House Hunters: Mission Complete!

We did it! The house is officially ours. We received our keys on Tuesday evening and since then we've been having a grand time imagining, measuring, discussing, and generally agreeing about all the stuff we get to do.

Tuesday night I cleaned the kitchen and all the bathrooms. J checked out his garage and learned how to program the thermostat. I ran some laundry and then we played a game of cribbage in the dining room (I won). You know the things you normally do when in an empty, new-to-you-home. :-)

We have to buy a microwave so I measured and am researching. I think I've selected the model I want, it's a GE, so hopefully it'll last us a good long while.

Today, J took the afternoon off so we're going to move over the most fragile items: the TV and wine glasses. (Yes, we have priorities!) and then I think J will mow the lawn if it's dry enough.

Oh you want pictures? OK!

It's all ours!

Dining room looking into kitchen

Living room

Kitchen

Shiny!

Office

Stairs, landing, and entry

Master bath

The move is officially Saturday. My Mom and I are going to try to get all our food and kitchen stuff moved over on Friday. Hopefully it doesn't rain and everything goes smoothly!

House Hunters: Update

I can't believe that I didn't update you all on what's been going on with our house.

The landscape bid came in within the budget that we had set, so we put a second offer on the house. After some negotiations, we arrived at a fair selling price.

To give you an idea, the house is to the left (see the corner of the deck?), the trees on the right are planted down the hill into the gully.

This picture is the bottom of the gully, the large rocks between the "tea house" and the bamboo are the "creek bed" that the sellers created for the storm drain to run down to look pretty. This will all disappear in the spring, no more tea house, bamboo, or storm drain. Hello fence and semi-terraced grassy yard!

The yard truly is peaceful and beautiful, but it just won't work for us long-term. We want our kids to be able to run and kick a ball, not trip on rocks and play in storm water run-off. We're hoping to retain most of the privacy and greenery of the existing peripheral landscaping, this will be a huge project but hopefully a fun one. We have plenty of time to git 'er done...30 years to be exact! ;-)

The inspection went fantastic. There was a small amount of water in the crawl space and 2 non-structural support beams weren't "footed" with concrete and were starting to rot.  But the seller was so upset that something was wrong that he had everything fixed within a week to the specifications of our home inspector and his recommended contractor. (The water ended up being from a spot in the foundation that a pipe runs through that hadn't been properly sealed--a very minor problem to fix).

All the paperwork is now complete, we are awaiting an official signing appointment and we close on Wednesday, October 19th! Two weeks! Ahhhhh..... So much to get done!