My First Post!

Hello there, and welcome to my blog! I'm mainly using this to document my experience with building my first new home.  I've noticed that many other people have blogged about building their home, and since those blogs have been extremely informative for me I've decided to "pay it forward" by making one of my own.

I am located in the Buffalo/WNY area and we are building a Ryan home, using the Savoy model.  The floor plan for the home can be found here.  I have an amazing wife of 6+ years and two little girls that are aged 3 and 1.  Overall I'm excited about this but I'm also cautiously optimistic.  Unfortunately I'm a pessimistic/realistic type person, so I really needed to go into this process knowing that there's going to be problems along the way, whether it's before, during, and after the building process.  In the end I hope that my experience can help someone else out there who may be thinking about building a Ryan home.

So to start off, I'm currently in the early honeymoon phase of the process: At this point all we've done is sign the purchase agreement and I've met with the NVR Mortgage LO.  Both the SR and LO have been very nice so far, which is definitely a good thing!  At this point we are waiting for the call from the Design Center in West Seneca so we can go and select our flooring options.  My wife is starting to get antsy about this already!

As you may know, you can build a Ryan home with everything at it's base price, but I'd bet that almost never happens :-).  So far we've asked for the following upgrades:

 - Morning Room
 - Kitchen Island
 - Natural Gas Range
 - Stainless Steel Appliances
 - 2' Extension in Family Room
 - Natural Gas Fireplace
 - 9' Ceilings
 - Wood bannister for staircase
 - Recessed Lights in Family Room, Morning Room
 - Ceiling lights in all 4 bedrooms
 - Laundry tub in first floor laundry
 - Ceramic tile (level B I think?) in both bathrooms downstairs

The 9' ceilings gave us upgraded, taller kitchen cabinets for free which is nice.  Though I suspect they have to since the smaller cabinets would create a huge gap to the ceiling which probably looks awkward.  We didn't upgrade the elevation, but my wife wants to upgrade the frame on the front door which we were told shouldn't cost too much. 

The reason why we've decided to build this model was because of the recent change Ryan made to the Savoy model.  In the previous version, the garage was right next to the house and you walked directly into the garage from the kitchen.  They changed the plan where they moved the garage forward closer to the street, which makes room for a huge walk-in pantry, mud room and first floor laundry behind the garage.  Instead of the door by the kitchen there is a walkway to the pantry/mudroom/laundry area.  All of this comes standard!  If you haven't looked, check out the floor plan that I linked to above.  To be honest, there was a few already built houses that were similar to the Savoy, but they didn't have that extra room behind the garage.  If Ryan was still building the Savoy like that, we probably would've bought an existing house and not built brand new. 

OK, I think that's enough for now.  Our next steps are to pick out our flooring, wait for approval from NVR (that should be interesting) and hopefully start breaking ground soon!