4/27/15 Our options, choice, and NVR…. (The Good the bad, and the paperwork?)

  So we didn't go crazy with options but we chose to add the morning room, garage floor drain, upgraded the front of the home to stone did rough ins for fans, a fireplace with the slate, and kept the floor plan with the 3 bedroom plus loft (Florence).

We went with elevation C (colors not chosen yet below is just example and due to our street its flipped).

We met with Jon at NVR, nice guy I will say and brought the majority of the papers requested by Ryan and NVR. We are looking to go the conventional route at this point but it seems you must keep everything on the table. After meeting with Jon heres what I'll say he has a job and I get it but holy crap boring, and generally feel like we suck at life choices…. So to put it simply since we are having a child in June and she wasn't planning to return to work until September we won't have 30 days of pay stubs and we are not going to have to wait on word of how we can work this out. We could still go fha loan wise however not really wanting to do that. Soooooo make sure you work at least a month ahead of your closing or at least plan that way (gosh that sounds odd).

TIP for NVR, if you have recently moved funds due to closing out bank accounts or what not, make sure you have a paper trail or work on it now to make the process overall easier for you. They want copies of all larger deposits (over 1000 I think) so they can verify your money? Thats just a way to make your life easier also bring your SS card too!

4/22/2015 So we bought a house? Oh yea and who we are!

After many weeks of asking more questions than I ever thought we could we decided to go ahead with buying our first house. Also let me say that the sales group at our particular site are really great (Jace and Nikki at Timber Ridge). I read a lot on Ryan homes and asked around as a whole I have seen both bad and good. I hope this will be helpful to others in the future as we document our journey to home ownership!

Also just a quick who we are, we are both from the Cleveland Ohio area, recently married in September of 2014 and expecting a little girl this spring. I am a full time firefighter and my wife is a nurse both in the Cleveland area now, in February of 2015 we moved back from Myrtle Beach where we had lived for 5 years, we had a great time and learned lots but ultimately family became most important with the soon addition of our daughter.

Picture from our wedding 2014

We started out looking for homes in the resale market for about a month or two and didn't see anything in particular that we loved so we looked into building. I will say this about building I think its a kind of you get what you pay for situation. In my opinion from what I have seen most builders in the 200k price range are comparable in construction, just methods vary. The examples I saw were K Hovnian, Ryan Homes, Drees, and Pulte (I will say Pulte was a little scary to me….) With that all being said we went with Timber Ridge due to its location (highways, family near by, near Olmsted Twp/Falls), size of the overall development (250 homes), wooded homesite, and I'd say project manager was helpful too.

Delivering September 2015!