Buying a house - the upgrades

Perhaps the most exciting and stress free period after becoming a first time home owner is the time in between giving your initial down payment and your first mortgage payment.  My wife and I are first time home owners and bought a new house in June 2011 with a closing date of May 15, 2012.  So far I have spent most of those six months watching the DIY television channel learning how to build decks and finish basements and also wondering what sort of technical expertise does Tony Siragusa have to be hosting a television show on that network. Of course we are eager to finally move into a house that we can call our own but waiting a year for our house to be built has allowed us to get more prepared and save more money.  

Everybody has a friend on Facebook who just bought a new house and floods their account with pictures of the status of their house as it is being built.  Similarly there is the friend who is renovating their older house and also updating their profile picture to show what stage their upgrades are at.  I am not one of these people who get excited about cabinets or kitchen counters getting installed as to me our house is just a pile of dirt.  It literally is a pile of dirt beside other piles of dirt with the only distinguishing feature being a wooden stake in the ground of our dirt with our lot number written on it.  On the other hand, my wife is somebody who does get excited about the progress of our house (I think she has driven by the dirt around 10 times now and the dirt still looks the same the tenth time she went by compared to the pictures she took of the first visit) and will be posting a ton of pictures on Facebook as she just doesn't see a pile of dirt like I do but she instead sees "our dirt."

Our upgrade consultation was last month and we were a bit nervous since unlike some builders, ours did not allow us to visit their third party design studio beforehand making it difficult to visualize what our house could potentially look like.  To make matters worse, there were quite a few negative reviews from previous home owners and their experience with the design centre ranging from the inflated prices to the limited time you have at the centre (four hours) to the actual specialist assigned to them.  The only information that we were provided was a spreadsheet of some of the possible upgrades available.  It follows that we had only four hours to choose our upgrades and colors that would be in our house for the rest of our lives with no real chance to prepare. 

(side note: after having our contract mailed to us, it was another five months until we received anything from our builder about the purchase of our house and I guess that I expected more from the builder [maybe a keychain?] since after all we are spending half a million dollars.)

The upgrade process was not nearly as stressful as we were led to believe it could be.  After spending only half of the allotted four hours, we were done our consultation.  In total we spent just over $10000 on our upgrades.  Of the $10000 in upgrades more than half went into upgrading from carpeted stairs to stained oak stairs with metal pickets and the rest was mostly dumped into the kitchen and bathroom.  We were actually just under $10000 but decided to add an upper angle cabinet in the kitchen (whatever that is) so that we could be slightly over $10000.  In terms of financing, the way our builder and this third party decor centre worked was that if we had spent under $10000 then all of the cost would be due right away but if we spent over $10000 then we could roll half of it into our mortgage with the remainder due upfront.  

These additional upgrades are separate from others that we have already received from the builder. When we bought our house the builder was offering free hardwood floors on the main level which saved us approximately another $5000.  Furthermore, we were lucky enough to have our site plan changed (due to builder error) and we will also be getting a walkout basement, a bigger deck (from a 4'x6' to an 8'x10') and sliding doors at no extra cost which amounts to another $15000 in upgrades.

(side note: the sales rep actually told us that the builder did not feel right asking us for more money due to his mistake.  I almost laughed that he was phrasing it in a way that it was even possible for the builder to ask us for more money. I guess he was just trying to make us feel even better than we were.)   

Six months since our purchase and we are halfway to finally living in our new house.  As silly as it may sound, I sort of forgot about the new house and the upgrade appointment kind of brought back a little bit of excitement to this whole process.  Regardless, upgrades like a walkout basement, oak stairs and upper angle cabinets are still just ideas on paper and all that we really have right now is dirt.

(side note: I actually had to Google "upper angle cabinet" and still cannot figure out how they are useful to anybody but short people who might have trouble reaching the back of a regular cabinet)