Moving In

I promise house pictures will come. But right now the place is a huge mess, so pictures will have to wait. 

We started trying to figure out how to get our mail the Monday after closing. It's taken two weeks, but the whole thing is finally taken care of! There's still a sign covering the outgoing mail slot warning of a hornets nest, so we can't send mail out yet, but we can finally get our mail. The whole process was way more frustrating than it needed to be. I was ready to sign us up for a PO Box today if I still wasn't able to access our box.

The same day I was told there was a hornets nest in the mailbox, we got our washer and dryer delivered. That's when we found out that there was no breaker in the panel for the dryer. The dryer outlet wasn't connected to anything. I also discovered a sewage leak in the garage that afternoon. I wasn't expecting much, but decided to email the realtor and see if there was any recourse for this stuff from the seller or the home inspector. He was awesome and told us he'd reach out to them and would cover the cost of fixing both so we could get them done right away. Thankfully the electrical wasn't too bad. The wiring was there, just not connected to the box. And messed up on the outlet end (it would've blown the dryer if we'd been able to turn it on right away because there was no neutral or something). But no holes in walls were required. Took a little longer to get the sewer pipe problem fixed. It did get taken care of eventually though.

Our mason guy started working on tuckpointing the day after closing. We got a call late that morning telling us that he was shocked our chimney hadn't already fallen over. The chimney didn't need tuckpointing, it needed to be rebuilt from the roof up. We went over that afternoon to look at it. Sure enough, you could easily tell the bottom of the chimney and the top were not at all lined up. Thankfully our credit for the tuckpointing was enough to cover the additional cost of rebuilding the chimney.

We moved all our big stuff into the house this past weekend. It was soon discovered that our queen bed will not fit up the stairs to the master bedroom. So Ryan and I are sleeping in the basement bedroom until we figure out exactly what mattress we want (probably some kind of memory foam because it comes all rolled up - easily fit up our stairs!). Not an expected expense, but what would home ownership be without all sorts of unexpected costs?

Sunday we drove Gareth up to Camp Kirby for his first ever summer camp. We'll go pick him up Saturday. It felt a little odd to put Malcolm to sleep in his room (in his new bunkbed, which he loves) all by himself. We realized he would never get to sleep with the sun shining right on his face, so we came up with a great window covering:

At some point we'll get something better than cardboard boxes to use as window coverings. But we were lucky to have a curtain rod for the shower this morning. We'd purchased one, not realizing it was one that required hardware to hang. I ran to Home Depot just before they closed and grabbed a cheap one. 

I'm realizing that deciding decor for a house is really difficult. Soap dispensers, for instance. Ryan seems to want something nicer than the plastic softsoap bottles from the store. So we were looking at them and it was completely overwhelming. What will guests think about my taste if I choose dispenser A vs dispenser B? Do I even like any of these? There are just far too many choices. I'm not great at visualizing things, so that doesn't help. And the tile and other fixtures are all the same in the bathrooms here at the moment. But I'm not sure I want all the bathrooms to look exactly the same. I can't even figure out soap dispensers - the thought of window treatments just makes me wince. The good news is that we have lots of time to get things just how we want them.