Actual Pieces of House

Went by the "house" today, and we have our first pieces of actual house. They poured in the gravel, and the footings for the foundation, as well as dropping off the mold pieces for the foundation.

As you can see they have started to lay out the molds for the foundation in the back right of the photo. Yesterday was horrid weather here, I am sure they didn't get much , if anything done. It looks like the weeping tile has been put down around the foundation as well.
Now that they have the footings down, I guess the layout will be the opposite of all the drawings etc. Every single picture, drawing or diagram we have including the kitchen, has the layout the opposite of this. I guess that also means the water line will come into the house at the front, where the rough-in washroom area is as in the demo.

O well , going to make this a short post, as I already left a War and Piece long one below today.

Investigative work

This post really has nothing to do with the house per se, rather an investigation into third party complaints we have heard about "Reid's". You will figure out why the quotes in a minute. This is probably going to be long, I like to hear myself type.
Here's a little story : When we chose the builder for our Home, a lot of the initial information came from word of mouth. We knew people who had built homes in the past, and got to hear their experiences with multiple builders around the London area and elsewhere. Multiple times, Reid's Heritage Homes was mentioned, and every time, these firsthand tellings had nothing but amazing things to say. In fact some people were planning on, or had, built multiple Reid's Heritage Homes. We did come upon many people who had nothing but terrible experiences with some builders, these will remain nameless. Doing more digging through the London Home Builders Association website, we found more great things about Reid's Heritage Homes. Multiple Awards had been given to them, including Builder of the Year for 2007. Investigating further led to the Ontario Home Builders Association, where again Reid's Heritage Homes had multiple awards for 2007, including design awards for their houses and Green Builder of the Year for 2007. Did the Better Business Bureau have a ton of registered complaints about Reid's Heritage homes? Nope. How about the Warranty company? Nope, in fact yet another Builder of the Year award there. Are these guys too good to be true? there must be SOMEONE who has had issue, I mean these guys build a lot of houses.
One day , while going through the Demo house, we came across a complaint first hand, well kind of. This guy purchased his house second hand, so he was the second owner of the home in question. He was coming over to inspect the Demo house to see what they had done differently than his house. When we asked if he had any issue with his house or the builder, he quickly gave answer. Apparently the loft in his house was "useless", too many stairs to get to it, hmmm. Another issue was the en suite bathroom was much too small, he came to see if they made it bigger in the Demo , he thought they did but measured and was incorrect. The odd thing here is, if he actually built the house and didn't get the loft option, the en suite would have been bigger (the stairs get in the way) solving both issues. He parted from us with a "You better watch them closely, they like to cut corners". Finally proof that Reid's Heritage Homes isn't infallible! Yeah I know that is stretching it.
After finally choosing Reid's Heritage Homes as our builder, we felt very confident. Then one day talking to someone at work whom I was just informing of our decision, I got an odd comment. "You went with Reid? be very careful, I had a friend who built with them and had a very bad experience". Hmm odd, I had yet to find a complaint, let alone a "very bad experience". O well, they can't be perfect, I still think we made the correct choice. Then the next week, the same thing " I had a buddy that built with them, they are horrible". Horrible? Really? Wow, seemed like a rather harsh wording to me. Everyone has different expectations I guess , good AND bad are relative terms. Over the next couple of weeks, we had a couple more people tell us to "be careful" with Reid etc. It started to get rather startling, I mean I did some serious checking into this. This is the largest purchase we have ever made, and I wasn't going to just pick some schmo off the street to do it. An odd thing happened next. Driving north of where we currently live, there was a small sign by the side of the road. We stopped at the red light by it, and what was the sign for? A company called Reid Homes. Yes, there are two builders with a name that close, in the same damn city. The weird thing was, this company hadn't come up in any of the research I had done about builders. So I went back to all the builder associations, the BBB, Tarion etc, and what did I find? Actually nothing at all. The London Home Builders Association doesn't list them as a builder in the area, odd. The Ontario Home Builders Association has no mention of them at all. The Tarion Warranty Corporation doesn't mention them at all. The Better Business Bureau has no listing of them, at least as a member. According to their website, they have been in business since 1947, of course what that means I don't know. Sifting through their website there is no mention at all about a warranty, only that you get 3 hours with the builder at the end of your first year when you go through your end of year inspection. Actually , going through their website doesn't inform you much at all.
Now I am not trying to present Reid Homes as some sort of piece of crap builder, I do not have any direct evidence of the sort. It just seems an odd coincidence that there are 2 builders with names so close, in the same business , in the same city. One of them is going to have a better reputation than the other. What comes to mind though is that one of these businesses looks like a "leech"so to speak. What happened with us and the bad experiences, which may or may not be Reid Homes related, started to make our builder look "bad" so to speak. This also works the other way. Because the names are so close, it is easy to get confused between the two. The builder with the great reputation can also pass on that reputation to another undeserving company. I couldn't say how many , if ever, this has happened, but mentioning this situation to others makes them draw the same conclusion. Going back to clarify from the people reporting bad experiences, they cannot tell me right off which builder is which.
Even if there is no connection to this found information and what I have heard, it makes me feel better. When there are two companies with essentially the same name in an area and you go by third party word-of-mouth stories, there is no telling who it could be about. There are just that many more people out there that could have a "horrible" experience with one, which ends up placing future "blame" on the other.
Hearing peoples experiences with a builder was rather high on my list of how to decide who to build our home for us, so when we started to hear conflicting testimonies AFTER the decision, it really muddied the waters so to speak. After dealing with all the people that we have dealt with so far at Reid's Heritage Homes , I don't think there is any question that we made the correct decision though.

