Friday, May 15, 2015

Breaking Ground and More!!

I'm a little behind with my updates as we broke ground on our home on April 29th!!! At the same time our house in CA was being packed, cleaned and loaded up on the truck. We have also driven cross country, and are now officially in VA!! So needless to say it's been an absolutely insane few weeks. I'll try to catch you up with all the home building details.

As I said, we broke ground on April 29th. Things have been moving along nicely since then, there were a few days of bad weather but it doesn't seem to have held anything up. Here are a few pics from Day 1 of building! They are pics of the home's footing, reinforced with steel before the concrete was poured which also happened on Day 1.




Our realtor headed to the build site on May 5th, which was Day 7 of building and took some pictures of the start of the foundation. 




We arrived in town on May 10th!! After checking into our hotel we went straight to the build site since the model home also happened to be having it's grand opening that weekend. We were so excited to walk through the model because it's a Rome and we hadn't actually walked through our floor plan yet. When we were originally looking we saw a Milan model but there wasn't a Rome nearby to view. I'll cover that in more details in my next post. This next group of pics is from May 12th which is Day 14 of building. 


The next day, May 13th we scheduled time to meet with our PM in person at the build site so he could answer some questions, actually meet us, and show us the progress thus far. We were so surprised to see the difference in work that one day could make. Take a look at the pics!




Framing has begun!! It's really starting to look like a house now and we are getting very excited! I'll go over a few things the PM explained to us. First off Ryan Homes does 'stick framing' as opposed to using prefabricated, engineered wall panels. I wasn't really sure if this made a difference as far as build quality so I did a little research. It looks like prefabricated wall panels can be cheaper, faster and require less man power at the work site. Stick framing allows for flexibility on the site if there are any issues, but does seem to be the more expensive route, as well as requiring more manpower. I didn't really read anything about a difference in quality which made me feel good. 

The dirt pile you an see in the pic behind the kiddo and in the second pic will be flattened out to become the floor of the garage. Our PM told us they are expecting to have the roof up by May 19th which is the end of the third week of building. It's amazing how fast the house is going up! Another thing our PM explained to us is that for a 2 story house the AC and heat is single zoned, it becomes dual zoned if you opt for a 3rd floor. We were are bit surprised by this because we were under the impression that the house was dual zoned. We are looking into this. 

The whole neighborhood is a bustle of activity. We were blown away by the amount of work that has been completed in the two months since we were there picking out our lot. We are planning to bring in an inspector to conduct a pre drywall inspection and our PM told that should happen in around 3 more weeks.

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