Hi everyone! Welcome to our blog #OstlundsGetCreative. My name is Steph, and Eric is my fiancé. We are both employees at Creative Homes, and have made the decision to build a home in one of our brand new communities, Summit Ridge!
We are very excited to share our home building journey with you and keep you updated on the decisions we’re making throughout the process - including the highs, the lows, and everything in between both in the videos we film with Austin and our blog! We are so excited that you are joining us during this exciting time of our lives!
The past couple weeks were super exciting for Eric and I. We can’t believe we signed a purchase agreement to build a home! We chose a community that fits our lifestyle, picked out a floor plan that will allow our family to grow, and made structural decisions that cross off a few of our “must-haves” in a new home. When we signed our purchase agreement, we secured our homesite so we can now begin our home building journey.
Eric and I are building the Lexington floor plan. The reason we chose this floor plan, is because we want main level living with two additional bedrooms on the main floor – one for guests and one for our baby due at the end of the month! We are planning to finish the lower level which adds a fourth bedroom to our home. We have also decided to add a wet bar, and an additional room for our portable sauna. We love to entertain and cannot wait for our lower level to be a great space to hang with our friends and family!
Although starting the process of building a home can seem overwhelming, we made a “must-have” list of rooms and various features that are most important to have in our new home, which will help guide us as we go through this process. We can't wait for what is to come and are so happy you're along for the ride! Stay tuned!
Welcome back to #OstlundsGetCreative for another update on our build! This past week, Eric and I visited the Design Studio at the Creative Homes office with our Design Studio Specialist, Claire.
Visiting the Design Studio was something that we've been looking forward to since the day we decided to build a home! After all, one of the main reasons we decided to build was so we could personalize our home exactly the way we want.
A few things we are most excited about include the selections we made in our kitchen and laundry room. In our kitchen, Claire recommended white painted cabinets to go with our gorgeous white quartz countertop that we will also use as our backsplash as it will provide a really fresh and clean look. In our laundry room, we wanted to add in a fun element, so Claire showed us a really cool navy floor design, along with navy cabinets to match, which we are deciding to implement in our laundry room.
Although the internet was an amazing resource for us to find ideas and inspiration for our home, we also visited quite a few of the Creative Homes models and brought in pictures that we wanted to mimic in our home. In fact, our laundry room (pictured below) is from one of our models in Lake Elmo at Legacy at North Star. Visiting the models really helped us to visualize what our options were and narrow down exactly what we wanted in our home.
While visiting the Design Center was fun, there were moments of frustration as we struggled to make decisions with all of the choices. Claire was incredible to help keep us focused while also listening to both what Eric and I envisioned for our home - even if we disagreed. In fact, deciding on the selections in our lower level wet bar was surprisingly our biggest frustration - we couldn't decide whether to have stained or painted cabinets and had trouble deciding on which backsplash we liked best. Claire did an awesome job providing her expertise and ideas to paint a picture for us to envision, while still considering both of our wants and keeping our budget in mind.
Eric and I can't wait to see how our design selections all come together throughout the course of our build! Thanks again for staying updated on our blog and our videos on Creative's Facebook and Instagram! We are so excited to share the next step of our build with you!
Hi everyone! Eric and I are thrilled to announce the birth of our new baby boy, Ryder! The three of us are very excited to welcome you back to #OstlundsGetCreative!
We have officially wrapped up our selections in the design center, which is a great feeling. We really enjoyed designing our home with our Design Studio Specialist, Claire. She’s helping all of our dreams become reality in our brand-new home!
At this point, the planning period has concluded, and construction will begin soon enough! We are looking forward to meeting our Neighborhood Builder as we patiently wait for our upcoming dig date. Lace up your boots and get your hard hats on – next time we connect, we’ll be on our homesite beginning construction on our brand-new home!
Thanks again for staying updated on our blog and videos on our Creative Homes Instagram and Facebook page. We can’t wait to share the next step of our build with you!
Eric and I have exciting news to share – we have officially dug on our home! After months of planning, we have now entered the construction phase of the building process. To kick off construction, we met with our neighborhood builder, Ray, for our Homeowner Pre-Build Orientation (HPBO).
First, Ray discussed our survey with us and explained the dimensions of our home site and how our home will fit in the area. After reviewing our survey, we went through our plans to make sure everyone was on the same page so Ray can ensure construction goes smoothly, and that our expectations of our home would be met throughout the construction phase of our home.
To stay updated during the build of our home, Ray let us know that him and the new home specialist would be calling on a weekly basis to share what was done in the previous week, what is scheduled for the upcoming week, and open up the floor for any questions that we may have for him. Besides the brief weekly phone call, we will be able to check our Buildertrend account to see photos posted periodically throughout our build.
The HPBO meeting was very informative, and was a great way to start off the construction phase of our build. We are beyond excited to watch our dream home be built, and we can’t wait to share photos with you throughout this journey!
Hi everyone! Welcome back to #OstlundsGetCreative! Last time we connected we had just dug on our home. When people tell you the construction process flies by, believe them! I can’t believe the progress that has been made in such a short amount of time. Now our house is completely framed, and we met with our neighborhood builder, Ray for our pre-drywall tour.
This gave Eric and I the chance to walk through our home with Ray to review framing, mechanical and electrical progress. We verified the outlets and light switches were in the right place and Ray explained what each switch was for. This tour was really fun for us because it made things feel a lot more real and helped us imagine what life could be like in our new home. We can’t wait for the next steps, because as things come along, it will only get more exciting! There are only a few more months until we’re in our dream home, so make sure you stay with us the rest of this exciting journey! We can’t wait to show you the final product!
