Ordering a home is only the first step in a process that will take several months until completion. A number of things need to happen before we can actually begin building your new home. A lot of behind-the-scenes things will go on behind the scenes after you order. So that you understand the process, here is a rundown of what is going on:
- Our home designer completes your plans to include any changes that you may have made when you ordered the home. Once he has updated them to reflect your order, the plans will be sent to you to verify for accuracy.
- Our home designer then puts your home design onto a layout set for blueprints (read about the software we use here). This will include your kitchen design, roof and floor joist layout, foundation plan and so on. If your plan is especially complex, this may take up to a week to prepare for submission.
- The plans are sent to a structural engineer to be engineered for your site including seismic zones. Important Note: Once the plans have been sent to engineering no structural changes can be made to the home unless it is necessary for local building requirements. Please make sure everything is as you want it before we send it to engineering. (If you are building in Thurston county, they will require the truss designs to have special engineering, which we will arrange for at no additional charge to you)
- We send your entire order, including a set of prints off to the lender to determine the appraised value of your new home. If you have done your due diligence and not overspent on the options, the value should exceed the cost by thousands of dollars. The lender will require several bids and a couple of key things to fund the loan. For example, you might have an approved septic design that shows you have on site approval. The two things are perhaps the most important things to the lender are usually proof of water and sewer or septic availability. Usually they will provide you with a list of the bids that they will require to fund your construction loan.
- You will complete an application for building permit with your local building department. These are usually not very complicated and may only be a page or two long. If they have questions that you don’t understand please call your sales associate and he/she will help you with it.
- If you haven’t already done so, you will need to begin arranging for the grading of your lot, application for temporary and permanent power, and so on. The lender will usually require bids for all of these things which you will need to obtain. We urge you to care for these promptly as we cannot move forward with building your home until you do.
- If you are replacing a mobile or manufacture home, you will need to arrange the removal or demolition
- Once you have your building permits back and your financing is in place, we have a pre-construction meeting with you. At this meeting, your sales associate will introduce you to our project manager who will oversee every phase of the construction of your home. They will review the plans and home order with you, as well as any change orders you might have done. You may have already done your selections of colors and styles for your hard surfaces; however, if you have not then you can make these selections at this meeting. All customer selections must be made at this time. Any changes after this meeting incur and 100% markup fee, so you should have made your final decisions at this point.
Once the sales associate hands your order off to the project manager, it is time for us to officially start the building process.
