The House...

So what house did we finally settle on? As I mentioned last time, after looking through the selection at Wayne Homes (www.waynehomes.com) we settled on a ranch design we liked - the Montgomery.

Sharon spent quite a bit of time plowing through reviews of Wayne Homes. Being a veteran review browser myself, I wasn't surprised when a number of negatives surfaced about them. Any time you look at reviews of anything you'll have some folks that weren't happy. Sharon also took the time to look up some blogs of people who have built or are building a Wayne home. We found them useful as a reference, which is one reason I decided to do this blog; kind of a "pay it forward" philosophy. Anyway, we felt that the positives outweighed the negatives for us. You seem to get a decent value for what you pay.

The Montgomery seemed to best fit our needs - 2100+ square feet, which will give us plenty of room for the occasional gathering or overnight guests; a huge Master Bedroom with the option of adding the luxury bath; a formal Dining Room and Living Room, both of which can be walled in and used as offices - something we need. Since we only have guests once in a while overnight, we thought one of the 2 guest rooms would become our exercise room.

Wayne Homes has a cool online interface, which immediately appealed to me, being a geek. They have a tool which lets you choose from a list of options and see what they'll look like on the house you're looking at - luxury bath, 2 sink vanity, 2 extra feet on the garage, a side garage door, etc. what they don't list, however is how much all these options will cost. For that you actually have to talk to someone.

We decided to visit the closest model home center near Delmont, PA, a pleasant 25 minute ride on back roads. We got to talk with the rep, Tory, and gave her a list of what options we were interested in. We weren't that interested in the alternate "elevations", which add a dressier look to the exterior, figuring rightly that they would be more than we wanted to pay. Tory emailed me a few days later with a breakdown of costs for all of the extras we gave her. We were pleasantly surprised that our list of options only added about $10K to the price.

We were also supplied with a list of references - those people who have built a Wayne home. Some of the people are only a few miles away, which is surprising in the rural area we're in. We'll probably talk to them as well as try to attend an open house in the area in August.

We're scheduled to meet again with Tory in a few days to fine tune our list of desired options and also see how much Sharon's wish list of kitchen upgrades will be.

We had a few more developments today on some other fronts; I'll save those for next time.....


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