Everything House: The Plans

I'm going back a couple of weeks to start posting about what has happened with our house plans since putting the approach in back in August.

For the past I don't know how many years, twice a year (Spring & Fall), we go and take a look at houses on the Parade of Homes. Not really knowing what we wanted to live in for the rest of our lives, we figured that taking a look at some homes would help us decide what we liked and what we didn't like. After going through quite a few houses, we ended up finding a house that we both fell in love with as soon as we walked in. If you ask me now just where it was, I would have no idea. Ryan likes to think that he knows, but I don't think he really does. Anyway, the house was 2600 sq. ft. which we knew was WAY too big for us. We grabbed the plan from the showhome (http://www.ashomes.ca/uploaded/pdf/Sunbury.pdf), and took it home with us and started fiddling around with it. We went back with Ryan's mom and my parents just to show them and to find out what they thought. We also tried to talk to the guy that was showing the home, and he was pretty useless. Ryan was asking him all these questions and it was like he didn't think that we were seriously looking at the house, and didn't want to waste his time with us. We knew that we wouldn't go with the company that built that particular house, but we had called to talk to them about it anyways. We had called the builder but they wouldn't meet with us because they said that we had to go through the real estate guy to get any information. Ryan told them that we didn't want to buy that house, but that we wanted to talk to them about the plans of that particular house. They still told us that we had to go to the realtor. Forget it.

So we kept the plans that we had picked up from the house and tweeked them a bit and knocked off a little over 600 sq. ft. and got it down to just under 2000 sq. ft. Now all we had to do was find a builder. Ryan had talked about wanting to do the build ourselves and be the general contractors, but we decided that neither of us had the time to run around and get all the contractors for the various jobs. With both of us working full-time and Ryan working lots of extra time after work, it wouldn't have worked out for us.

We had decided to take the plans to three different builders. One was a Project Management company, and the other three were builders. We had heard nothing but great things about Lyle Foster and the homes that he builds. Ryan's cousin and his wife had their house built by him, as well as the parents of a guy that we went to highschool with. They had no complaints at all. We decided that we would go with Lyle after getting his quote. The other places that we took the plans to either didn't call back, or were ridiculously expensive. Lyle took our plans and drew them properly (apparently we didn't have ours in any type of scale that made sense). After a few back and forths making changes to the plans, we now have our plans complete, mortgage approved, and we're just waiting for things to start!