Our Process Buying a New Construction Home

If you have been reading my blog for a while you know that we bought a fixer upper almost 3 years ago.  We put a lot of love into it and it was such a cool experience, but we tried to do it too fast and it honestly just wore us out.  All of our extra time and money was spent working on a project on our house.  We learned a lot and loved the experience, but we soon realized we didn't want to ever buy a fixer upper again (at least not one that we would live in).  

So after moving for Tyler's job relocation and renting a basement apartment for a year and a half we finally found a location that we loved and knew we would be in for 5-10 years.  We went the new construction route because it was the complete opposite of a fixer upper.  We apparently only go for the two extremes.

So now being a little over two weeks from our expected close date we have learned a lot from this experience.  There are pros and cons, but for us we would choose this process again in an instant.

Pro #1: For starters, when you build your own home it's yours. No one else has lived in it.  You don't have to spend the first few days deep cleaning it because it is brand spanking new.  After moving 6 times in the last 6 years that is definitely something that I will not miss.

Pro #2: You get to choose all of the colors, finishes, light fixtures, where to put the lights, where to put the outlets (that one surprised me), countertops, cabinets, etc.  Going to the design center meeting to choose everything was really overwhelming, but super fun.  Luckily Tyler and I have very similar taste.  The hard part is that you only see a small sample and it is hard to envision the final product and I was constantly second guessing my choices.  Now that we are seeing it come all together I am so happy about our choices.  We get it to look exactly how we want it to without having to do any of the work.

Pro #3: Before they drywalled our house we were able to go around and take pictures of where all the plumbing ran and where the major electrical wires are and other things that will be helpful later on if there are issues.  When you buy a home that is already built you don't have the opportunity to do that.

Pro #4: We have the entire basement to finish and we even get to create our own floorpan (mostly).  We are really excited to use our hands and creativity to make it our own space.  We actually have already planned out the whole floorpan.  It might take us a while to finish it though.  This time we plan to take our time and not overdo ourselves like we did with our last house.

So there are definitely cons that we have experienced with this new construction home.

Con #1: It is really hard to gauge the final cost of the home before you put an offer and sign the contract.  We couldn't go in and meet with the design team until a few weeks after the contract was signed.  That made Tyler and I really uneasy because we had to put a deposit down in order to reserve the lot that we wanted.  We were able to have the seller put something in the contract saying that if we weren't able to afford all the upgrades that we wanted we could back out after the design meeting without losing our earnest money.  

The approach we took at the design center was to make a list of all the MUST HAVES, a list of all the WANT TO HAVE, and then a list of IT WOULD BE NICE TO HAVE.  When we first went through the design center we combined all 3 lists and chose it all.  Then after seeing the price we chiseled down the list to fit our budget.  Luckily all of our must haves made the cut.  But man do they mark up all the upgrades.  There are a few things that were on our must have list that we didn't get but we decided to just have them put in the standard and then we will purchase it on our own for a third of the cost (like pendant lights and the chandelier in the kitchen).

Con #2: When you build a new home, you won't lock in your interest rate until it's almost complete.  That means the interest rate (and consequently your payment amount) could change from what the estimate was when you sign the contract.

Con #3: There are definitely things that go wrong in the construction process.  There were several scares for our house, but all the kinks were worked out in the end and we are loving our house.  We can't wait to move in.

Here are some progress pictures:  

Kitchen - we are waiting on the backsplash, appliances, the faucet for the sink, door handle for the pantry and the pendant lights over the island (which will be changed out anyway because they are hideous).

This is the view from the family room into the kitchen and dining room (that chandelier will be gone as well)

We chose a different countertop for the bathrooms mainly because the quartz in the kitchen was so dang pricey and we didn't need it in the bathrooms.  This is a granite countertop.

We want to tile the master bath/shower up to the ceiling but they charged more than double so we figured we would get this cheaper/easy to clean eco-stone surround and then install the tile later ourselves and save lots of money.  That way we can afford some of the more important upgrades like these beautiful kitchen countertops and all the flooring.