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.

Design Day!

Well today was a big day, we got to choose the exterior and interior design of the house. First of all I would like to thank Cheri (and my Dad) for coming down and helping us out. With her keen eye, sense of style, and head chalked full of knowledge, Gabbi and I felt completely comfortable in the decisions made on everything. There is just way too much stuff to know, and so many questions you can ask that without Cheri's experience in what to look for we would have been completely lost.
Another thanks goes to the designer we dealt with at the Reid's Design Center, Pat. Between her and Cheri, with a teensie input from Gabbi and I , we came up with a design that I think all parties are very happy with. She had many great ideas and pointers that meshed well with what we had in mind.

On to the craziness! The exterior was pretty much done aside from a few tweaks on things that we didn't know what to do with. Stuff like the colour of the pillar on the front porch.
In some of these pictures it will be hard to tell exactly what colour is what. We chose a brick that was close to what we wanted because we couldn't have what we wanted our neighbor already had it. The only issue being that there are NO houses with the exact brick we chose, it is brand spanking new from the maker. The Garage Door only comes in so many colours, so we chose something close, and are having the trim around it painted to match. It is hard to see on the little picture to the side, but above the second story window at the front there are scallops around it up t po the peak. We chose to go siding there instead , the scallops also only come in specific colours, and I like the siding look better.

On to floor number 1.
This picture is kind of crowded with stuff, hopefully what you can see makes sense. We made a slight adjustment to the floorplan by adding another cabinet, and extending the hardwood floor to include the kitchen. So we will have hardwood in the Kitchen, Dining Room, and Living Room. Leaving the front entranceway, and the garage entrance all the way to the downstairs door vinyl. This gives us a more robust floor in the entrances to the house so we aren't tracking dirt, salt and rain on to the hardwood. Gabbi can also bring her bike in either the front, or garage door, and downstairs without tracking across the hardwood as well. So the bottom left of the above picture is the vinyl in the entrance, and powder room on the main floor. It is hard to see the wood clearly, but we went with a manufactured hardwood that has a wider board size than their standard hardwood, as well as being less prone to shrinking/expanding.
All the kitchen cabinets are made by Kitchen Craft, and we chose to go with 2 different colour cabinets, one on the island, and one everywhere else. The main colour is Natural Maple with a Mocha glaze and the island is I believe called Nutmeg. Cheri brought up the idea of contrasting the cabinets this way, and I thought it would be a great idea, especially as you look into the kitchen from the living room or dining room. The natural Door pictured isn't the exact style we chose, but it had the colours we wanted. The backsplash is tile, and that little bit of multi coloured strip will run horizontally above the first line of tile that is behind it. It has a little darker tones than the backsplash itself, and sets off the counter top and cabinetry nicely. We chose to go with Knobs on cabinet doors, and handles on the drawers. In the Kitchen they are a bronze colour. All the faucets throughout the house are Moen, I believe we chose a brushed Chrome finish on the Kitchen faucet.
There isn't much carpet on the main floor, just the stairs up and the landing, but the carpet pictured will be throughout the rest of the house.

Above is the Powder Room Counter Top and Cabinet colours, I believe the cabinet is called Sambuca. The floor is the same as the rest of the main floor vinyl. I liked the idea of dark cabinets with the light counter top. In the bathroom the cabinetry is relatively small compared to the Kitchen, and the dark stands out nicely. The knobs and handles are a brushed chrome, the Towel rack, and Toilet Paper Holder are all a brushed nickel.

Floor number 2.
This is a picture of the main bathroom on the second floor. Our original design was slightly different, but the paint scheme we chose for the house didn't match up, so back to the drawing board. The floor here is a tad lighter, with the cabinets a charcoal stained oak. I thought black cabinets would be daring, but after seeing the counter top, floor and cabinet together, with the crushed chrome metal finishes, it will look quite stunning. This is the largest bathroom in the house so the cabinet here is a bit larger and the Black will hopefully contrast well with the white bathtub.
This is a picture of the En suite Bathroom setup. Again the Sambuca cabinet, and the same floor as the main level Vinyl but with a counter top that looks like aged leather. The pillow in the photo is from our bed set, Gabbi liked it enough that the house had to be designed around the pillow. It is in there to show how it apparently does not clash with the bathroom. I guess if someone needs to sleep on the bathroom floor after a hard night, they at least will look good doing so.
I saved the paint till last because honestly, I can't remember what goes where. I BELIEVE the darker shade to the right is the main floor, the middle is all the bedrooms, and left are the bathrooms. I really couldn't tell you truthfully what goes where, but we DO have photos, so you can just imagine it all yourself.


