.... and it's been a stressful and exciting one!
I don't even know where to begin! Y'all already know about our shenanigans on closing day with the cleaners coming in our house, our closing the garage door on the car.....
Well, the stories just keep getting better.
Gonna try to go in chronological order here, but that might not happen, lol!
MOVING DAY:
Our movers show up bright and early at 9 AM {okay, so not so early, but we were happy to get a morning time slot}. We had both of our cars packed with stuff because this company charged by the piece instead of by the hour. So the more boxes and such we could take over ourselves, the better!
Once they got started packing up our stuff into the truck, we loaded the dogs into my car and I headed over to the house. I drive a little VW bug. Both dogs started out on the front passenger seat, but it wasn't long before Cody made his way to my lap. Then, Crosley decided he wanted over too, but Cody thought that was too crowded (which it was) so he made himself comfy on the passenger seat.
Well, about 5 minutes away from our NEW HOME, Crosley decides he wants to vomit. He's still a puppy and hasn't gotten the hang of car rides yet. We were on back roads so I was able to get him into the passenger seat while he was sick, but then both dogs immediately jumped in my lap for the remainder of the car ride to the house. No one wanted yucky ole vomit on them.
When I pulled into the driveway, our PM was walking up to the front door and knocking. He had mentioned he was going to stop by to make sure everything was going well and to make sure our keys worked on all the doors as they had to be re-keyed for us. So, I park the car, attempt to get the dogs out. Crosley jumps out right away but Cody doesn't like this new territory and wants to stay in the car. So, I have carry him out of the car. Our PM asked if he should come back, and I told him that he didn't need to.
In the house we go. Our basement door hadn't been re-keyed so that needed to be done. I don't know if I mentioned it or not, but the cleaning crew that had been in the house had told us that our half bath toilet was "running constantly" and they noticed it while they were cleaning the toilet {aka using it to relieve themselves}. So, our PM was out to look at that too.
So in the house we go. We are standing in the kitchen and our PM was looking at the toilet, and Cody decides to poo in the kitchen.
Way to christen the hardwood floors my sweet boy.
Right in front of the PM. It was gross. But, he was nervous and I hadn't really given him a chance to go outside because we had immediately come inside.
So now I have poo on the floor and vomit in the car.
I scrambled to find some TP or something to pick up the mess. Well, of course, PM is working on the toilet downstairs. So, I decided to just throw the poo outside over the deck. Fertilizer for the yard, right?
The toilet was constantly running because of some dirt and grit that was under the plunger. The plunger wasn't able to go down because of it.
So, while our PM cleaned that out, he also broke a piece inside the toilet. So now he has to call the plumber to come out to fix a broken toilet.
Moving day also meant refrigerator delivery day! We ended up having both the movers there and the fridge being delivered at the same time and nearly completely blocked the street at one point, haha! But, our fridge was delivered, it's beautiful and I don't think I could love it any more than I do.
The movers were really efficient getting everything out of the town house and into the new house. I'm a little bummed because they did scratch a piece of hardwood near the stairs, and they really banged up the trim outside the laundry room. We have a call into their claims department and are waiting to hear back.
The plumber also came out and fixed the broken piece on the toilet in the half bath and all is well with that toilet now.
FIRST COUPLE DAYS IN THE HOUSE:
So, we noticed this on moving day, and we had to deal with it for a couple of days.... We didn't have hot water :-(
Yep. No hot water.
We had luke-warm water at best, but not hot water. Chatting with our two neighbors across the street, I learned a thing or two about hot water heaters. I learned about the thermostats on them, and even figured out how to adjust them.
So we adjusted the thermostats on them, but still only luke-warm water.
So I text our PM the next morning and he stopped by to check it out. He also checked the thermostats, and thought that maybe one of the heating elements was bad on the water heater. So, he set up an appointment to get someone out to check out the hot water heater.
Water heater guy changes the elements, and we still only have luke-warm water. Ugh. He thinks that it has something to do with the plumbing in the house. Like lines being mixed somewhere. NOT what I want to hear.
So our PM comes back to check on things, and to install a cabinet front in the master bath that was scratched. Well, the cabinet front was the wrong one so he had to get another one for us. He also messed with the hot water heater and he felt that it was a water heater issue and not a plumbing issue, so he wanted to get the water heater guy back out to check things out again.
Fast forward to a couple hours later. The cabinet guy was now at our house touching up some spots on our cabinets that had dings or needed sanded down. PM says he has talked with the plumber and the plumber has given him a couple of things to try.
So here's what they did: They adjusted the water mixing valve on the hot water heater. The valve has something to do with our master bath being ginormous and the bath tub and yada yada, so apparently the mixing valve had been turned all the way "on" and was mixing too much cold water. Easy peasy fix and we now have glorious hot water.
