Woo Hoo! Approved!

So today we received our loan approval letter from NVR Mortgage.  HUGE STEP!  

So first, a bit of a caveat:  On other Ryan home blogs, some people go into great detail on their credit scores, back and forth with NVR, etc.  I will not be doing that as I believe that may be a little too much information to disclose, even though I found all of those posts extremely helpful.

What I will say about the NVR process is that we had great people working with us.  It was pretty painless, with the exception of the one night we spent printing every single document for the meeting with the loan officer.  What I wish I understood before this process started was this:  The loan officer is always right.   Our well meaning sales office gave us a very different number for cash at closing than our loan officer.   That brought a lot of questions from our side, but we quickly realized, whatever the loan officer says goes and there is no use crying over spilled milk.  Fortunately for us, we could take it all in stride and make it all work, but I could see other families not having the same luxury.  So that is my one warning.  Be happy when you sign all of those papers with Ryan, but be prepared for anything at that first meeting with NVR or whatever company you choose.

In the next week we have a lot of fun meetings (tile and flooring, plus Guardian) so stay tuned!

The Elizabeth

One of the reasons this process seemed to be accelerated for us is because of our floor plan the Elizabeth.  We knew this was our ideal plan, however the day we visited Potomac Shores, there was only one site that could fit our floor plan.  So if we wanted this house, we pretty much had to decide within the week after reserving the lot.   Our lot does have a premium, and we weren't thrilled about that, but in the end we think we will be very happy!

In the end we were deciding between this floor plan and the Berkeley, initially, because we wanted the options of a media room and a porch off of the master bedroom.  In the end, our lot did not allow the 4' extension which would in turn allow the additional porch, so that option didn't matter as much. Because we knew we wanted/needed a home office, and the Elizabeth has the back library which we thought would be perfect for that.

Many of the other floor plans had little problems that ruled them out (wall oven addition takes away the pantry, no formal dining room) so we knew this was the layout for us!

The floor plan is linked to at the start of this post, and really can be accessed from any blog post.  As it is not currently offered by Ryan the floor plan is quite hard to find on the internet!

Hi There!

Hello, and welcome to our blog about our home building process!   We decided (rather impulsively) to buy a Ryan Home in the Potomac Shores community in Virginia.  We had identified this community as "the one" for awhile now, then we went on a preliminary visit with a buyer's agent and decided, "What the heck, let's do it!"

Thanks to the numerous other blogs on building Ryan homes we knew what to expect during the process, and we will be documenting ours as well.  I did want to also use this blog to talk about the Potomac Shores community, as I wished there was more information about Potomac Shores when we were in the middle of our research phase.

So, thanks for reading and we hope you find this interesting and informative!