After weeks amd weeks of searching, driving all around Richmond, 'visiting' houses in all stages of construction, we finally made a decision. We had been checking out a neighborhood in (near?) Hanover, but were not getting much help from the realtor. We wanted to be able to see some houses with the floorplans we were interested in, but he was not getting us information very quickly. Saturday we drove waaaay south to see 1 of the 2 he'd located for us, but after walking through, decided it just wasn't right. Too many bedrooms and formal rooms, not enough good living space.

Since we were already that far south we decided to visit a Ryan neighborhood with the model house in the floorplan we like. We ended up making an appointment for later in the day with Judy, the sales rep for Ashbury at Stoneleigh, the new neighborhood we were interested in.

The first thing she told us was that in the 2 months since we'd last come in and talked to her, the prices of all the houses had gone up by about $27,000. DOH! That's a major change, but the reason is because they're selling so fast. With such high demand, they'e just going to keep increasing the prices, because people are still going to keep buying.

We talked more about the house, options, prices. We reconfigured the house with all the options we wanted and got the semi-final price of it. We took all that home and pondered until yesterday's meeting.

And then we signed a contract.

We still have to meet with the mortage people, the bank people, and the decorating people, but we have plenty of time for some of that. We won't even be able to move in until July-ish of 2006. That's a lot of waiting, but we know the value is going to continue rising, in the new house, as well as our townhouse.

We both walked out of there last night still kinda of shell shocked. But today I'm really excited!! Yay!!

There's not a picture online that shows the front elevation we've chosen, but here's the Floorplans