Our pick...

In the end we decided to go with Bonadelle. We originally prefered their homes over the ones we had seen before, but the price was outside of our budget. For some luck of faith, my husband happened to stop by their sales office the day that they reduced the price.


We went in, got the ball rolling, and selected a lot. However, they never disclosed that a PG&E substation was going to be going up behind the house. Before we can say "WTH" they had already started construction when the PG&E substation went up.

We were lucky enough to switch lot without paying the required $5K lot change fee. Also, we had pretty much negotiated and got everything that we wanted as well as getting the builder to throw in a few free upgrades, waive the lot fee, pay $5K in closing cost, and get them to buy down 1 point from our loan when we locked the rate. At the time that we changed our lot, we were able to just move everything that was negotiated over to the new lot and lucky for us the base price had already went up by $10K.

Well here is a picture of our lot before the construction process. The little boy in the picture is our nephew, Steven.



Tip: Building a home is not easy. Stay in communication with your agent and the builder and put everything in writing. It's important to know that addendum can be added to the contract. You can always negotiate up until your house is finish.