Pre-Con

Well, today was the pre-con finally. Took care of the flooring and structural wiring already.  That was relatively painless. I was surprised how short the pre-con was.  I was expecting two hours based on everyone's experience.  Took only 40 minutes and didn't have to write a single note on the back of the checklist.

Getting ready to break ground.

We found out our house will have the first of many options in the neighborhood. First Elevation N, first Wyoming Square Cherry Java, first master tray ceiling and first to get solid wood stairs!  For those of you who've spoken to the sales rep about getting wood stairs the SR is trained to tell you Ryan Homes doesn't do wood stairs.  I guess we got real lucky with Version 5 of the Rome which offers a double oven option, master suite tray ceiling and wood instead of carpeted stairs to the second level.  We are extremely happy about this change because we were planning on taking the carpet out upstairs and installing wood flooring. For those of you who don't know about the cabinets, you have to get Wyoming and higher to get real wood cabinets.  Anything lower gets you a veneer.

One thing we took into consideration was solid wood flooring vs engineered wood.  Engineered looks really nice but with having so many young kids we opted for the solid wood flooring just in case we had to refinish it.

Panoramic view of the front.  Basketball court and recreation field across the street.

A couple other changes we did which weren't widely advertised were adding a couple gas stubs on the outside of the house.  This will give us an unlimited supply of gas for our grill and the one below we might hook up to an outdoor gas fire pit someday.  We really wanted to get outlets under the eaves for Christmas lights but went way over our budget so something had to give.

Panoramic view of the rear, slop allows for walkout basement with a relatively flat yard.

Anyway, breaking ground next week with a pre-drywall meeting setup for early October and a pre-settlement meeting close to the end of November.  Now that's really fast.  We were also told by our SR that she can take pictures of the progress for us so we didn't have to make frequent trips to the site.  Pretty good customer service.  It seems like this is where customer service really kicks in, during the construction phase.  There's a survey at the end where the PMs would like straight 10s and would like the courtesy of knowing if they weren't giving level 10 support.  I think that's fair enough. Can't wait till the break ground so we can put everything on auto pilot.  Hard to believe we'll be moved in before we know it.