Closing Day!

We did it!

We closed on our home today and we are exhausted.

Yep, that's right.  Exhausted.

Closing went super smooth.  We showed up about 20 minutes early and got started nearly right away.  It didn't take longer than 45 minutes and we had the keys in hand and were on our way back to the house.

We have movers scheduled for tomorrow, and they charge by the item, so we decided that we would take over as much as we could ourselves to help alleviate some of the costs.  Our town home is about 30 minutes away from our HOME, but we ended up making three trips out there with car fulls of stuff in my little VW bug and hubby's full size car.

Each time we had something "fun" happen.

We dropped my VW off at the house before we went to closing.  We went inside and checked out a few things that had been left on our "list" from our pre-settlement walk through yesterday.  A few things still haven't been done, but our PM is coming out to check on us tomorrow so I'll touch base with him on those.

After closing we came back to the house and officially unloaded our first set of belongings into the house.

Our very first item was the little box that holds the ashes of our sweet boy Chase.  He was with us when we started this whole process and we were ecstatic to build a home for him and his brother to run and play in and enjoy as a family.  And, if you've been following along with our adventures, you may remember that Chase got super sick right before we broke ground and we had to make the decision to put him to sleep.  I still miss that sweet boy every day, and to both me and Jason it made perfect sense that the first "thing" in our new home is Chase.

So, after we have our moment, we unload the rest of our stuff and get ready to go.  We backed each of our cars one at a time into the garage for easier moving.

Well.  Hubby goes to leave the garage and the garage door literally goes down on his car!  I look up from my rearview mirror because I am waiting on him, and see half the car sticking out of the garage and the door is down.

Oh. Em. Gee.

So, he's panicking because he literally did NOTHING except start to pull the car out of the garage.  I quickly see that the pull string from the garage door that makes the door come off of the chain of the opener is stuck in the door of the back seat of hubby's car.  So, I get it out of there, and we have our first adventure as homeowners:  Try to figure out how to latch the garage door back to the opener so that it'll all work properly.

We survived.  We figured it out, got the garage door working again and back to the town home we went.

Trip number two.  Two car fulls of stuff again.  We pull into the neighborhood, turn down our street, get ready to pull into the driveway, and notice that there's a van sitting in front of our driveway, and our garage door is open!!!

What. The. Heck. {not my actual choice of words}

There are three people sitting in our garage.  An older lady and two younger teenage looking kids.  They're the cleaners and they're there to do the final clean on the house.

Say what?!?!

We closed on our home at 11 AM and here it is, well after 2 PM and they're just now doing the final clean?!  The older lady was quick to reiterate several times that they only moved things to clean the house and then put them right back where they found them.  They had one house in the neighborhood they had to do a "first clean"on and then our home for the final clean.

I didn't like this at all, and neither did hubby.  These three people quickly gathered their things and left.  Kinda suspicious if you ask me.  We called our PM, very upset that people were IN our home, and had to leave him a message.

The older cleaning lady also said that while she was cleaning the toilet in the half bath, she flushed it and it's been running ever since.  We both think that she saw we had put TP in there and decided to use the bathroom.

I have several issues here.  Obviously the fact that we weren't told that our home still needed to be cleaned and here it was happening after we closed on the home.  But second, if you're the cleaning staff and you walk into a home that has people's BELONGINGS in it, wouldn't you think to ask questions or maybe even not enter the home?!?!!  Granted it wasn't a ton of stuff, but it was still our stuff and it was definitely noticeable that someone was now living in the home!!!

This older lady also said that someone else was in the home installing some wire in the kitchen.  More on that one in a second.

Our PM finally got back to us, and he had no clue that the cleaning staff hadn't done the final clean yet and had no idea they'd be out today.  He was going to talk to them.

The "wire" in the kitchen was for our ice maker.  Let me tell you about this.  We were told at our pre-construction meeting that the ice maker rough in was in the basement, and that you just had to run the line through the floor and voila!  ice.

