Finishing up!

The last two weeks of the process is the slowest. You visit your house almost daily and it looks just about move-in ready! You bug your builder daily asking if you can get in there and if not, when? Why?! This is where if you are an impatient person you need to just distract yourself with packing or whatever you can find to keep your builder from placing a restraining order on you!

During these last couple of weeks final touches are done to the house (touch up paint, minor adjustments, etc). There are also a handful of inspections for electrical, plumbing, etc. If something does pass (which didn't happen for us thankfully), then the problem must be addressed. Then the final inspection happens and the builder hands you the keys. Since this was a custom home building process and a construction loan was in place, there is no closing paperwork to do and the builder literally hands you the keys and says congratulations! You already closed at the beginning of the construction loan.

There is nothing quite like being handed the keys to your own custom built home. The past 4-5 months were long, but you got the house you wanted. You didn't settle for a market house that had "most of the things you wanted." You didn't have to settle for a predetermined floorplan offered by a "big builder." You designed this thing from the ground up just the way you wanted it. You just made a sound investment in a custom product that will have a very nice resale value when and if you decide to move.

Next step is either hiring a moving company or buying some pizza and beer and seeing if you can convince some friends to help out with the big move!

No pictures in this post as there is a whole section dedicated to our finished product. Check it out!

Brick/insulation

Thus far throughout the process, the most exciting part was easily watching this hole in the ground transform into a framed house in the matter of a couple of weeks. During this part of the process, it seems every night you go out there they have made a ton of progress. It is really satisfying! Enjoy that satisfaction because from here on out, all of the progress isn't quite as..."visual" for the lack of better words. From here on out, don't expect to go to your house and see it transforming the drastic ways that it has over the first couple of months. While it doesn't look like much is getting done, it probably is. The next step was getting the outside closed up and starting on the internal workings so they can get that drywall up.

(Brick color: Mulberry; Mortar color: Chocolate)

We came out to see several bundles of bricks scattered around the house. When building custom, your builder/general contractor generally has a brick company/mason or two that he or she has had good success with in the past as far as cost and quality. They have you go out and see the different samples of brick they have. Unlike building with a large mass producing builder (where you have maybe 5 options), your options are limitless. Our advice is to narrow it down to different shades/colors that you are interested in before even going because if you don't, you will go into panic mode when you see that there are at least 50 different brick colors to choose from. Keep in mind that there are also different mortar colors too. Make sure you pay attention to that as you are driving around. When we saw the bundles of brick laying around on our lot, we got a little concerned. It is crazy how different they look like this compared to when you have seen them on a house somewhere. We spent weeks and weeks driving around every neighborhood we could find to try to find a unique brick that didn't stand out too much at the same time. We saw two houses that had this color and met with our brick people who went out to these houses and matched it for us. Even so, when we saw them in this bundle we called them asking if they were sure it was right. They assured us that it was and that they would just do a small section of the house first so we could see what it looks like before proceeding. This of course set us back a day, but we were going to have to look at this for the rest of the time that we live here so we did just that. Fortunately when they started putting it on the house, it was what we hoped it would be. The brick took roughly 2 weeks to complete.

They also did the stonework in the front. We did stacked stone using Pennsylvania stack style stone. My advice here is closely monitor the stone work. It isn't supposed to look perfect, but there were some parts that looked downright awful that I had them come back to fix. 

Sample section so we were sure we liked the brick color.

Keep in mind that there are also a decent amount of shingle options when building custom. This will likely be done by the same company that does your brick, so you may want to try to knock two appointments out with one if you are up to it. We had only seen the shingle color that we picked on two houses in the area and had the hardest time matching it. The company we used kept going out and telling us that they thought it was a color called Barkwood, but we felt it was Weathered Wood. In person, it has a brown color with some lighter brown mixed in. We felt the Barkwood color was too light. We had samples of both and we happened to be driving past one of the homes that had the shingle we were looking for when the gentleman who owned it was standing in his garage. I decided that this was the perfect time to embarrass my wife and stopped to talk to him. He proceeded to get a ladder and let me climb up to the roof and compare the samples with this shingles! The end result is that it was indeed Barkwood and our problem was resolved. Don't be afraid to knock on someone's door if they have something you like. In my opinion a few minutes of being uncomfortable so you don't make a mistake that you will have to look at forever is worth it!

Once all the electric is run, they very quickly get the insulation in. You have options when it comes to insulation and although this is the very basics of it, the options are regular insulation like this or cellulose spray insulation. The spray insulation is much better at insulating if you have the money. It costs roughly twice of what the normal insulation costs. We did not have this in our budget as this is our starter home. The one concern that I did see about the spray insulation was in terms of flammability and if not mixed properly, creating an odor that is very irritating (although this seems to be rare and only happens if someone inexperienced does the job).

And on a fun note, the pictures below show some bible verses that we put on the interior walls throughout the house. We saw this idea on another blog and liked it. It is a form of "blessing" your home. We were a little more adamant about this after the graffiti incident we had earlier on in the building process (see a few posts back). We scattered them in several places throughout the house prior to drywall.

Up next: Drywall/siding