The Experience

As I stated in my first post, we are excited about the home building process. In this post, I will document our experience at the various stages of the home building process.

Our experience so far has been sometimes pleasant, sometimes worrisome. Things have taken a bit longer than we initially thought. We broke ground 6 months after we signed a contract with ANV and 5 months after we settled on the lot. A lot of progress has been made since we settled on our property in late June 2010, but some steps such as finalizing the grading plan and submitting the finalized architectural drawings took longer than anticipated. We are hopeful that we will gain momentum now that construction has started.

LAND Engineering PLC
LAND Engineering PLC is the company we hired to perform land engineering services such as creating the grading plan, site stakeout, brick points, etc. This company is on ANV’s recommended vendors list, that’s why we chose it.

The owner of the company, who is the person that we’ve dealt with so far, is a very pleasant guy to work with. Although we haven’t met him face to face, he is always accessible to us to ask questions and discuss matters related to his work. This was quite helpful to us since we are first time home builders and there are a lot of things that we didn’t understand. We appreciated the fact that he took his time to explain things to us.

Although we were satisfied with his accessibility, we are a bit disappointed by his slow turnaround time. We felt that generally he didn’t turnaround things as quickly as we would have liked. For example, it took over 2 months for the grading plan to submitted and approved. We understand some of this time is attributable to the county’s review process, but we felt that even when the county requested revisions, LAND Engineering’s response was a bit slow. Another example of LAND Engineering’s slow response time was during the step of doing the brick points which results in work slowing down for multiple days because LAND Engineering was not able to do the brick points quickly.

Country Excavating
Our experience with Country Excavating, which is the company that we hired for site preparation work, has been very pleasant so far. Not only have they done a great job with the site work but we have also continued to experience the outstanding customer service that we were exposed to during the pre-sales process. We are very happy with Country Excavating's services and greatly appreciate their professionalism.

ANV Group
Our experience with ANV has also been very pleasant so far. One of the factors that led us to choose ANV over the competition was the outstanding customer service it offers which ANV has continued to provide throughout the process. ANV staff at various levels has been very helpful and has been extremely patient with us. The owner of the company, Neil Puri, is a very pleasant guy to work with and has been accessible to us on multiple occasions. When we encountered matters that required his consultation and approval, he’s been very accommodating.

In the past few months, as we worked through the selection of additional features, ANV has gone out of its way to accommodate our requests. They allowed us to visit their design center multiple times and have patiently answered our multitude of questions. They allowed us to make multiple revisions to the 2nd floor floor plan which is much appreciated especially since we made some mistakes which they allowed us to correct.

Another matter that we were very impressed by is the fact that ANV honors its word even on matters that are not in the contract. Over the last few months, we’ve had multiple verbal discussions and email exchanges discussing additional features, optional items and discounts. During the pre-construction meeting, which is when everything is finalized, ANV kept its word on discounts and additional features that were discussed outside of the contract. We were very impressed by this.

Although we’ve been happy with our experience so far, it’s not to say everything has gone smoothly. As pointed out in earlier posts, some things such as the submission of the architectural drawings, have taken longer than we anticipated. This has caused us some worry since we have to make sure that the house is completed by mid June, 2011. June 2011 is when the term of our one year construction loan ends. We’ve expressed this concern to ANV, and we’ve been assured that our house will definitely be completed by June, 2011. We’re keeping our fingers crossed and we look forward to more pleasant experience with ANV in the next few months as the construction our new home progresses.


I will keep updating this post and documenting our experience as construction progresses…