Pre-Construction Meeting and New Construction Start Date

So we had our pre-construction meeting on Thursday May 26 with our sales representative and our construction manager.  After so much time the meeting was both a pleasant relief and somewhat awkward, with our sale representative and construction manager clearly feeling a little anxious about the long delays and wanting to make sure we understood everything and were ready to get started.


And I'll be honest, a lot has changed in a year.  The delays and limbo have taken a toll on my family.  We have all been crammed into a 2 bedroom apartment for 11 months that we were only planning to stay in for 3 months.  My sons did not want to change schools, but were excited about finally each having his own room.  Eleven months later and they are still sharing a room.  We have all questioned whether this was a good idea or something we rushed into without doing enough research on Ryan Homes.

But here we are.  Going through the selections again I was struck by what a large beautiful home we picked out and I can see why last May we signed a contract to have that dream become reality.  We signed up to finally have a big, beautiful adult home - we thought we were "adulting" like crazy.  Lol
But as is often the case things did not turn out as planned.  But I am hopeful that once construction starts and we get to have the fun experience of watching our dream home get built that this long delay will start to become a distant memory.  But so far, not so much.

In terms of the meeting itself, we learned that the start date for our house has been moved up from June 13 to June 8.  Our construction manager will be starting a new house in our phase each week through early July.  I know Ryan Homes is anxious to complete this development that has cost them much more money than they anticipated.  I hope the accelerated schedule does not mean they will cut corners, but I take heart with the fact that I know Howard County is very strict and will closely monitor what is being done.  We also learned that instead of a bioretention pond for stormwater management we will have a buried dry well.  I looked up these systems on Howard County's Department of Public Works website.  On the one hand I thought the bioretention pond took up a good part of the front lawn of the house, so I'm happy not to have it, but the buried dry well seems like it may be more work to maintain and could cause more problems over the long haul if it gets backed up.  I will be asking more questions about this system.   That's it for now, I will update again with pictures once construction starts.


 

We Just Scheduled a Pre-Construction Meeting!

Hello!  I'm back!  Well it is almost a year to the day that my husband and I first signed a contract with Ryan Homes to purchase a new home in a small development called Montgomery Crossing.  If you have followed this blog, and I know there are one or two of you exactly that have, you know that our house was originally slated to be finished in October 2015.  But it turned out that despite what Ryan Homes initially told us (and what they say they understood) the developer did not have permit approval to build the road and infrastructure to be able to build homes on the land.  So our house was not started last year.  In fact it took the developer eight months to get such approval.  But after that very long wait, which included angry phone calls, and additional funds towards closing, we are finally getting started.

Hooray!  We are going to our pre-construction meeting this month and our house is scheduled to begin construction in mid-June.  We are beyond thrilled.  But until I see a big hole in the ground, I'm not celebrating quite yet, but this is definitely progress.