Looks like they poured our driveway, our front porch and the walkway.
Our lot is getting more and more sloped. Looks like we might have to put some kind of retaining wall in eventually. Maybe some dirt. Our backyard WILL BE FLAT!
I am more impressed with the view out back now that it's summer and things are nice and green.
Can't wait for them to start framing.
I hope our neighbors are nice.
Well after a stint at another blog where I was told I was far too negative to represent Omaha, I told them to pound sand and find someone else to be Omaha's cheerleader.
Which they did.
And that's that!
The house construction is progressing nicely. I've been hearing rumors about there being framing materials on-site, so I'll head on over there tomorrow and take some pictures.
My parents have decided to sell their house in California and build a house here in Omaha. They've decided on the subdivision of Manchester Park, which looks like a very nice area. I'll follow the building of that house as well.
As a way of apology for my lack of updates, let me share this with you: Indian Thriller!
Hmmm. Looks like our lot might end up having a slight slope from left down to right. That would be unfortunate. It doesn't look like a lot of slope, but I'd rather have NO slope.
Of course, there's a HUGE pile of dirt on the lot to our left and they might use that to level out both our lot and the lot to our right. We'll see.
We're not quite ready to move our stuff in yet, as you can see, they've only just put in the concrete for the basement floor.
We went to NFM last night with our Berkshire Hathaway passes and ordered two couches for the family room, a refrigerator for the kitchen, a very large and MANLY bed for the master bedroom, and a table and chair set for the "breakfast nook."
Delivery, according to NFM, needs to be within 60 days. Because the house isn't going to be finished in 60 days, we'll have to call and reschedule the deliveries.
If Jamie forgets to do this, we'll have NFM delivering all these things to a house that, at that time, might not have a roof.
Looks like we have a garage floor. They also put the dirt back in after they coated the basement walls with the moisture sealant.
The big metal thing is the bracing for our basement daylight window. My escape hatch in case things go really bad.
The biggest drawback your basement has with a daylight window is that zombies can get in - only one at a time, though, so it's managable. Plus the window is small enough to secure, or you can just secure the top of the bracing.
We had some addendums our building coordinator wanted us to sign. One had to do with the fact that we're now going to get radon testing done.
Due to Omaha's conquering of Elkhorn, our future address has changed to better reflect Omaha's numbering system; which is to say, it's not as nice.
While we were out there, we had the wonderful experience of seeing a potential buyer interacting in a calm and reasonable manner with our building coordinator.
Just kidding. This guy was a jackass.
He was upset that certain homes were walkout and others were not, and he let everyone know about it. He insisted that he was fully qualified to determine how a particular lot should be labeled and that he wanted to talk to the foreman to give him a piece of his mind. He was doing all this with his four children present. His wife was also annoyingly bitchy.
I hope they're not on my street.
Regardless, I was able to snap some pictures of the progress Hearthstone Homes had made to my lot, so here they are:
Owen adores dirt clods. It was difficult to pry him away from the huge piles of dirt sitting on our lot. He will be heartbroken when he finds out the dirt isn't going to stay.
Just how dangerous is Radon Gas?
I've been warned by a concerned party (my mom) that Nebraska has a serious problem with radon gas. This concerned party (mom, again) was sure that radon was going to kill us all unless we took steps NOW to solve the problem.
This is an artist's conception of what the radon's assault on our family would look like. Notice my short arms. Both my children have longer arms than I do. This is a weird genetic flaw that can only be explained by radon attacks.
Hearthstone Homes gave us the option to have our own inspector check the site for possible radon gas. This would have been in addition to their own inspector checking everything out. We weighed the risks and decided to let Hearthstone Homes handle the inspecting.
If there's any evidence of radon after we move in, we'll have to get a system installed to deal with that. How much those are, I have no idea.
Here's a link explaining how to build a house that deals with possible radon buildup.
I'll do my best to get out to the Hearthstone Homes house site tomorrow morning and take some pictures of the progress they're making on our new house. The basement is dug, and there are a bunch of slabs that are up against the walls of the dirt pit.
Am I using the correct technical terms? Probably not.
Will the pictures be pretty? Yes, yes they will.
Tractor was gone, so Owen didn't get to watch it push dirt around. He does so like tractors.
I believe my wife will be taking me to a Chinese Buffet for dinner in celebration of that most holy of holy days.
Signed the purchase agreement today.
$195280.
Wow.
On Friday we finished the "final selection" phase of the building process, where we cemented our option selections that would go into the purchase contract. That was fun. Since we've been in the Choice Studio about 5 or 6 times now we ran through fairly quickly, knowing exactly what we wanted.
Stuff like:
Finished basement
Trayed master bedroom ceiling
Double sinks in master and main bathrooms
42 inch kincaide maple cabinets with crown molding
Moenstone black granite sink
Black quartz island countertop
Tiled backsplash
16x9 deck
Whirlpool tub and a shower in the master bedroom
Cat5 cabling throughout the house
Garage door opener
You can really spend a lot of time picking out all these options you can't really afford. I'd estimate that my wife and I spent about...oh....9 or 10 hours wandering around in there, figuring what goes with what and how to maximize our dollar.
As many options as the Choice Studio has, there are quite a few options I wish that they'd include:
1) 3 car garage option - currently only available as a standard feature on their upper-tier homes...they should make it an option for the lower-tier homes as well
2) Jacuzzi pad/jacuzzi - how hard would it be to lay down a concrete slab adjoining the deck, hook up whatever wiring and tubing you had to hook up and offer a few spa types as an option?
