Weekly Construction Update & A bit about exteriors

This week's update was on a Monday, which is weird, but I'll take it. According to the construction manager the following are updates:

• Drywalling will continue
• Application of the wall texture will begin on Friday (notice the change - last update said Wednesday)
• Next week: interior doors will go in along with baseboards
• They can begin on the exterior of the house

Exterior: When building a home you must select a floor plan that you like and then select what is called an 'elevation.' The word elevation in the sense of a home is defined as: the external face of a building or structure. This is how when driving through a neighborhood you may see two homes whose exterior facades are very different, but if you were to go inside, it's essentially the same house. 

Most of the time neighborhoods try to avoid having a lot of homes with the same exterior and floor plan in the same vicinity. For example, when I was looking for a home in a different area I could not build the home with the elevation that I wanted because there had to be 5 homes in between homes with the same floor plan and even more homes if the elevation was the same. Therefore, it pays to get into a neighborhood early! That way if you find a good lot you will not have limitations with what floor plan or elevation you can select.

The pictures below are taken from the Toll Brothers website (www.tollbrothers.com) and shows how though homes can have the same floor plan, the elevations can be very different.  The renderings below are of the same floor plan but with different elevations.

In fact, some elevations can affect your floor plan slightly. Take my situation for example. In the model home, one of the upstairs bedrooms had these awesome high ceilings, but when I walked through one being built in a nearby neighborhood that was the same floor plan, I noticed that the ceilings were not high. It turns out that with the stucco elevation, which I will be getting, you lose the raised roof line in the front and therefore the ceilings in that bedroom are not high. :-(  I think the sales manager should point out those types of things when they meet with you. But that is also something that may be brought to your attention when working with a Realtor who is familiar with assisting people looking to build a home.

I will post very soon about STUCCO!