Before the shovel hits the dirt of your lot, the biggest decisions have already been made. It's important to spend some time deciding what you want. To start, where do you want the house to be? What community or part of the city? As I explained below, I chose Tuscany because it was close to where Ashley lived and close to my church. I had heard good things about the area, and it was close to a major commercial district. It seemed like the perfect place to build a house!

Chosing the builder and house was a major challenge - we first started looking at smaller start homes (under 1200 sq feet), but quickly discarded that idea. My current condo is 950 sq feet, and I wanted something that had significantly more space, not just a little more. We looked at around ten different show homes in Tuscany that were over 1500 sq feet, picked two plans that we liked (one from Cedarglen, one from Bay West), then started drilling the sales people with questions. Picking the builder was also part of that process - we liked the people at Bay West (Kimerie and Shelly). They were very helpful and supportive, answered a lot of questions for us, made us feel very much at ease, and made us feel like we were a valued customer. A few months ago Ashley and I were looking at showhomes, and I invited my parents to come along - one of the builders chose to address my father rather than me for the entire visit. That lost them the sale instantly. Note to salespeople: never assume the oldest person is the decision maker!

It took a few visits, but we chose the Aspen floor plan and added a bonus room (the floor plan link in the navigation doesn't include the bonus room). I felt that Bay West was a good builder to go with since they had an established track record of building solid homes. I asked several people who had built new houses lately, and none had heard anything negative about Bay West. Of course, none of them had built with Bay West either - so we'll see how that decision goes...