After spending countless hours reading through all of the blogs that I've found regarding building a home with Ryan Homes and all of the helpful information that I've gained thanks to those blogs I've decided to start one of my own. This will serve as a way to chronicle the build of our new home for us and will hopefully be a resource for others that may come across this on the great big internet.
Our Ryan Homes adventure begin Sunday March 1, 2015. We had been idly looking at new homes for the better part of two years but had never really found "The One." It had become a common practice on the weekends to hop in the car and drive around looking at houses. We had gone through the occasional open house and practically wore out the Realtor.com app looking up new houses in the area to go and see, but had never really strayed very far from the location of our current house. It was on a whim and at the suggestion of my wife's boss that we ventured a little outside of our comfort area and drove up to Williamsburg to take a look at the new Ryan Homes development called Washington Ridge.
Now before I go any further, I should tell you a little about us. My wife and I are in our thirties, we have a son named Jacob as well as a dog and a cat. We are both full time professionals and work fairly demanding jobs. We live in the Western Branch area of Chesapeake where my son attends school at Western Branch Primary (which is a very nice and well ranked school.) Our current home is a 1400 sq/ft townhouse with a garage that we have lived in for 10 years. It has been a fantastic home for us and we have many wonderful memories here of our lives together. We've worked hard at making this a very nice home and while we are very proud of it, we have slowly out grown it.
After much discussion and many hours of watching HGTV we had a basic idea of what we wanted in a new house. The list is as follows…
-Three Bedrooms
-Walk-in Closet in Master
-Pantry
-Coat Closet
-More Kitchen Cabinets and Counter Space
-Two Car Garage
-Good Schools for the kid
-Ample Storage Space
-Safe Neighborhood
-Laundry room in House (most important)
-Larger than current home ~2000-2500 sq/ft
So there you go. Not a terribly detailed list, but one that we were pretty set on sticking to.
This brings us back to our trip to Williamsburg. We drove up there with no real expectations and certainly with no plan of buying a house that day. We arrived at the Misthaven model home without an appointment and were immediately greeted by a very nice and friendly agent that said he had another family with an appointment coming in, but that he would try to answer any questions that we might have in the meantime.
First impressions are everything and our impression was the house was gorgeous. It was large with an open floor plan and a layout that we could easily see ourselves living in. The kitchen was big and bright thanks to the addition of the morning room with all the windows to let the natural light in. It had tons of cabinets with lots of usable counter space and best of all, a nice, roomy pantry! As we made our way upstairs my wife and I kept noticing things that we really liked, from the windows in the stairwell to the half bath downstairs for guests, but it wasn't until we got to the master bedroom that we were really wowed. The master bath is huge with nice soaker tub and a separate shower stall, and the bedroom is large with a nice walk in closet. All the other bedrooms are a good size and it wasn't long before our son was trying to lay claim to which room was going to be his.
We asked a few questions to Zach our site agent and found him to be very helpful without being pushy. We definitely liked what we saw but still had a few other places we wanted to check out, so we left to continue our looking. After a few other stops we decided to go back by Washington Ridge to see if the agent was free to answer a few questions that had come up in our discussions while driving around. (I know, I know, we should have known better than to go back!!) We get there as the other people are leaving so Zach was freed up to give us the grand walk around. To be honest, we loved it all. We even went to a few homes that were still being built so that he could show us some of the different arrangements that are available and so on. After at least a solid hour of talking and asking questions and going over everything we got to that pivotal moment, the would you like to sit down and see what we could do to get you into one of these of your own, moment.
Two hours later we were driving home saying to each other, did we really just buy a new house?!?!?!
Yep, we sure did!!!!
We picked the Misthaven model with the finished basement and the morning room addition. Our quest for a 3 bedroom, 2000+ sq/ft home with a little more room for us has finally come to an end in the form of a 4 bedroom 3100 sq/ft home. A little overkill? Perhaps. But it's new, and it's beautiful and it will soon be all ours. The upside is that with the finished basement it gives us room incase a parent or someone needed somewhere to live in the future and it gives us a dedicated play room/theater room to relax in. The downside is that we now have more than twice the house to furnish! I'm beyond excited and beyond anxious at all the waiting and decisions that lie ahead.
There will be many sleepless nights to come!
Our next step is the meeting with NVR the mortgage agent that Ryan Homes uses exclusively.
STAY TUNED!!!
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