Respect

A year ago, when my wife and I first began telling people that we were going to build a new home, rather than purchase an existing home, nearly every comment we heard had a negative tone. We were told things like, "Hope you have a good marriage counselor" and, "Why would you want to do something like that to yourselves" and, "You better plan on spending every moment over their shoulders making sure things get done right". Needless to say, we worried that we were making the right decision. A great deal of that worry had, in hindsight, a lot to do with the homebuilder that we were speaking to at the time. Something just didn't seem quite right. They were certainly established in the area, one of the top local names, but instead of listening to what we were saying about what we wanted in our new home, we were shown pre-printed plans for two different models and told these were our choices. Fortunately for us, we had yet to make a commitment before the Parade of Homes weekend. We decided to take advantage of the open houses to find out if all builders operated in this way. Well, we are now two weeks from closing on our beautiful new home and we can say without question that NO, not all builders operate that way. Thank goodness!!

As we made our way from house to house that Saturday, we found ourselves at the Cornerstone Model in Harrison Highlands. Wow. But we weren't able to build a home in that price range, so we were just having a little fun. Boy is it lucky for us that we didn't leave without speaking to Kristy! She introduced us to Tony and explained how they were bringing the same standards that we were seeing in the beautiful Harrison Highlands Model and building homes more in our price range under the Wade Homes brand. Same builder, same standards, but something we could afford. Bingo! If I remember correctly, that was about the time we asked Kristy if we could see some printouts of the models they offered. She explained that they didn't do things quite that way and two weeks later we were sitting across the table from Tony Hardebeck, and while he listened to our thoughts on what our house should look like he sketched a preliminary floor plan right in front of us. We were floored (no pun intended)!!! That preliminary sketch will be framed and prominently displayed on a wall two weeks from now!!

So far, so good, right? But surely the actual building process would be a horribly stressful experience … I mean everybody said it would, so it had to be true. Nope. The process employed at Cornerstone/Wade Homes somehow eliminates the stress. Or maybe the people employed at Cornerstone/Wade Homes eliminate the stress. Or, maybe it's a combination of the two. Bottom line is this has not been a stressful experience at all. On the contrary … it's been fun! (And to answer your question … No, I am not being paid to write this!!) It really has been fun! I'm not going to lie and say there haven't been one or two slightly stressful moments along the way, but in hindsight those moments were more about our worries, having never built a home before, that something wasn't going right as opposed to something going wrong. I can honestly say that when we are in a position to build another home in the future my first and only call will be to Tony, Kristy and Dan at Cornerstone/Wade Homes.

Now that we are so close to the end of the building process, those same people that had the negative comments are asking things like, "Still married?" and "Got any hair left?" and we just kind of laugh and tell them what a great time we've had building this house and how wrong they were … and the next thing they ask, without exception, is, with their head tilted quizzically to one side … "Who was your builder?"