Hi Everyone! Welcome back to #OstlundsGetCreative. As we get closer to moving into our Creative Home, I just want to thank you all for being part of this journey with Eric and me! We are beyond excited to be in our brand-new home. Whether you’ve been here since we made the decision to build, or joined our journey part way through, NOW is the time you won’t want to miss out on! Everything is coming together beautifully, and we can’t wait to show you our new home once it’s all complete!
As things start taking shape, it’s been really fun for us to vision where we will put furniture, how we want to decorate, and most importantly how our new home will accommodate to our lifestyle. We will have plenty of space for our family, and we have extra bedrooms for friends and family to spend the night, which excites us the most.
Eric and I also love to cook together. With our kitchen being about double the size of our current one, we’ll have plenty of space to make a full spread! Hopefully it doesn’t mean we’ll eat double the food, though!
Overall, I have been very impressed with the home building process. Something I have really appreciated along the way is the weekly update calls from the New Home Specialist and Neighborhood Builder. It’s been a lot of fun knowing what’s been happening in our home on a weekly basis.
Our next meeting at our home will be for our ‘Welcome Home Orientation’, and after that we finally get to move into our brand-new Creative Home!! I can’t wait to show you all the beautiful finishes we chose, so make sure you stay updated on our social media and our blog!
Since we have been giving you sneak peeks of our home along the way, I really want to share one of my favorite things in our home – our fireplace! I always thought I would want a stone fireplace, but I am loving the tile we chose!
Hi everyone! Austin here. Below is a video highlighting the Customer Care Quality walkthrough. This occurs about a week prior to closing and is our chance for our Quality Control team to go into the home and complete the 600 point quality checklist to ensure the home meets Creative Homes standards prior to the Welcome Home Orientation. Check it out!
Hi everyone! If you’re reading this blog right now, thank you for riding out the #OstlundsGetCreative journey with Eric and I until the end. After months of planning and construction, we have finally moved into our brand-new Creative Home!! We are absolutely obsessed with our home, we love the community, we’re having a ton of fun trying all the new things around us, and couldn’t be more excited to share the positive energy with our friends and family.
One thing I learned is that building a home is a very emotional process. There are so many details, and while a majority of the finishes in our home were installed perfectly, it’s only human for mistakes to be made. There were highs and lows, but the Creative Homes team fulfilled their promise of making sure everything was just right for us, as they would for any homeowner.
About a week before closing, we had our “Welcome Home Orientation” (WHO Walk) with Rob, the Customer Experience Specialist and Ray, our Neighborhood Builder. You can watch that video here:
This walkthrough was an opportunity for us to learn how to use all the “bells and whistles” in our new home. From the mechanical room, to kitchen appliances, Rob demonstrated how to use everything in our home and informed us on how to keep our home in great condition for as long as possible. This walk through also gave us the chance to find any imperfections that might have been missed during the Customer Care Quality Walk. We found a few things that needed to be touched up, and Ray got everything taken care of so we could move into our clean and complete home!
A week later, we finally closed on our home! We used a preferred lender that Creative Homes offered, so closing went very smoothly. We were then handed the keys to our home, which meant the moving and unpacking began! To be completely honest, moving is quite the chore… but, it’s so rewarding once everything is unpacked and you can finally enjoy being settled into your brand-new home!
The move has truly improved our life in so many ways, and I can’t speak highly enough about what Creative Homes was able to offer our family. It’s the coolest thing being in our home and being able to look at the finishes we selected together! It makes it all such a special experience for us. We love everything about it and constantly find ourselves questioning, “Is this really OUR home?” We have enough space for multiple people to be in the kitchen, Ryder has his own bedroom, we have a guest bedroom for our friends and family to spend the night, we have a garage that we can park in so we don’t have to shuffle cars around in the morning, we have enough space to host our family Christmas, and believe it or not, we have even been more motivated to do laundry since our laundry room is conveniently attached to our walk in closet! We couldn’t be more excited to expand and grow our family into our brand-new Creative Home. It has truly been a life changing experience.
Lastly, Eric and I want to give a special shout out to Nick Hackworthy & the Creative Homes team for all their hard work in building us our dream home. We are so grateful for the experience and are completely in love with our Creative Home. If anyone has any questions about building or buying a Creative Home, you can #AskAustin at 651-571-4806 or AskAustin@creativehci.com. Otherwise, if you’d like to see more photos of our home, please feel free to add me on Facebook: Steph Fix - I’d love to share my experience with you, or answer any questions you have about what it’s like to join the Creative Homes family.
Cheers to new beginnings!
Steph, Eric, Ryder & Grizzly
Everyone at Creative Homes was very easy to work with. They were very kind, helpful, professional and helped us through some ARC roadblocks so we could get the home we always wanted. My husband and I highly recommend Creative Homes!
From the initial conversations and choosing our lot and floor plan, to our design meeting and the actual build itself Creative's team made us feel at ease and went above and beyond. We felt like they truly cared and looked out for our best interests.
Wow! It's hard to know where to even start and I know I won't be able to list everything, but I have to try and tell you how we awesome we feel about the whole building process with Creative Homes and how much we truly love our new home. The process of building with Creative Homes was the most relaxing (sounds weird, but so true!) home building experience we have ever been through. The communication provided from the very start until the very end has been phenomenal. Not once during the whole process did we ever sit and wonder what was going on regarding our home. I honestly wish I could name everyone behind the scenes at Creative Homes who works so hard to make customers like us have such an awesome home building experience. This company has the standards and employees that all companies should take note of and follow the example of.
Hear from the Nordby's about their build experience.