3) Undercabinet lighting
4) Motion detector lighting over the garage door
5) Sprinkler system
6) Fencing
7) Maybe some different tiers of landscaping? For people who don't have a green thumb?
8) Sunroom option off the back porch instead of a patio?
It's not as if we could have afforded a lot of these options, but it'd be nice to look at them and say to ourselves, "Hey look at what we COULD have spent?"
Our house will be finished as early as September 19, 2007, if everything goes to plan and there are no problems. I'll wander on out there every week or so and take some new pictures of the site to post on here.
Especially if you have crappy friends.
I had one person show up to help me move.
Parker.
And he showed up an hour late.
"Got lost" he said, as he sipped his overpriced Caribou Coffee.
Stenneche? Thornton? Neun?
...nope.
Neun says he set his alarm for 9PM instead of 9AM. Whoops, got me there Neun!
He's a crappy sniper anyways.
Time for a Jihad jump off a cliff in a 4-person van.
Next time we play BF2, it'll be done.
I wish that there was at least one other finance company working with Hearthstone Homes that did one-time closes.
Currently with Hearthstone Homes you get a $5000 discount if you do the one-time close with their preferred lender First Horizon, where you close when you sign the purchase agreement.
The problem I have is that they have that only that one lender available to do this one-time close, which means I can't really get a competing quote for the interest rate.
I am extremely interested in the interest rate we'll be offered.
So the wife and I finally went to our appointment at Hearthstone Homes today to put money down to reserve the lot of our dreams and get the process started on building our new house.
We've been looking forward to this for several weeks now. We called Hearthstone up a few weeks ago and asked which of the larger lots coming up for sale were flat lots.
Flat lots make mowing easy.
Flat lots mean you have no walk-out basement. Walk-out basements are virtually impossible to secure against either tornadoes or zombies, two of Nebraska's most menacing natural predators.
I will not have my family vulnerable to a possible zombie attack.
The Hearthstone saleswoman pointed out a few over the phone that sounded good. One lot especially perked our ears up, as it had no premium but was a flat corner lot almost twice as wide as most other lots.
We went out to the subdivision and walked around the lots that interested us - the one lot in particular. There's lots of mud out there. They just put in curbs a few days ago.
Our lot looked nicely situated. Almost twice as wide as a regular lot, and a little bit longer. It was on the corner of a cul-de-sac, which would be a great location normally, but worried me a bit because I'd have to mow a lot more grass than I really want.
The land looked a little too...sloped to be called a flat lot though.
She noticed this aspect of the lot first, as she slipped down the muddy slope of what would possibly be our backyard into what could only be called a crevasse. With the kind of determined effort normally only seen in a heroic epic and a handy length of rope, she was freed, wiped off, and we were on our way back home.
Despite this unwarranted attack by gravity, we still felt this might be the lot for us. The saleswoman had said it was a flat lot, after all. Perhaps when the construction dudes excavated our lot, they would put the dirt that was in our basement into our backyard - making it level.
We thought, as we were walking into our appointment, that we had a lot selected.
Heidi was very nice as she crushed our dreams like so much newspaper.
Not a flat lot, she said. It's a walk-out lot.
Drat.
But she had another option, if we were interested, she said.
Hmm?
Well, there was a truly, really, honest-to-god flat lot just a little bit away from that other spirit-damping lot. It was also a large lot, it was also just one house away from a great deal of green space filled with trees and assorted foliage.
It was also discounted $5000.
I asked her if I could plant an apple tree in the green space and possibly release some ferrets.
She said nobody would know.
DEAL!
So on Friday, we will go in and make the final selections for the options for our house. We will sign the purchase agreement on Saturday. Our house should be built by September 20th of 2007.
This is the house we're going to have built. It's a Hearthstone Homes Whistler model.
Next week, Jamie and I have an appointment to wander on over to one of their subdivisions and put $500 down on a lot. We've decided that lot selection is going to be crucial, as we made a mistake buying our current home - underestimating the resale value of a nice backyard.
Ninety percent of the buyers that came through our current home said that they liked our house - especially the 1750 square feet of space - but that the backyard was too small. Hearing that over and over again while you're trying to sell your house and move on with your life is extremely disheartening. Different people have different priorities they look for when they look at houses and it was just a matter of time before someone with similar views decided what we have is what they want.
We think we've picked out a nice lot. I'll post more details about it as we get them.
We found the Whistler to be Hearthstone Homes most impressive floorplan. For us it's better than some of their top-tier Tapestry floorplans that have somewhat dated layouts, such as the Monet. Open floorplans are much more appealing to us.
Here's the main floor:
And here's the upper level:
Originally, we were thinking we'd go with the Russell floorplan, mostly because of the kitchen. A "U" shaped kitchen is more efficient and (in my humble opinion) looks better. The Whistler, however, has so many advantages over the Russell that we felt it was worth the $4000 price difference. A few advantages:
The square footage we get - 3580 square feet including the finished basement - should solve any space issues we might face in the future.
Two problems I have with the Whistler:
We've an appointment with a title company tomorrow to sign the documents that transfer the deed and so on to the buyer of our current home. We close on the 23rd. We'll be moving on March 15th to an apartment - I'll let you know how that goes.
