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.

Wife just called me, our buying agent called to check in since she hadn’t heard from us in a while. I guess she had called down to the sales office and talked to our sales lady and our granite has been installed.

One thing we found out when we spoke with the construction manager yesterday is that this weekend will be the last time we can get into the house before our pre-settlement orientation which is tentatively scheduled for the end of November. The appliances might be in this week but the only things left to do are install them (if they aren’t done already), put all the plumbing fixtures in, the carpeting and paint/clean up. He locks the houses down once the appliances are in so nothing gets stolen. The sales lady had let us into completed homes that were beyond this point but she only has 1 more unit in the entire neighborhood to sell and she’s expecting it to be gone by next week so she will be moved to another development.

The pre-settlement orientation is when we spend 3+ hours going through the entire house with the construction manager and he explains how everything works, that kind of stuff. We also found out that we are having this meeting while he is gone on vacation for a week at Thanksgiving…so we are having it with someone else. He had warned us back at pre-drywall that this may happen so it wasn’t a complete shock but still I was less then thrilled. They wouldn’t reschedule us since this other guy, who he swears up and down is great, has been with centex longer than he has and has experience with the types of homes we are in. Still, I’d much prefer for it to be our guy who actually did the building.

Anyway, that’s it for now. The next update will probably be the last for 3-4 weeks.

Did our Sunday ritual at the house this past weekend and there wasn’t anything to update. I did schedule our pre-drywall inspections for Thursday so I should have something to post about then.

Tomorrow morning we are meeting with our loan guy to sign off on our mortgage.  We are still about 4 months from completion of the house but we have to have our mortgage approved and in by the October 1st deadline to ensure that we get all the money that Centex has promised us.  Come October it will be illegal for Centex to give more than $7500 in buyer incentives - which would completely screw us.  So, our mortgage guy is making sure that our paper work is all in by the Sept 15th to ensure that we’re taken care of.

Wish us luck!

Flickr hasn’t really been fufilling my needs, I have a free account which is limited to only 100MB of uploads a month. I have only 20MB of upload remaining this month and Sunday alone I took 100MB of pictures and I really wanted to upload them all. My options were to spend $25 for a pro account which is good for one year and removes all account limitations or just suck it up and host my own gallery. So, I installed gallery here on my hosting space. A link is also on the right. Since I have a ton of space with my webhost that I rarely ever use I have been able to upload some pictures that I couldn’t previously due to the constraints of the flickr account.

Here are the appliances that we picked out for our kitchen. We upgraded the refrigerator and the stove, the dishwasher and microhood were perfectly fine. We saved over $1200 by going with black-on-black instead of stainless steel, and to be honest I feel that SS is getting really played out and it can be a real pain to keep clean.

I just got an email from our saleswoman and she sold the last unit needed to begin construction.  They should be breaking ground in 2/3 weeks.  The permits have already been approved and they just have to pick them up from the county.

Here we go!

We heard from the sales woman at our property and tonight she sold another unit in our building.  That leaves only one more before they start and she has another appointment tomorrow so, fingers crossed.

Twelve days ago my wife and I signed a contract to build a new house. This will be our first house and after living in an apartment for the past 6 years we can’t wait to get the hell out.