Update Nov 18, 2009: Please read The situation. Our feelings have changed since this post was written.
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It’s hard to say when the thought of building a house first entered my mind. Probably many years ago, but we first seriously considered it in late May or early June of this year. After spending months poring through online listings and rarely finding anything that hit all our criteria (we are quite picky), we decided to get a Realtor, Jim Gable, to help us look and at the same time started talking to builders. We learned a lot.

Excluding the myriad of purely custom home builders (which in this area on the north side of Indianapolis seem to mostly cater to the $500,000+ crowd, which is out of our price range), there are a number of options. However, by and large the typical family home these days is built using pre-fab construction. Large national or semi-national builders like Beazer, Ryland, Pulte, Centex, etc, all build these manufactured homes. This means that pieces of the home come out of a factory somewhere, are shipped to the build site, and assembled. They’ll build sections of wall, for example, and those will all get put together on site. It’s sort of applying the principles of mass production to home construction, meaning they can churn out more homes faster — and more cheaply. As far as we could tell at the outset, this type of home was our only option if we wanted to build in our price range.

So we looked at and priced out homes from Beazer and Ryland, and although they did have some nice floor plans (they’d gotten away from The Box), we weren’t totally in love with them. On the surface, the biggest problem with the Beazer neighborhoods tended to be the tiny, tiny lots — they really crammed those things in there. Imagine a good sized 3,000 square foot, 4 bedroom home on a 7,000 square foot lot. If you built a deck on the back of the house, it would take up half of your back yard. Literally. The Ryland neighborhood wasn’t a whole lot better. And although all the big-box builders have a certain degree of quality issues, we didn’t even bother to price out a house from the Wal-Mart of home builders, Centex. They just didn’t feel good when we walked through them, and I’d heard enough horror stories.

Aside from the lot sizes and potential quality issues of mass-produced homes, many of those neighborhoods suffer from the vinyl village effect — a high-volume builder will typically only offer 6 to 8 floor plans for an entire neighborhood, and although you have a few options for different elevations (that means what it looks like on the outside), the neighborhood still can get quite repetitive. After awhile, it became dreary to drive through some of these neighborhoods that were so obviously repeating the same few floor plans over and over and over; it didn’t help that the vinyl siding on 90% of the houses was some shade of beige or white.

We had heard of Hansen and Horn from my former boss at The Indianapolis Star, who is currently building a home with Estridge (another respected builder in the area). Estridge isn’t building on the north side of Indy right now, but he pointed out Hansen and Horn as a comparable quality builder, and it turned out they had a neighborhood in development in the perfect spot for us. I had heard they were excellent quality homes and therefore very expensive, and when I couldn’t even find base prices for the plans on their web site (Beazer, Ryland, etc. all list the base price of their home plans) I became discouraged…surely, if I have to ask, we can’t afford it, right? I also saw one house on the market in that neighborhood that had been built a few years prior, and it was listed at the top of our price range without a basement (one of our criteria), and I can tell you from experience now that a basement is a $35k-$40k add-on.

So while we weren’t exactly hopeful, we stopped by the Hansen and Horn neighborhood anyway. Immediately we loved it…the houses all looked so much more visually interesting than the beige boxes in the big builder neighborhoods. No vinyl in sight — they all used a composite fiberboard material for siding that looks like wood but doesn’t need that level of maintenance. On top of that, they had numerous different styles of siding for accent areas of the homes in addition to horizontal — shake, clapboard, or even stucco on the European-style elevations. They had distinct architectural styles and had — gasp — color! Greens, yellows, reds, blues, slates and grays, even one that was kind of a dark peachy color. The houses did not look the same. And to top it off, there was a huge park/common area in the middle of the neighborhood, with several acres of field and a playground and space for a (yet to be built) pool. As far as new suburban neighborhoods go, it looked pretty appealing. The yards weren’t all huge, but they were a lot better than 7,000 square feet like Beazer’s, and if we could snag a lot across the street from that big park in the middle…

Unfortunately, the model home and sales office wasn’t open when we came by that first time. When we eventually came back, we were able to look at the model — which was impressive (although not what we would build) — but the sales agent who could answer our questions was out of town due to a death in the family. As soon as she got back, though, Sandy contacted us and set up a time for us to come in — after hours! I was thrilled to not have to take off work (since I had just started a new job the week before).

We met with Sandy and laid out our wishlist — 4 bedrooms, main floor office space, basement, would love a loft/bonus space upstairs, and of course the price we were aiming for. Somewhat to our surprise, Sandy informed us that Hansen and Horn had just released a new series of home plans — called the True Choice series — that were priced more competitively (they obviously recognized the downward pressure on home prices lately). They were so new they weren’t even listed on the web site at the time, and we would be one of the first to build from this series of homes. We found a few that would probably meet our needs, if modified somewhat. And that’s where one of the best parts came in — Hansen and Horn, like Estridge and other high quality builders, constructs stick-built homes. That means they build the home in the traditional way — all the lumber and materials come in and everything is hand-built on-site, not manufactured somewhere else.

With a stick-built home comes great flexibility. We were able to move walls, add rooms, and completely rearrange the interior of the house to be however we wanted it. Whereas the pre-fab builders had a very limited set of options to choose from, and certainly wouldn’t let you move walls, we could do absolutely anything we wanted to our Hansen and Horn floor plan and the only cost would be if additional materials were required to build it. It’s like getting a custom home without the custom home price, and Hansen and Horn is particularly known for their quality homes. I struggled to find any complaints about them, where it was ridiculously easy to turn up dirt on Beazer, Ryland, Pulte, C.P. Morgan, and of course Centex.

Sandy helped us get some quick estimates on the major options that were really going to affect the price, and helped us work with their draftsman Aaron to customize the floor plan we chose. We started with the Jackson and changed quite a bit of it — we reversed it, added office space and a larger kitchen in place of the tandem garage space, moved the garage door, moved the stairs, expanded the master bath and closet, etc. When the numbers came in we were shocked — we could build this high quality, semi-custom home with all the space and features we wanted for barely more than the big-box pre-fab builders were quoting us. Throw in the fact that we got one of the bigger lots in the neighborhood directly across from that park I mentioned, and that Hansen and Horn has a complete 4-year “Porch to Porch” warranty (definitely the best in the area that I’ve seen), and we were sold.

Looking back, it was really a no-brainer. Granted, there was some negotiation and we got some concessions from Hansen and Horn, but overall the price was so close to what it would have been from a lower-quality builder that it freaks me out to think that if all the stars hadn’t aligned just right — we stopped by the neighborhood on a whim, they happened to have that new line of homes, we happened to get a great lot — we would have missed out. Our house is yet to built, of course, but we’re extremely comfortable and confident in Hansen and Horn, as is our Realtor Jim Gable (who used to be in home construction himself). He knows what to look for in a builder, and when we saw how impressed he was with H&H — the type of insulation they use, the low-E argon filled windows, and countless other little details that make a big difference in the long run — we were satisfied that this was the right choice. On top of that, everyone at Hansen and Horn –from our sales agent Sandy, to our draftsman Aaron, to our design consultant Christine — have been the most professional, pleasant, and helpful people we’ve encountered throughout our entire home builder search.

Know what to look for. The biggest piece of advice we’d like others to take away from this is that it pays to check out a high-quality builder and decide if the difference in price from the cheaper builders is worth it to you. Second, make sure you get yourself a Realtor who knows the home construction industry — Jim’s been invaluable to us. Third, do what feels right — after feeling indecisive for weeks about other builders, once we looked at the neighborhood, walked through the model, and spoke with Sandy, we almost immediately knew this was it.

Now all we need…is the house to be built!