Progress Report

YAY!! We have a street now.  Our Lot is on right side looking at the first picture of the cul de sac where the pile of rocks are in gutter.

Let me begin with a BIG THANKS! to Tina our SR for the updated lot pics.  Now, there has been some breakthroughs in the development of our house.. During our Pre con meeting we were told that our house was originally the 3rd house to break ground based on the date of application of applicants.. which is fine with us..  We were more interested in the June/July completion date when we first started this adventure.. Well, of course the delays are now starting to pile on and with them the anxiety starts to fill us up emotionally.  We were told during the pre con meeting that 1 May would be our ground breaking day.  Since then it has been pushed back due to permits and developer backlog and such.  We then discovered from our SR that our delivery/closing will now be pushed back into mid Aug.. ACK!!!!!  That was not what we wanted to hear, as we are now pushing into the new school year for the kids.. We will basically be moving into the house during one week and the kids starting school the next week.. Not to mention that we will have to extend our stay with my brother-in-law and his family until we can move in.  This just went from staying with them for less than a month, to close to 2 months.  Talk about inconvenience. And they live in Crofton MD, which is at least an hour to our new neighborhood in Aquia, VA.  Its probably a good thing I am military retired, so I don't have to worry about work, but Darla will have some commuting to do in the first month of reporting to her next command.  I will say that I am very appreciative that we can afford to be in a house like this and have family to help us out during this time.

Another interesting development.  Last week, we requested and explanation from our SR or PM regarding the delay in construction and also expressed our concerns, they explained they developers delay in permits, and that our house will now be the first to be built on the street because the first two neighbors had to pull out of the process... sigh!  While I am happy that the house is starting to be built soon, I not sure how happy I am to be the first to be built because that means construction will be going on for probably the next year on our street and the adjacent street behind us.  Pros and Cons I suppose.  Darla is more concerned with our move in date - to worry about construction on the street...easy for her, she will go to work and not be bothered by early morning construction noises!

I do know that one of our neighbors is getting anxious as well at "Lot 3" and she has been blogging more with updates which is good because we can follow her progress as well.  I believe her house is next to be started after ours based on her timeline listed in her blog.  Melissa, thanks for keeping up the great posts, especially ones with pics of the neighborhood:)

As of now, I really don't know exactly what day they will "break-ground".  I am hopeful it will be during the week of 6 May, but I wont be surprised if its the week after. 

Update for the Spring

I haven't provided updates in awhile, mostly because there hasn't been much to update.  So, I will go over some of the things that has happened since my last post in this post, and will provide another post with our most recent information updates since our Pre Con meeting trip.

In late February, we flew to Virginia for a few days to attend our pre-construction meeting.  We had it early only because we live so far away and was the most convenient time for all of us to get together.. Generally the meeting is held about 2-3 weeks before construction starts.  So, this meeting is about 2-3 months before construction will begin.

During this trip we took advantage of going everywhere we could around our future neighborhood, visiting shopping centers, schools, restaurants, Marina's (for our boat) etc..

The pre-con meeting went well, there weren't any surprises.  We went over the blue-prints of the house and discussed details that I was unaware of, such as the numbers and codes that are on the paper that shows the lot, our PM was happy to explain those details for us.  The meeting lasted over 2 hours, mostly because we have had no person-to-person contact with our PM and SR until this trip.  All previous conversations have been only by phone and email.  So this was nice to actually be there in person.

A very BIG Thanks to Tina (SR) and Andy (PM) for all your generous help and patience with us during this visit and meeting.  It was comforting to know that our house will be built with you in charge.

Here are some pics of the blueprints that I took (unfortunately I deleted every picture that we took on this trip, so I had to go into "recovery" operation to get back some of them.)  So keep in mind this meeting was in late February.  Since then the pavement has been finished and I will provide pics of that in the next post.

After the meeting, we walked right over to see our lot (we are lot 10).

Here is a pic of me with Andy (PM) and Tina (SR).

One of the options for our double welled exit was to have the exit come out the basement and instead of going straight out below the morning room, they could build it to have it come out the side of the house and still run out the back to the back yard.  Here is a couple of pictures of another house that has the double welled exit like we will be getting.

We then had a meeting with the flooring company to go over all the options that we chose for the floors, cabinetry and tiles. Danni was our rep, and it was finally nice to meet her in person and to actually see the  products.  I wasn't able to recover the pictures of our choices that we took that day.  Danni did provide us with alot of information about what we are getting and how to maintain everything once installed.  She also gave us a tip where to go to get some furniture for some deep discount prices.  So, of course we went and checked out that huge warehouse of beautiful furniture.. I think we stayed in that furniture warehouse longer than our meeting with Danni. Thanks again Danni for all your help.