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options

in food

Time for the Showroom

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August 15, 2015
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Does anybody remember Expo? Home Depot’s high-end kitchen and bath showrooms? How about the Great Indoors? What ever happened to those? After a recent google search, I discovered that in 2009, Home Depot closed 34 of their Expo stores, including the one in the Houston area. And the Great Indoors that I remember visiting as a child is also a thing of the past.

I did not let this deter me from finding the experience that I was looking for. After some research, I found a few showrooms in the area. None as epic or grand as the Expo, but my needs were minimal. All I wanted was to sit in an oversized bathtub that was in a row of other oversized bathtubs, or at least have the option to. So I found a few candidates and ended up choosing Ferguson. All the online browsing and Pinteresting in the world is not the same as seeing and feeling something in person.

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Upon entering the showroom I was ecstatic that this place was not letting me down. There were plenty of bathtubs, sinks, plumbing fixtures, and enough rain showerheads to last a lifetime. I was in heaven. They even had the Numi – the super smart and fancy Japanese style toilet by Kohler ( I would recommend watching this video. How do they make a toilet seem so elegant?).

The other side of seeing things for yourself is that you might discover that some things that you wanted just won’t work. For example, I had to see it to believe that my master bathroom floorplan was not conducive to a free standing bathtub. My husband already knew this and already warned me, but I wouldn’t accept it until I visited the showroom. Sad but true. But again, this was a necessary step in my home-building process.

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The highlight of my visit was the sighting of the Jenn-Air Obsidian in the wild (pictured here). Isn’t it BEAUTIFUL. After seeing it in a magazine from 2013, I thought it was only a thing of legend. But I finally got to see it in person and it was every bit as exquisite as I thought it would be. If you haven’t heard of Obsidian, it is the first fridge that has a black interior. With a dual evaporator system, this ten thousand dollar fridge is both functional and gorgeous.

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Perhaps secondary to the Obsidian was the GE Profile Series 30 in French Door Oven. In the flesh. Inspired by restaurant ovens, these doors are connected and swing open and closed together, making it easy to maneuver with one hand and also making food easily reachable with hopefully fewer forearm burns. Setting you back about $4000, this dream is slightly more attainable.

I’m also in the search for pendant lights, and though I did not find any that my husband and I could agree on, my trip was definitely worth it. Next showroom I am going to try is Morrison, stay tuned!

in finance

Haggling For Incentives

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August 13, 2015
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The incentive amount that a builder has offered me when I walk through the door has never been the final offer. Whether it’s 25k, 30k, or even 40k, you can always get more. Which is evident by the fact that they are throwing around tens of thousands of dollars. 25k sounds like a lot to you as an individual, 25k in design center options is nothing to a builder. You should always ask for more. And you know what? The worst they can do is say no and give you the original offer anyway. But usually they will say yes to another 5 or 10k. I got 45k in upgrades and I still think I could have taken more.

Another thing about incentives is to find out where you can apply them. Can you apply them to structural upgrades? Or just design center upgrades? Can you apply them to the lot premium? Can you apply them to elevation upgrades? This is important. When you are buying/building a house, you probably want to know the all-in price right? Well if you sign the contract and later find out that you can’t apply your credit to anything but the design center, the lot premium and elevation alone can be tens of thousands, not to mention any structural changes that have caught your fancy.

If you are considering a certain house with a certain builder, ask if you can price out your options. They should let you do this, and if they don’t, then you know there is trouble. We priced our options at about 4 builders and it educated us so much on the whole process. The first builder gave separate incentives for structural and design and you could not use those towards lot premium or elevation. So that added another minimum of 7k onto the base price. This builder had an extremely interactive online pricing system where you could price out all of your options per the floorplan. For example, you could see how much it would cost to upgrade the flooring for the family room and master bedroom to wood. You could see how much it would cost to upgrade the granite to a Level 2 or 3. This gave us a really good idea of how the whole options process was going to work.

The second builder sent us a price sheet for all of these same options. However they did not allow you to use any of your incentive money on structural. The third builder had an online tool that had to be operated by an employee so we sat in her office and filled out the whole options list. This is where we discovered that with this particular builder, you had to pay extra to get full gutters (standard was only the front half of the house) and only two fans came included in the house.

The builder we eventually selected is a smaller family owned builder and therefore had no such fancy computer system. However they did provide the pricing sheets of some of their inventory homes so that we could compare those options to the ones we wanted. Also, full gutters were included in the house, along with five fans, a sprinkler system, and blinds for all of the windows. All of these things were expensive options for builder #3. As I said, we ended up with $45K in options and were able to apply this to lot premium, elevation, design center, and structural upgrades however we wanted. Options are a huge part of building a house so you want to make sure that you understand how it all works and that you get as much as you possibly can.