So the day finally arrived for our pre-construction meeting. This meeting is pretty much an all day meeting. The first half of the day you meet the field manager out at your lot and they get a feel for any problems or challenges there might be and they are supposed to stake out where your house will go. For us that couldn’t happen because there was so much water on our land and we still need to mow the meadow where the house will sit.
After the meeting at the site we headed to a restaurant to work on all the paperwork. The field manager goes over different details about the plan and any issues observed on the land. In our case we talked about drainage and if we will have to do a deeper survey in the future to determine if there is an underground spring causing part of our water issues, but that is a bridge we will cross if it’s determined it’s necessary. For now we proceeded to talk about some of the money set aside for things like seasonal fees and where it can be moved around since we won’t be digging until spring and won’t have seasonal fees. We learned a bit more about the process and received a little more detailed information about our responsibilities.
The second half of the day was supposed to be spent at the Wayne Homes offices going over the detailed blueprints, the next steps and signing off on any final changes. This was supposed to be handled by the color specialist, but a series of events caused a lot of issues. First there was a snow storm moving in and they even asked if we would prefer to reschedule this bit of the process; however, we knew we needed to move forward with this before we could finalize our construction loan and with the work trip for my husband coming up, we didn’t want to risk rescheduling and getting it all done before our rate lock with the loan application expired.
Once we got there, we learned that the color specialist was in a meeting with other clients and it seemed to be running over. So we started off with the sales manager and got passed around to different people from there until we finally ended up with the color specialist at the very end to finish signing off on our paperwork. Honestly, it was a mess and I fear that we could have missed things. I don’t feel settled about it at all. In the end I did catch something after we left that we did not go over that had a major affect on the layout of our master bathroom.
In the end I wrote back and forth with the color specialist and we think we have it figured out and there will be changes that have to be made to the blueprints to fix the issue, but I still feel a little uneasy about the plans. I’m sure all will be fine in the end, but it was the first time where I really felt like I was forced to sign off on something before I was ready or else the process would have stalled. Even while we were there, they were told that the home office was shutting down the offices and telling them all to go home for safety reasons…but there wasn’t much snow at that time and in the end the snow event wasn’t that bad. I agree with making sure people are safe, but I felt we kind of got short-changed on a very important part of the process and I’m hoping I don’t live to regret it.
Thanks for reading!
