Our Ryland Home Experience
(Very very under
construction)
After extensive research my
wife and I have decided to buy a home from Ryland Homes in Austin Texas.
Chris spent tons of time
researching floor plans she liked, neighborhoods, school ratings, crime rates
and so forth.
We originally planned to move
to the south west of Austin, but all the neighborhoods had either poor schools,
high crime rates or both. So now we are moving to northwest Pflugerville.
There are tons of good sites
out there giving this information
Links to home building
Horror stories
A few notes about our Salesman
A few notes about our
Builder/Foreman
The purpose of this site is
to chronicle both the good and the bad about our experience, and to gather the
resources we used to make our decision so that others might gain from our
experience… Oh and to show off our new home as it goes along.
Why We Chose Ryland
What initially attracted us
to Ryland was the fact that where some other builders had 1 or 2 floor plans
Chris liked,
the floor plans available at
the development "Blackhawk" by Ryland were all very good for our
tastes and purposes.
We have chosen the floor
plan "Hawthorn" at the development "Parks of Blackhawk". As
we didn't like the location of any of the spec homes, we have decided to have
Ryland build us a house on a lot of our choosing.
Link to
Park at Blackhawk website
We chose to build this house
despite Horror
Stories we'd read on the web, mostly because the other major builders
seemed to have a lot more of them.
Home Inspections
One of the tactics we are
using to protect ourselves after reading all the above horror stories is called
"Phased Inspections". Basically it means that you hire a private
inspector to examine your house at 3-4 critical moments during construction and
take his report to the builder and try to get the issues resolved. After
searching on the web I found a couple inspectors in Austin that were officers
in local home inspection groups and active on home inspectors boards about
Ethics. I then asked them if they did phased inspections and, in particular,
had expertise in Post Tensioned slabs (The only kind you should have in Texas
IMHO, because of the soil) From New Day Inspections I got a recommendation for:
Nev Nicholson
at Aspect Inspections
(512-328-0995).
For phased inspections he
charges $98 an hour and it take 1-2 hours for the pre-pour slab inspection, the
framing inspection will take longer. I consider this money well spent, but to
be honest we haven't had any inspections yet, so I'll have to keep you updated
about this inspector in particular. So far they have been willing to work
around my schedule, which is nice. I'll let you know how he does in about a
week once the foundation work is inspected.
Thur, Sept 2,
2004: We
had the first phased inspection today. It took about an hour. The inspector
found a couple places where the tension cables were not protected from the
concrete, but that was really all he found. He was impressed in general over
the preparations taken for the slab.
(12-26-2004) the closing is tomorrow and
Nev has finished his inspections, with his help we’ve been able to get Ryland
to make the needed changes to our house, I have to say hiring him has been the
single best decision I’ve made in this
process. None of the things he’s found were huge, but they all will give me a
better stronger safer house and I had piece of mind while the building process
was going on.
I strongly suggest phased inspections from a reliable source to anyone who’s looking to build a house. Search the web for your city or state home inspectors association and ask the local head for a recommendation. It worked for me.
The House itself
You can look at the Floor
plan we have chosen online as well.
Interactive
Floor plan for the Hawthorn
If you click the links,
"W.C. Enclosure", "tub shower" and "Covered
patio" you will see the house pretty much as we decided to have it built.
The
only major change is that we had them install double doors in to the closets to
bedrooms 2 and 3. We were told this would cost $450, but in the end they
charged us $500. There were other inaccuracies like this with the numbers we
were given by the salesman, so don't be surprised. We added this feature
because we thought it would be difficult to get into the corners of the closet
once it was full through the narrow single door.
There
were also other options that we chose to get quotes for that, when we got the
prices from them, I got the impression they chose a price high enough to
prevent us from making the change. What I call the "We don't want to do
that" price.
Elevations
In the lower right hand
corner of the interactive floor plan page above is a "elevations"
button where you can see the exterior elevations of the house. We chose
"B". We actually liked "C" better, but were not willing to
pay several grand to upgrade and then have to pay another $800 to have the
garage be a single door instead of a double door. That just seemed too much on
top of the upgrade costs. (like $5k if I remember correctly)
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