Well, at our pre-settlement yesterday, I asked our PM to show us how we were supposed to put it through the floor.  Yeah.  No dice scooter.  He had to drill the hole for us, and then saw off a piece of the pipe in the basement and add a nozzle to it so it worked.  Now, at our pre-construction meeting, it didn't seem like it was that much work.  He made it sound like it was one, two and done.  I am so glad we asked though because if not, we would be getting this amazing refrigerator tomorrow and it wouldn't have ice.  But now all is right in the world of ice maker lines.

Whew.  Our last trip out to the house was the uneventful one.  We brought our step ladder out with us and changed the code on the garage door so no more random people can come into the house without us knowing {after leaving from the second trip we made sure everything was locked up}.

So now, we sit in our town home for the last evening.  I am exhausted but I really wanted to write this post so that hubby and I can one day laugh at our first day as home owners.  OH!! We also went out and did some adulting and bought a dehumidifier.  We did some research and went with the Frigidaire 70 Pint from Lowes.  I'll update more on that a little down the road.  I really know nothing about these things.

And now a few photos and then bed.  Tomorrow our movers come, we get out of this town home and officially start enjoying our new home!

{and sorry if there are typo's, grammatical errors or parts that make no sense.  I'm definitely not going back to proofread this thing, haha!!!!}

My little VW hanging out at the house before it officially became OURS!

Closing papers. Not as intimidating as I thought it would be.

First load of stuff in the house, and then we selfie with our keys in front of OUR front door!!!

Chase Tanner.  Officially our first "thing" in the house.

The line for the ice maker rough in.  No idea how we were supposed to DIY this, but I'm happy we asked and our PMs took care of it for us.

That gosh darn cord thingy that caused our first crisis.  I made it shorter so that thing never happens again.

Three loads of goodies hanging out in the morning room.  Unpacking begins tomorrow!

More stuff. We most definitely have A TON of it.

See? More stuff.

Our bunnies!  They are the first ones to spend the night in the house.  It was easier to take them over tonight rather than while the movers started moving all of our stuff.

Bed frame all ready to be put together!

The glass surround for our shower!  This was one of the last things to be done on the house!

I plan on filling this closet with my clothes.  I definitely have a good head start!

And, Crosley, our 5 month old pup.  He sat perched on the couch watching us as we loaded cars with stuff to take to his new house.  He goes out there tomorrow with his big brother dog, Cody!

Week 13- Pre Settlement Walk Through

We have been blue taped!!!

We had our pre-settlement walk through this morning.  It went really well and was really easy.  We don't have many things that need to be done, so that's a plus.  I had my dad and granny with us that way they could be an extra set of eyes to check out everything.  That worked well because they did see a couple of things.

I think the walk through lasted about 2 and a half hours.  The first bit was just going over warranty stuff and all of that mumbo-jumbo.  So that part was pretty easy.  After that we walked through the house and we were shown how everything works.

We didn't use too much blue tape, but there were a couple of spots that need touch ups.  A few spots on the cabinets were the main thing.  We have the cabinet company coming out for touch ups later this week.  A couple of spots need paint that look like they were fixed but never painted.

They need to drill a hole in the floor where the fridge will be so we can run our ice maker line down to the basement to connect it for ice.

They need to touch up some of the stone work outside, and install the shutters over the porch window still.

And then there was a list of things to "get".

We were told to seal our driveway before the winter.

The deck needs to be sealed as soon as possible.

Water the yard a lot and often.

Seal the grout.

Get new hoses for the washing machine.

So we headed to the hardware store after the meeting was over.  We got some hoses, sprinklers, grout sealer, washing machine hoses.

We talked with the paint guy at Lowe's and he told us that we need to wait for the wood to "dry"-- about 6 to 8 weeks.  Stains and sealers are oil based and won't stick with the wood being "wet" still {because they're pressure washed}.  So yay to that.  We want to do this stuff once it's a bit cooler out.

Tomorrow at 11 we close and get the keys!

And then we pack up our stuff and FINALLY move in!!!!!!

So, back to packing so we can get outta this town home and into our DREAM HOME!