...and then there was 1

First let me begin by saying Happy Memorial Day and a special THANK YOU to all of our amazing military vets for your service!  We spent our day honoring our vets at the WWII Memorial in DC.  It was extremely hot, but well worth it!

Secondly, thank you to everyone blogging about their experiences with building with Ryan Homes.  I came across this blog site while researching  and the information here has been invaluable!!

Our journey to build our home started November of 2010.  We were going back and forth between 2 builders and honestly could not decide on which builder to go with.  We compared lots, models, options, lenders, etc and finally decided on a builder that was not Ryan, (shocking I know!)  We signed our contract in January of 2011 with a scheduled start date of Mid March and completion date of Mid July.  We were notified in March that there was now a three month delay to our start date due to energy efficiency standards.  This should have been our first clue of things to come!  Then we received a phone call from our sales rep stating that there was issue with our lot, we would either have to remove the sunroom or not have a walk up basement entrance because the city would not issue the permit.  (Neo-Traditional home, walk out would hit  about 2 feet from the garage)  So at this point, that little voice inside of was no longer whispering but screaming RUN AS FAST AS YOU CAN.  Thankfully, we were able to get out of our contract!

Now back to Ryan!  So here we are back at square one.   Originally, we were looking at the Michner II in the same community, but after this happened, we decided to take a look at another model that Ryan had called the Carol II.  We absolutely loved the layout of this home and it had every we wanted so we priced it out and it was well within our budget.  Just to be sure we were making the right decision regarding the model, we decided to check out another community that Ryan was building in.  We looked at 3 models, the Jasmine, Chantilly and the Taylor.  While all the homes were very nice in their own right, the Jasmine had a very large morning room with beautiful windows and the Chantilly had a 2 story great room that was just amazing but in the end we decided on the Taylor.  We loved the layout and it had everything we wanted in a home without having to make any concessions.  When we walked through it we just had that feeling that this was the one!  We spent the next three weeks going back and forth between the two communities going through the plus and minuses of each community, visiting each community, pricing out the homes with options and we finally settled on the Taylor!!  We are very please with our choice. 

So this where our journey begins, I look forward to sharing it with all of you!  More to come...

Below are some pic from our trip to the Memorial...Enjoy!