The Masters House

One of the things that I was tasked with when we signed the contract for our new house was to take the Floor Plan layout and mark up where I wanted the various options that we had purchased. In looking at the piece of paper they handed me I knew that my chicken scratch on that paper was going to nothing but confuse people. To top it off the floor plan was reversed which made it really hard to mark the correct wall I wanted a switch or outlet on.

I decided that I would take it home and fire up Photoshop so that there would be no misunderstandings as to where I wanted each item.

If you click the picture above you will be presented with my hour of labor in reversing the original floor plan and then adding color coded options to it. The options that are listed in the diagram are:

• Additional electrical outlets (extra outlets that we purchased)
• All the cable outlets (standard and extra)
• All the phone jacks (standard and extra)
• The extra door off the 3rd car garage
• The upstairs deck door
• The 2 additional concrete slabs to extend the down stairs patio
• The fence line

When I presented my printout to our sales person she was blown away by the level of detail. I did not do it to impress her but to make sure that there is no question as to where things should be.

In our last house I had marked up the cable outlets by hand and sure enough they put one in the wrong place. I caught it the same day they did it so I called the foreman and it was corrected the next day. I will be checking when they put these things in with my trust diagram in hand to make sure there are no mistakes .

Some people may think that this overboard but it was an hour of my time and was actually a little fun to build my house on paper.

P.S. The model of the house that we are building is “The Sparrow” and is by DR Horton.

Technorati tags: New Home Builders, New Home Construction, Second Home, Housing Market, DR Horton, Round Rock TX, Ausitn TX, Central Texas

I get a lot of traffic on this site from people that are looking for information about the warranty offered by DR Horton. The main reason for this traffic is that about 6 months ago I was having issues getting a couple of small things taken care of them before my standard 1 year warranty expired and posted about them here (you can see all the issues that I faced in the first year under the Repairs category). Six months after that experience I was back in a DR Horton sales office signing a contract on another DR Horton.

I concluded that series of posts stating that yes, I would buy a house from them again. The reason for this is that overall I believe that they make a quality product and to me that is what counts the most. I backed those word up by putting a deposit down and signing another contract with them this past weekend.

While some builders are better then others I feel that you still need to watch the construction and make sure that things are being done in the way that they are supposed to be done. Houses are built by people and people are not perfect, they make mistakes sometimes. Other times they just try to cut corners and don’t do things right. Either way I am taking the responsibility to make sure that people do what they are supposed to. It is MY HOUSE they are building after all.

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