THIRD STEP: Talk to Our Realtor
Our builder, Kevin, has been a family friend of mine since I was 11 and I had no qualms about dealing with him directly through the whole house building process, so we decided that we didn’t need to have our realtor on hand through the building process. The catch was, we had signed a contract with our realtor saying that we would use him to buy any property or houses for the next six months. The contract also said that if we didn’t purchase anything during the six months we would be under no obligation to use our realtor anymore and we wouldn’t have to pay him anything. Well, because we decided to break the contract three months early in order to work with Kevin we paid a fee to our realtor which left us free to work with whomever we liked. If we had decided to keep our realtor on hand we would have had to pay him closing costs when we finished the house and that would have come out of our pocket. (If we’d gone with the other builder, the building company would have taken care of those fees.) However, we did decide to still use him to buy the lot.
FOURTH STEP: Design the House
Okay, this is the fun part! Eeeek! I’m getting giddy again just thinking about it because this is when it became real for me: “We’re building a house!”
Curt and I went with our builder to a draftsman who designs custom homes to describe what we’d like in our house so he could design the floor plan for us. I absolutely LOVED the hour and a half we spent with him! He told us right off the bat that he’s not the cheapest draftsman, nor is he the most expensive, but he does very quality work and he loves designing homes. Another thing I really appreciated was his openness. He told us that he would recommend upgrades all over the place because that’s how he makes more money, “But,” he said, “I will always tell you when I’m trying to get you to spend more money.” I loved how transparent he was, it’s his living, he’s gotta earn money.
Anyways, we told him all of our must haves and he asked us a whole bunch of questions about our preferences for the kitchen, whether we wanted a mudroom (we did), whether we wanted the bedrooms on one side of the house or the other, what kind of tub we wanted in the master bathroom, etc.
Because we were building with Kevin, we had two options as far as payment went:
Option 1: we could pay the draftsman out of pocket and when the build was over the plans would belong to us.
Option 2: Kevin could pay for the plans and when the build was over, he would own the plans and could make more houses using our design. Essentially we’d pay for it because the fee would come out of our loan for the house, but he would take care of all of the transactions.
We decided that we didn’t have a need for the plans after our house was done, so we opted for the second option. Our draftsman asked for half down that first night and the second half when he was all done (our builder took care of all that). He said that he would have the first draft finished within 2-3 weeks. Our job would then be to print out the plans and make any changes in red pen, then send it back to him. After the first draft, we could repeat the editing process as many times as possible until we were happy with the results. After we were satisfied, we would let him know and he would finalize all the plans, which means he’d take the part off of the plans that said, “Preliminary design. Not for construction.”
