BAD JIM, BAD!

So we attempted to show my brother more than the outside of the house yesterday, but we couldn't because...OUR PERMANENT LOCKS ARE ON! Yay! Thus the title of the post, Jim is our PM, lol. It was exciting driving up to the house and seeing the landscaping (mulch, shrubs, and tree) has been done, our mailbox is installed, and the door has been painted. Our locks are sexy because they're all ours. The door isn't as deep of a chocolate that we thought it was going to be, its more like a milk chocolate and we love it. All in all we're a little disappointed that we couldn't show the inside to my brother, but he really enjoyed what he saw in person and we showed him the pics on the blog too. We decided not to take pics since we'll be there again Wednesday for pre-settlement.

Now on to the second bust if the day, the Victoria Falls model is complete and open in a new community. Did we see it? Nope. Epic fail #2 of the day. Now we've had this happen before and we learned to call before hand to make sure someone was there. This time we did not. No biggie because we'll be living in our house on Friday. I text our rep to let her know, just in case someone asks her, and she took it as a personal mission to find out why no one was there on a Saturday. She's great, even makes sure to keep juice boxes in the fridge at the model for us, lol.

Yesterday wasn't s complete bust. I think we found our dishwasher at a great price. It has everything that we want except for steam and adjustable racks. For that price we get what we need.

#6

REC ROOM

We have dubbed the largest bedroom as the Recreation Room or Rec Room for short. We even labelled the boxes for it as Rec Room. In this room will be our treadmill, our first couch that we bought as a couple, our entertainment center, our first flat screen TV, and the PS3. Eventually we'll transition this down to a dedicated area in the basement once we finish it, but for now its upstairs. Stephanie, our sales rep, is excited about this room too. We joke that one day we'll come home and my mom is in the kitchen cooking and Stephanie is in the Rec Room on the treadmill and taking phone calls from the model on her cell via Bluetooth, lol. Yeap one big happy Ryan Homes family.

This portion of the countdown from this moment on is in ranked order.

#5

AREA AND SCHOOL DISTRICT

I was born and raised in Pittsburgh. So it was important for us to be in a sense behind our family geographically. So when we have kids and are dropping them off, thanks Mommie, it
will be on our way too and from work. We still had 5 communities to consider between the three builders we were looking at. Three of the communities were also in the same school district. When we made the decision that we were going with Ryan that put us into 3 communities all in different school districts. In researching school districts we used schooldigger.com and the annual report that the Pittsburgh Business Times comes out with their statewide rankings. We factored in lot size, school district, taxes, HOA, and community size. Out of all of the communities we got the biggest bang for our buck in our community and we couldn't be happier.