I took more pics of the house yesterday.

Hall Bath

Master Bed

Master Bath

That’s the last of the “construction” photos.

As you may have noticed we took a trip to IKEA. We got some bedroom furniture and kitchen pieces for Christmas:

It took us 5 hours to get those 4 pieces together, we still have these to put together:

2x

Sitting on a cold tile floor for 4 hours has left me totally wrecked. Nevermind lugging all those boxes up 2 flights of stairs.

Well it’s finally over!!!

We met the construction manager again at 9 this morning to go over the punch list from last week and to make sure it was all done. He had two of the workers there who followed us through the house doing last-minute paint touch-ups and clean-ups on the tile, etc.

We walked into the title/mortgage offices at noon and walked out at 1:30, we only spent about an hour signing papers. It pretty much was just a formality, we already had our HUD-1 so we knew what to expect. The vast majority of the paper we signed was just stuff that protected the builder and lender. They did have some typos and a couple wrong/missing figures that needed to be fixed so they re-printed those specific forms while we went through others which kept us moving along.

We then headed back to the house to walk in and just see it all by ourselves. The construction manager was in an all afternoon meeting so my wife will be meeting him at the house tomorrow to make sure his key stopped working. We did find that our keys can’t unlock the back door that goes into the garage. We can secure it fine, just can’t get into the house that way. It looks like there is something physically wrong with the lock itself. I left the guy a message and Melissa will deal with it with him tomorrow.

All in all it’s been a long day and a long 8 months.

This is the door with the messed up lock.

The pics are a little blurry, light was low and I was shooting in manual to keep the flash off.

Exactly 8 months today we signed the contract to begin construction of this home.

Tomorrow is our final walkthrough at 9AM and we settle at the Centex offices at 12PM. After we settle we’ll be going back to the house to make sure keys work and then I’ll take pictures of the completed home.

The orientation went well. The only issues we came across was mostly cosmetic stuff that we had them put on the punchdown list. We have a final walkthrough scheduled at 9AM on the morning that we’re closing. 

We’re almost there!

In a little over 2 hours we have our final inspection. It’s been a long process, 8 months, but it’s finally coming to an end.

Finally, we’re done.

Our pre-settlement inspection is a week from tomorrow. We knew a few weeks ago that our construction manager would be on vacation when our meeting was scheduled and he had a guy subbing in for him that had built the stacked townhomes in the past and who he had a lot of confidence in.

Well, today we get a call from our sales lady and our construction manager is no longer at our site, he’s been transferred to another community. I find that very wierd since this community only has a few more months left before it’s done. Maybe that’s normal, I don’t know.

Anyway, for some reason Centex decided since our regular manager is no longer here they aren’t going to bring in the guy that was originally in line to sub in for our meeting. They are bringing in another entirely different guy who has no experience with building our type of home- he has been with Centex “for a long time” but he only has experience in single-family. When I called to talk to the sales lady she said delivered her usual lines how everything will be allright and said, “well the condos should be nothing for him, they are only ~1700sqft and the single families are like 4000.” My response to her was that building a multi-family dwelling is a much more complicated process than building a single-family home. She didn’t have anything to say to that.

Anyway, there’s not anything we can do about it but I don’t really like the idea that I have a guy showing me my home who has never even seen the floorplan, much less built one.

We finally got the email with our pre-settlement buyer orientation and settlement dates. The orientation is on Nov 26th at 9AM. I had them reschedule this from the Monday since I had taken the day of the 26th off from work. Because of this change they moved our settlement date back from Dec 2nd to the 4th at noon.