Buying A Home
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Our tech team has launched updates to The Nest today. As a result of these updates, members of the Nest Community will need to change their password in order to continue participating in the community. In addition, The Nest community member's avatars will be replaced with generic default avatars. If you wish to revert to your original avatar, you will need to re-upload it via The Nest.
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Note: This only affects The Nest's community members and will not affect members on The Bump or The Knot.
Our tech team has launched updates to The Nest today. As a result of these updates, members of the Nest Community will need to change their password in order to continue participating in the community. In addition, The Nest community member's avatars will be replaced with generic default avatars. If you wish to revert to your original avatar, you will need to re-upload it via The Nest.
If you have questions about this, please email help@theknot.com.
Thank you.
Note: This only affects The Nest's community members and will not affect members on The Bump or The Knot.
For those that have custom- built their home-- come in!
Tell me about your experience-- first, did you use an architect or just go with a general contractor? Were they open to many of your ideas? Anything you would have done differently if you were able to do it again?
If anyone did this in central IA that would help me even more 
Re: For those that have custom- built their home-- come in!
We're in the process and scheduled to break ground next week.
We decided not to use an architect. We found a house plan we really liked and had a designer do all the changes we wanted. Going with an architect would have been ~$10-15k. Since I didn't see the point of starting from scratch, I didn't want to pay $$$ for an architect to draw/design a house. If we didn't find a plan we liked, then we probably would have gone to an architect. FYI, I looked through TONS of house plans.
The general contractor we have chosen is 100% open to our ideas. This all depends on who you chose. The other builders we considered seemed to be not very flexible with changes or with our requests.
As mentioned above, we're breaking ground next week. You know what, I'm still making revisions on the basement plan. That's how flexible our builder. It will be like that until we are done. He works for us and will do what we want unless it's a code violation (I would think, lol).
I would say, I'm really glad we decided to change builder. We were somewhat set with someone else a few months ago, then changed because of communication issues. Now, I really like the flexibility we have with our current builder. We can choose where to cut corners and where spend more. Any savings with subcontractors means savings to us, not the builder. Plus, we can claim the state sales tax deduction.
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