Tuesday, March 22, 2011

Building A Florence

I decided to start a blog after reading through the many blogs I have found since me and my fiancée began our journey with Ryan Homes. We currently live in a two bedroom apartment and are sick of apartment living. We will be getting married this June as well, so it is a very busy time for us to be planning our wedding and building a house.

We looked at pre-built homes and while searching around we stumbled upon a Ryan Homes development going up around our neighborhood of choice. We visited the model and liked what we saw, but we did have some reservations at first because of all of the bad reviews we saw online. Going through them, it was hard to tell if many of the issues were really Ryan Home's fault or not. This is when I stumbled upon all of the blogs and got to see firsthand how real people were doing building with Ryan. I saw almost all positive things and this is when we decided to go into this journey further.

We have decided upon a Florence model with elevation B. Here are many of the upgrades we have chosen:
- Morning room, with extra windows
- Fireplace
- A/C
- 42" Maple Spice cabinets
- Gourmet Island
- Upgraded the carpet pad to the second level
- Added the extra window in the master bedroom
- Added a lot of fan outlets/ light outlets throughout the house
- Upgraded the sink to be deeper (I forget how deep)
- Concrete driveway (instead of the standard tar)
- Only one sink in the master bath, but we added a cabinet on the empty side of the vanity
- Upgraded the cabinets in both bathrooms to Maple Spice

I think that is all we chose to upgrade. I am probably forgetting something though!

We have already signed our contract and went to the selection center to pick all of our flooring/carpet/etc. We are doing everything standard throughout the house. We have a feeling we will be updating the carpet on the first floor to hardwood in a few years.

We applied for the mortgage about a month ago, but have not heard yet if we are approved. Our rep and sales rep both are very confident that we will be approved. It is so hard though waiting to hear back from them!

We have our pre-construction meeting schedule for April 11, and our sales rep thinks they will begin building that week as well. He also gave us a tentative closing time for the house, which is the end of June. I have a feeling these dates may be pushed back if we don't hear back about the mortgage soon.

Here are some pictures of the selections we have made:

Bathroom Flooring throughout the house


Carpet (top right) we picked for the entire house


Kitchen floor


Kitchen counter-top

1 comment:

  1. How is everything since March with the house? My husband and I are on the "verge" of pulling the trigger with a Florence Model in NJ. Any feedback would be nice to hear.

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