Week 9: Home Appraisal and Construction Progress

Hello everyone! Not much has happened over the past week on the home building process, but lots of behind the scenes handwringing!

First, the appraisal came back, and this is a topic that I wanted to touch on a little. Out of all of our documents, I was most anxious to read this particular report, because it gives me a chance to be nosy, and size up our neighbors and what they paid for their own homes. :-) When you're purchasing a new construction home, you are basically starting from scratch, and unless you want a completely beige home, you have to swallow the painful lump in your throat, and start customizing, adding, and upgrading certain features that might be cost prohibitive to add later (cabinetry, for example) or something that would be nearly impossible to replace later on (under mount kitchen sinks).  It all adds up very quickly, and we've been wondering all of this time if maybe we went overboard, or if we upgraded too much for this particular neighborhood cluster.

Appraisals can give you a pretty good idea about the value of your neighborhood, as well as the value of your own home. For example, our total home cost, with all upgrades included, is around $85k over the base price of the home. Looking at the appraisal report, our nearest comps come within $5k-$10k of our home's price. Not bad! The least expensive comp was about $78k over the base price, and the most expensive was $115k over the base price (yikes!). These are all end units in the same neighborhood built by the same developer. The Appraiser wouldn't--for example--use a Ryan's Home townhouse in an appraisal report, because those homes start off costing $70k less than a NVHome in the same neighborhood. (Not sure if this is the case everywhere, but both Ryan and NVH have shared developments in this part of MD. Ryan Homes are built right next door to ours.)

Of course it isn't an exact science, plot location, location of the actual house (end unit vs. middle unit), and structural additions all play a big role in analyzing the true cost of a new construction home, but you can still get a very good idea of what kind of competition you'll be up against if you decide to sell your house five, ten years down the line.

So, with a few exceptions, we've all pretty much paid the same price for our homes and have similar upgrades, and we no longer have to worry about having the most expensive house in the neighborhood. Not by a long shot. :-)

This being the most productive week yet, we've also locked in our rate, received our settlement letter, and enrolled our son in school, using the said settlement letter since we're not in the area yet. We're getting a lot done, so yay us!

On the house building side, it took more than a few days, a few email, and multiple hastily drawn up revised contracts but we finally got the flooring situation and pricing situated.
Today, we drove out to the house just to check up on the progress, excited to see some flooring installed, only to get there and discover that .... surprise surprise, the newly drawn up work order was ignored, and the installers put in the same flooring combination (tile here, wood there, tile here again) in!

And our Project Manager is taking some time off right now due to circumstances beyond his control, so I marched right over to the sales office and spoke to our Sales Rep. She was very understanding about everything, and not at all surprised or put out in any way. Her response? "They will fix it."
Heeeey! Good enough for me.

Some other updates:

• Deck is fully completed now. It looks wonderful and much bigger than I expected. 
• Siding is complete.
• Light fixtures, plumbing fixtures, and sprinklers are all installed. 

Driveway is coming together, deck is fully completed!

Appliances have been delivered, but not yet installed:

Tile flooring has been installed now in all bathrooms:

And our master bath shower has been tiled! Oh yeees, it already looks so fancy and luxurious! I LIVE!

The floor of the shower! I think this is my favorite part of the entire bathroom, I just LOVE the way the tile looks here!

This upcoming weekend, they will finish the flooring, install the appliances, and start working on the finishing touches of the house, painting, etc. Our settlement date is September 18, which I'm just going to pretend is exactly one month from now! Eeek! And yay!