Oh! And our PM "took" a cabinet front from another house and put it on ours. So that was taken care of, lol!!
Left on our list from our pre-settlement walk through include fixing some stone on the front porch that had fallen off (pretty much after installation, and it's just been sitting on the porch) and one of our loft windows needs replaced because it's cracked.
The sprinklers that were in our yard from Ryan Homes were taken pretty quickly to put into another yard, so we had to put our own hoses down. We got some snazzy timers that turn the sprinklers on automatically. I think we have 6 hoses and 6 sprinklers going to hopefully keep our yard growing.
I got all of the pieces put together on our IKEA shelving unit for the TV. It's gorgeous. The problem is that I am entirely too nervous to try and put the top pieces up myself as they have to be screwed into the wall. This means wood screws, finding studs and leveling everything just right. We are currently trying to find us someone that can come out and do it for us. I'm just too scared to do it myself. I do now have my very own stud finder which should be handy for hanging all the stuff we need to hang, lol!
Homeownership is an adventure.
Projects inside the house:
Unpacking. Lots and lots of unpacking.
Building things. Our TV stand is completely assembled, we just need to put the top shelves on the walls. I'm not comfortable doing this as I don't want to ruin our walls or this awesome TV unit we have, so we are looking into hiring someone to do the work for us.
Blinds. We have 18 windows in this house. As of right now, almost all of them have blinds minus one bedroom, the loft and the morning room. I only have one more to put up and we still need to buy the rest. We won't be putting a set of blinds on the round window in the loft, and the bathroom window in the master bath will be getting something different than a blind.
More unpacking. The majority of the kitchen stuff is unpacked, but that's about it.
Next up on the list:
This weekend we plan on painting the garage. It drive me BONKERS to have unfinished walls in the garage. They're all dry-walled and taped, just not painted. That's not gonna work for me, haha! So, we must paint it.
The week after we want to epoxy the garage floor. That's why we will be painting the walls first. Much easier to just scrape some paint off the bare floor than the pretty epoxy we will be putting down.
So a couple of photos for now. It's a mess. There's lots to do. But you know what? It's home, and we are so happy to be here.
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| Moving Day... The plethora of boxes after the movers were finished unpacking the truck. |
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| Moving Day in the morning room. Literally, boxes EVERYWHERE! I seriously had NO clue we had this much stuff. |
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| Moving Day kitchen view. Such a mess, but it is OUR mess |
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| Let's play find the puppy! |
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| Thursday- an organized mess perhaps? |
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| Friday view. Slowly getting things put in their places, or just moved out of the main living area. |
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| Saturday. A little more progress. |
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| And Sunday. You can actually see the majority of the floor!! |
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| They finally installed the shutters on the front porch! There's a piece of stone that still needs fixed down at the bottom. |
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| Sent this photo to hubby asking if he knew what this was. It was my announcement to him that we FINALLY had hot water! |
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| Blinds! I'm proud of myself for actually doing these myself. They're really easy, but they make such a huge difference. |
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| The TV stand. Everything is put together, we just need to find someone to put up the top pieces for us |
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| We bought a rug for our morning room! It's a great grey color and we loved the pattern! The puppy was testing out new smells. |
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| Our gorgeous fridge! I love this thing. Still need to organize inside of it as it's all just kind of a jumbled mess right now. |
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| Moving wears the puppy out. |
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| He also strategically laid on top of my IKEA directions so I couldn't put the TV stand together. We don't think he liked the sound of the drill at first. |
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| He also has a love of boxes. So now he's helping us put stuff together so he can have the boxes. |
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| One of our two bunnies! They got new cages once we moved in, so this was miss Scarlet hanging out on the stairs while we put her new cage together. |
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| Hose timers. Super convenient. Hopefully we can actually grow some grass! |
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| And my nemesis. The damn dryer hose. We went to Home Depot and the little man working pointed us to these hoses. Definitely didn't like this one. It's not flexible, and I cut my hand on it. We ended up going to Lowe's and getting a flexible one, and now our dryer is all hooked up. I think the movers have the hot and cold water lines reversed though and I still need to fix that. Please disregard the ugly vinyl flooring. It's not growing on me yet. |
Our adventures are definitely going to continue on and I'll share progress and projects as we go along. We are so happy to be in our house and are already loving making it our home!!
And one more funny story for ya. That would be a tennis ball in my glorious glass of wine. We were unwinding for the evening, and Crosley comes flying across the living room with his tennis ball that we were just playing outside with, and he literally plopped it right into my glass! Perfectly placed and didn't miss! He didn't get his ball back, and I didn't get my wine back.
It was pretty much a good summary of how our day had gone that day. Hot water issues, cable guy taking all day, people all in and out of our house.... it only made sense that the puppy would put his ball in my wine.