Not part of the interior design, but we went and looked at appliances today at London Major Appliances. I guess we get somewhat of a deal through them because of Reid's Heritage Homes dealing through them. We settled on Black appliances in the Kitchen. Both Gabbi and I have always wanted Stainless finished appliances, but after looking at the colour we chose, the black looks really nice. Stainless seems to have become too fashionable for me I guess, so I have mellowed in preference over the years. Don't get me wrong, it is beautiful looking stuff, but it doesn't fit as well as black in out kitchen design.
This was just a random photo of us working away. Left is the Reid's designer Pat, Cheri in the red, with Gabbi and I pretending we are helping and know what the hell the other two are talking about.

I hope this comes out alright. I was trying to post while all was fresh in my mind, and trying to get it done before we headed off to Memphis and New Orleans.

Energy Star

One of the reasons we chose Reid's Heritage Homes as our builder was the Energy Star certification. Yes the same Energy Star sticker that you see on your computer monitor, or dishwasher is on our House. In 2005 Reid's started to build Energy Star certified homes not only to generate business with the new environmentally conscious customer, but to build a better performing home in general.
So what do they do to make a house Energy Star certified? Well there are a bunch of things that are needed, and Reid's adds a couple of things extra that go beyond what is needed.
First off there is an HRV installed. What is an HRV you ask? It is an air to air heat exchanger, so more fresh air gets circulated through the house, as well the furnace doesn't have to work as hard heating the fresh air when it is on. Of course Wikipedia has a great article on what it does. Not only does the furnace not have to work as hard, but allergy and health wise it is much better due to no stale air in the home.
What else? Well all the equipment put into the home by the builder is itself Energy Star certified. From the Furnace to the Appliances (if you have them buy them for you) all are certified Energy Star. All of the light bulbs put into the house are compact fluorescent. All of the seams on the duct work are sealed (you would expect every house to be this way but apparently it isn't code) Even all the wiring is spray foamed where holes are made to make the house air tight.
Most of the insulation in the house have R values above code or recommended requirements. For example I believe Code requirements for a cathedral ceiling is R28, they put in R32. The Basement walls are insulated R12 all the way to the floor, not just halfway down like most houses are. To also help with heating and cooling requirements, the house comes with a compliant programmable thermostat.
All the windows in the house are Low E Argon which lets a lot of energy in, but very little out.
One of the COOLEST things Reid's does isn't part of the Energy Star initiative, but it is a real nice addition, it is called the Power Pipe. No this has nothing at all to do with electricity directly, but plumbing. What happens to all that hot water when you take a shower? It just goes down the drain into a sewer correct? What if there was a way to recover the energy from that hot water? Well there is, and the Power Pipe is it.



That is a picture of one installed. Basically what it does is, when you take a shower or use the dishwasher etc, the hot water goes down the drain, and your water heats up more to replace what you use. Where the Power Pipe helps is when the hot water goes down the drain, it preheats the water going into the water heater by using the heat from your waste water. Pretty damn cool eh? According to their website, the Power Pipe can save up to 40% on water heating costs just by reusing your wasted hot water.
Right now the Demo model that they have that is the same as ours was built before the Energy Star initiative from Reid's so it will be slightly different. I did walk through one of the newer model homes that is certified, and I must say I cannot find a draft anywhere, the thing is sealed tight. Which makes it a good thing that there is an HRV to give us fresh air.

First Meeting

So we had our first meeting with the Project Coordinator, and I am happy to say she is great. I think we had a lot of fun, even though it sounds kind of boring.
We went over the official grading diagram, giving us how the property will be graded, which way water will flow etc. This showed us how big our yard will be front and back, how steep the driveway gets graded, and that eventually there will be a sidewalk in front of the house.
We got to go over the engineering and electrical diagrams as well in case we had any changes to structure or electrical we wanted to make. We got to pick where the Phone and Cable jacks were as well as electrical jacks (within limits to code of course). Placement of everything like the Furnace, Heat Exchanger and Air Conditioner we didn't change since they put them all in places that make sense to us.
In Ontario all (at least the reputable) builders belong to the Tarion Warranty system. Since we have never purchased a new home before the Project Coordinator made sure to go into detail how it all works, who to contact when etc. It seems strange buying a house with a warranty on it to me, I guess I am used to people I know buying used and older homes, and dealing with issues as they arise themselves. Because I am not the most handy of people, this gives me serious piece of mind when it comes to repair issues, at least for a bunch of years.
The COOLEST part of the visit though was our safety equipment. During our first house inspection, the house is still a construction zone, and safety Boots and Helmet must be worn on site. Well Reids Heritage Homes provides us with both, to keep!


I needed a pair of rubber boots. I need to draw flames or something on the hat though, plain red is kind of meh.