Foundation Walls Up!

We visited our home site today to find that the foundation walls are complete! Things certainly happen fast. It took only a week to go from untouched land to a foundation.

It's always exciting to see progress, especially after waiting so long.

We were especially surprised and happy to see that our side-positioned stairs from the basement will have a double-wide staircase. this is so useful when trying to get oversized furniture into or out of the house. I suppose the right-hand turn required for a side garage would make it very difficult to move large items in or out of the basement if it was only a single-wide. So thank you to DR Horton for being so thoughtful!

We had asked for 3 hopper windows along the back wall and there are absolutely there - right where we wanted them. Phew!



Unfortunately, we did notice an area inside the basement where the foundation is not perfectly positioned above the footers. It looks like the footers were placed a little carelessly. We will discuss this with the construction manager at our pre-construction meeting which is scheduled for two days from now.

Our precon meeting is set up to be at the building site, which is great, since we want to discuss the footer issue mentioned above. 

We also have a few other items to discuss at the meeting. I'm trying to find the best format to manage these without being too much of a pain to the construction manager. In short, the items on our list currently are:

a. Mantle - the mantle over the fireplace is positioned very high, which causes a television positioned above it to have to be positioned quite high. The builder says they can move the mantle down 8 - 12 inches without causing fireplace heat to damage the tv, which would be great. 

 b.  Dining Table light. Laurie noticed in the model that the dining area light (in the kitchen/family room) is not positioned exactly where we'd like it. 

c. We are still undecided on black or white gutters. I still think black will look good, but Laurie is not convinced. 

d. We noticed by inspecting a similar home that our interior package has gray backsplash tiles and white grout. We'd like to request matching grout. 





Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Long ... Wait

Image
Sorry it has taken me so long to write another entry. There were a number of things that go in the way, like a graduation in California, work, and training for some physical events coming up. However, the biggest reason for going silent was that we were waiting to sell our current home.  This is the first time I've purchased a new house and planned to use proceeds from my current house to pay for it. Given the past few years of crazy real estate stories - houses selling for above asking price before they even go on the market officially, no contingencies, no home inspections, multiple cash offers, etc, we were conditioned to expect a quick sale. After all, our current home is beautiful. Surely it would sell within minutes.  Well, we were a little off in our thinking. Several factors conspired to make our home selling experience much more 'normal' than the stories we had heard. The current higher interest rate environment, the subsiding of the COVID home-buying frenzy that t
Read more

Pre-Construction (sort-of) Meeting

Image
Most builders will either require or offer to hold a pre-construction (PRE-CON) meeting before they begin construction. DR Horton apparently does not require these meetings, but they will conduct them if requested by a buyer. So we asked for a meeting. After waiting so long for a permit, the folks at DRH were chomping at the bit to start construction. They started digging the day the permit was issued. The foundation was poured within a few days and the well was dug at the same time. We happened to be out of town, so the pre-construction meeting needed to wait until we were back. That was OK with us since it gave us more to talk about when the meeting did happen. It's About Communications The reason to have a pre-construction meeting is to ensure buyer and builder are completely in sync. This is important since virtually every project has unique aspects that must be accommodated (location of drains or pipes, etc) and every buyer has certain things they want to request. Another reas
Read more

Ahhhh Radon

One thing happened during the home inspection for our existing house that will impact new home buyers, so I want to mention it.  Part of the contract was a Home Inspection Contingency that included a radon test. Radon is a radioactive gas that naturally occurs in many parts of the country, including where we live. There is no legal requirement for builders to address radon. So our current house, built in 2017 did not have a radon test prior to occupancy and had no remediation system installed. However, once we went to resell the house, virtually all home inspections include radon testing. Virtually all them, including ours, failed. This means that we, as the buyer of a new home where the builder is not required to address radon, have to address it when we go on to sell our house. Honestly, this seems like a scheme for builders to lower their costs. The cost of radon always falls on the initial owner.  Of course, if I'd have known, I'd have installed a radon mitigatio
Read more