Roller Coaster

Building a house is a roller coaster. You go from the giddy highs of seeing progress inside the house (Look, we’ve got plumbing now!) to the mopey lows of learning that the extra wood flooring you wanted wasn’t $1,500 it was $1,800 plus an additional non-refundable deposit.

We watched Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House last night. A classic Gary Grant movie that resonated in new ways given our recent experiences. I’m not saying that building a house is a bad thing, and I’m not saying that on the whole we aren’t excited. But I am saying it is overwhelming at times. And that leaves us feeling exhausted.

We don’t know the schedule for what comes next, other than a vague list of “customer decisions” that are ordered by broad building phases (“before framing is complete”). We don’t know all the terminology of mortgages and financing, and we are teamed up with good, earnest people who do this all the time. They understand what is being talked about in an innate way, we have to stop and ask questions, and at some level we are forced to trust them even when we don’t fully understand.

Repeated discussions about how the non-refundable deposit we made would be handled left us thinking it would be held by the escrow company. Turns out it goes directly to the builder, but will be considered part of our down payment. We have to trust that this will be the case.

Communication is another mildly sore point. In order to make sure everyone stays on the same page we contact our agent, who in turn contacts the builder’s agent, who in turn contacts him. His responses travel back along the same path. It’s our own personalized game of Telephone. According to our contract we have to respond to the builder within 24 hours. It has now been more than 72 hours since we verbally made our tile, carpet and wood flooring choices and we still haven’t gotten anything in writing. True, the cabinet shop and flooring store took notes, but we haven’t seen those yet.

Oh, speaking of contract, one of our highs was to see “under contract” on the online listing for our house.

We are up and down and all over the map at times. Our house will be wonderful and what we want, but getting there is going to be a real roller coaster of a ride.

About these ads