, that we pointed out what hadn’t otherwise been seen by the contractors or builder. But in most cases, they already knew about the issue and were handling it.

We’re glad to have the construction process behind us and be moved in. We’ve felt somehow part of our life was on hold this past year and now we can let go of that feeling and turn our attention to other important things.