Ok piece of mind post completed. This post took a while, (when I mean a while, I mean a couple of days) so it rambles on and around a lot, I lost my train of thought a couple of times. After finding that Reid Homes sign I had to make a post though, just because it was such an odd thing.

We Have Hole!!

And a bonus pile of dirt to boot.

We drove by the lot yesterday, and noticed orange markers were laid out and surmised they may be digging rather soon. We were correct.

Judging by where the drain and water line is in the photo, they are going to be better placed than in the demo model. Of course this is a rough guess as it is just a big hole in the ground.
WOW I guess it has really started, it doesn't seem "real" until there is something tangible to show for it, if a hole can be considered something tangible since it is a LACK of something. O well, I am excited, usually holes are bad things to have unless you are talking colanders, but I will chalk this one up to being something good.

Faucets and Locks

Just a quick post to show what door levers and faucets we decided on. I thought, well I have the information, might as well put it up.


Faucets are all Delta Faucets and the door Levers and front door lock are done by Kwikset.

ooo exciting

Interior is Final...I think

We had out final design meeting today, really had to sign and initial the forms that had all the new upgrades etc. We went over all the design codes and names for everything, double checking that all the codes were correct. Good thing too, the wrong code was down for the flooring, so that got corrected. Who knows, we could have ended up with purple floors!
One thing we DID get were drawings of the cabinets, yay. Of course they are only in Black and White, so it is still hard to visualize the colours all together.

This is the overhead of the Kitchen. To the right will be where the Dining Room is, top/topright the Living Room, and I guess directly toward the top is the end of the entrance hallway and the doorway downstairs. Because of the open concept of the room, there is a rather largish post sticking out holding the rest of the building up. We decided to build the island around the pole, the standard one would just but up against it. It also matches the cabinet on the other side of the stove somewhat, that goes into the dining room area.


Here we have the "left" of the Kitchen. Stove and Sink on this side. Beside the stove we have added 2 Pot and Pan drawers, with an extra wide smaller drawer on top. In the corner cabinet we added a Lazy Susan. corner cabinets are always odd in shape, and I think without a Lazy Susan, you really cannot make use of the space very well. Unless of course you just throw bigger stuff in there, but we have other cabinets for that stuff. All I can say is whoever Susan was, I don't think she was necessarily lazy but rather ingenious. Yes there is a window there above the sink, that is not some odd out of wack cabinet.

I guess this would be the "right" side of the kitchen. not that there was anything "wrong" with the other side. Nothing was changed here from standard. Dishwasher, Fridge and Microwave this side. There were a couple of options available here, like a wine rack over the fridge, and/or over the microwave. I don't drink THAT much wine, nor would I want to give up rather nice places to hide junk. I mean who ever goes in the cabinet above the fridge?


This is just a shot of what the island will look like. The big difference here is that instead of being Natural Maple, we made the island Toffee Maple in colour. This should add a very nice contrast. After looking at photos online of how many kitchens are done like this, I have to say yes it will look great. Quick note here also, in the Demo house, the island only has the 4 doors. This has 4 doors with added 4 drawers. We have so much storage space, in the kitchen, it is going to take us forever to fill it all up. (forever = 2 weeks by the way)



This last shot I decided to grab some of the pictures I could find online, and pop on some doors etc to see what it would look like. I didn't take much time on it so it is rather rough, but should give an idea of the cabinet colours awith the counter top. The doors are not the correct design, I couldn't find a picture of the correct one in the correct colour.



Nothing is properly to scale, I grabbed photos off multiple sites and pasted them in. None of the colours will looks correct as well because different lighting for different photos, but you get the idea

EDIT***

I decided to make one for the Island as well.