Texas Update: The house gets personalized

Karen and I were in Dallas last week for just a couple of days. When we signed the contract for the construction of our new home a couple of weeks ago, one of the conditions of the contract was that we meet with the design coordinator from Ryland Homes to choose all the colors materials and options we wanted incorporated in the house. For example; The type and color of the brick; The type and color of the mortar between the brick; the tile, the grout color, the counter tops, the cabinets, light fixtures, carpet, Door Knobs, appliances, how many electrical outlets, cable outlets, network wiring, security system options, integrated pest control number of deadbolt locks, ceiling fans.... The list goes on but you get the picture.

We flew into DFW Thursday morning. I went into the office for a couple of hours and Karen went to the model house to measure rooms, and made notes about physical characteristics of the house. Thursday night Ryland had "Open House" at the design center. Karen and I spent 3 hours looking at all the options and getting general ideas of what the options and material choices were so we could be prepared for our appointment with the design specialist Friday.

Typically you get 2 appointments with the design specialist but because we were flying in from out of town it would be very difficult (and costly) to make multiple trips so we scheduled to do the whole thing in one day. It was grueling. We arrived at 9:00 and did not leave, except for an hour lunch break, until after 6:00. We had some issues with misunderstandings/miss-communications between us and our salesman but overall things worked out well. As we were choosing our options, everything cost money. "It's just an additional $198". "It's only Another $55". "That will be another $800. We were really afraid to see the total at the end of the day. We were prepared to have to start cutting things at the end to stay within our budget. To our surprise we were only off by a thousand or two of what we had estimated. Of course on our flight home we started thinking of things that we omitted and probably should not have or just plain forgot. But we faxed them a quick change order and things are set.
Did we get everything we wanted? No. There were a couple of things we planned on getting but in the end decided were not worth the expense. And there were things we did not plan on but decided it would be easier to get up front than to add later. And of course there is always the "Raught Iron Spindles for the stairs sure would look nice." Overall though, I think there were only 2 items we decided against that we could reasonably want.