Last week I shared part one of our DC real estate journey. To quickly recap, we committed to buying a brand new condo, pre-construction in DC in March of 2019 with hopes of being in our new home by Fall of 2019. In the previous post I talked about why we felt like new construction was the right choice for us and the steps we took to secure our unit. You can read the full post here.
Today I am going to share the highlights from 2019.
Spring 2019
By April 2019 all the paperwork was finalized and we were so excited about moving into our brand new condo in the Fall. Over the course of the next six months, I was excited to track all the progress. I would daydream about popping over to the new place and seeing how the plans were coming together. I will admit that I started bombarding the sales team with design questions. Again, we didn’t really know a ton of details since we signed so quickly and so early.
Looking back, I realize how silly this was. The sales team could care less about my design plans. I don’t mean this to be negative. I just want to highlight my own naivety in thinking that the sales team had anything on their mind beyond selling. We were locked in so their work was done. I was hoping that this time would be one full of creativity and conversation but I now realize it was very transactional. Lesson learned.
I’m assuming that I exhausted the team with my design questions so the team became less accommodating. I took me following up to get responses. I felt that I was being a nuisance. It was hard to navigate this space where we had made a major investment and wanted our questions answered but also didn’t want to bother the team who was busy trying to sell units to other buyers.
By late Spring, my only question was on timeline. Were we still on track for a Fall 2019 delivery? I am glad I asked because I was informed that delivery was more likely going to happen in Q1 2020. Imagine if I hadn’t asked…
Summer 2019
By the summer, I had curtailed my emails but I was anxious to get back in the unit and see the progress and take some measurements. I reached out in early July to schedule another hard hat tour. The sales rep said that tours were limited to specific days and that they hadn’t even hung drywall up in our unit yet. I decided to pass and wait until more progress had been made. I circled back at the end of the month and was able to schedule a tour for late July.
At this point it had been four months so I was surprised when the unit looked to be almost the exact same.
However, I wasn’t concerned because I knew there was likely progress being made that I couldn’t see like wiring, plumbing, etc. I quickly took measurements, because again I could tell that I was being annoying. I don’t even have pictures from this visit because I was so concerned that I was wasting the team’s time. I felt like there was now this constant tension in the air whenever I communicated with the team. Not a great feeling when you have just made the biggest purchase of your life.
Winter 2019
Fall came and went. We renewed our lease per the email exchange earlier in the year that officially pushed back delivery to Q1 2020. We would have our apartment until April 2020 so we were fine to patiently wait. We rang in the new year and in late January 2020 we finally got an update on delivery. Looking back on that email chain now, I can’t believe what actually happened.
More on that next week.
