Long Time, No Blog!

Hi, blogger friends!

I totally knew I'd be the girl to take a long break from blogging once we settled into our home. Life gets very crazy for our family around the end of August every year.

We've been in for just over two months at this point! Time flew as we settled and found a routine with our new town and homeowner status. I'll try to update with specific projects we tackled and ideas for future plans in the near future.

Tonight I simply wanted to reflect on a few loves about our new town and location of our neighborhood.

LOVE:
Location to highway for our commutes
Distance to local shopping center that contains our new gym!
1/2 mile from a grocery store
1/2 mile from wine & spirits store
Sense of a "small community" in the back of our neighborhood
Our neighbors!
Building new memories with my hubby & baby girl

And recent snapshots of this new life we've created by deciding to build our first home...

What 2 Weeks In Looks Like

Ok, we're getting there little by little. I decided to take some photos tonight of our unpacking progress. I'll admit that it takes much effort to figure out where you want things. I then find myself changing my mind 15 times. I know it obviously takes time to get settled, but I'm the kind of person who unpacks from a trip immediately upon returning because I like the satisfaction of completing a task. Kinda weird, but it's a somewhat struggle to not be unpacked and decorated and satisfied just yet. We're getting there! And we probably do have a lot done for 10 days, but not everything has found its place yet.

Outside the grass is getting really high in the front. The back has a ton of patches and it will be a project for this weekend. (fertilize, re-seed, water, etc.)

So what do I love? Entertaining! We've had a lot of friends and family stop by in the past week and I love it! In fact, tomorrow night we are having about 8 people over for dinner. We would have never been able to entertain like this in our apartment. We are also able to have two guest rooms right now which is awesome! We have even had guests (ok, my mom one night and my in-laws) too in the past week!

Here's how things stand tonight...

Settling In and Loving It!

It's been a crazy few days since closing on Friday. Closing was about an hour long as we signed, signed, signed. It was smooth for the most part, except for the realization of an interim tax that we will be responsible for in the next few weeks. We should have been told about it along the way, but weren't. We were told that another couple had been surprised by this recently at closing as well, so someone is not doing their job. The tax has something to do with the fact that the money hasn't been sitting in escrow, and Ryan has been paying the property taxes but now there is a house on the property and we'll owe this money this year. It's to the tune of a few thousand so we weren't too happy with this surprise.

Everything else was smooth. After closing, we drove straight to the house, met my momma who was watching Claire and started the toasting! We bought two bottles of the cheap
stuff, new boxes of champagne flutes and toasted as our family and friends stopped by all afternoon. It will always be an awesome memory of our first day here. We even invited our PM and he stopped by for a quick toast on his way out on Friday afternoon.

I took a bunch of pictures of the house before we started filling the house on Saturday. I will be sure to add more once the decorating begins! There is SO much to do! I didn't even think about the amount of baby proofing that needs to be done in a new house. Hubby is currently installing safety locks on all cabinets in the kitchen. Claire has been rather successful in helping me unpack by pulling everything out from an organized cabinet onto the floor. It has felt like 2 steps forward, 1 step back all week. But that's alright! I love having the space for her to be able to do what toddlers are supposed to do--make a mess!

I plan to go into some more details later this week about my pleasant surprises about our home and settling in and the not-so-pleasant surprises with settling in.

Ok, onto the pictures before we moved our stuff in...

It's Official!

Keys, champagne, yes!

Life is good

Tomorrow morning we will own our very first home. That sentence boggles my mind. This journey started seven months ago, and here we are now-- just hours to go until the keys are in our hands.

I want to take a minute to thank my partner through this all, my husband. He has listened to my wants, needs, complaints, suggestions and reminders for the past several months. He has worked endless hours, even achieving a major career goal in the past year and truly is the reason we will be living our dream come tomorrow. Any time I had doubts or worries, he calmed my nerves. He is the best balance for my personality and constantly makes me strive to have more patience and strength through stressful situations.

This journey, this experience, was such an enjoyable one. I loved every visit, every meeting and every night of planning with my hubby for this home. This house will be enjoyed by our 14 month old baby girl as well. I cannot wait to create new memories with my little family in this new home.

I'm also confident that this house will shape our future family. It will welcome new children and new friends, new memories and many, many holiday adventures. This house is the beginning of everything for us three. And I can't wait.

Life is good.

Pre-settlement Meeting!

This morning we met with our PM to walk through the home for our final meeting before closing in two days. It was a very thorough meeting that lasted just over two hours. He gave us SO much information and showed us the ins and outs of every room. Since we also got all of our appliances through our negotiations, he showed us how to operate each one.

This meeting has us so pumped to own our home on Friday! We have been busy packing and lining up plans for moving. Friday we will officially own the home, but we plan to make Saturday the official move-in day. I didn't take too many pictures because I was trying to focus and concentrate on everything he demonstrated for us. I'll be sure to post pictures once we are in and settled!

I have avoided blogging about some of our stress with finalizing the loan this week. Bottom line is our rep from NVR told us last week, "Congrats, you're all set!" and then emailed at least 3 more times that she needed a few more things. We were super quick to respond and send anything and everything she ever wanted, but from our end, she didn't seem to be very organized. That just added some unnecessary stress this week. I could go deeper into the issues, but I want to concentrate on the happiness surrounding our family this week and not the negative that's in the past at this point.

Here are the only pictures from today:

Nine Days!

I've been trying to keep busy to pass the time, but that's a lot easier said than done. Although, we were up in New England on Friday-Saturday for a wedding and ended up having car issues. That has kept us at my in-laws until the car could be fixed by a family friend. The bad news is that it took three days. The good news is that it passed the time and I guess prevented me from driving by the house 45,000 times this week. It will make our pre-settlement walkthrough that much more exciting next week! I plan to wait to walk through the house until a week from today.

PM called and said that the house is essentially DONE!! Appliances arrived this past week and all of the final touch ups with the paint and walls were completed. This weekend they'll seed the lawn and begin the basic landscaping they provide.

We are ITCHING to get out of our teeny tiny apartment and into our new home. Pre-settlement walkthrough is Wednesday morning 7/25 and settlement is Friday morning 7/27. I feel like this has been a long time coming, but at the same time it feels unreal that we are just days away at this point.

We haven't done too many major purchases yet. We have a lot of furniture in storage and are inheriting many pieces from my husband's aunt, so until everything is in place, I think it's best to wait to see what we still need. Quite frankly, so many things have been in storage for so long that I can't really remember what we own! I also can't wait to use some things that we got as wedding presents four years ago. Yes, that's another point. We will be settling on our first home almost four years from our anniversary- August 9. This is the best anniversary present I can think of! Well, we did splurge on a king sized bed, so I'm counting that as a present as well!

Here's to a smooth walkthrough and an easy closing next week!

Two Weeks!

Today marks two weeks until the Milan is officially our home! I've been so consumed with thoughts of our new house that they're creeping into my dreams at night. We passed by another new Milan going up in our neighborhood yesterday and last night I dreamt that we became best friends with them! Ha! We haven't even seen the homeowners yet.

Yesterday they paved the driveway and painted the porch column white. In our neighborhood they do an initial paving and then come back at six months to do another layer to seal it better. They want it to have time to settle and know that heavy moving trucks will sit on it soon too.

And a big thank you for all of the awesome comments about the front door color. Only a few others in our neighborhood picked a similar color combo, so it's funny that so many of you will be getting the same or wanted black too.

Driveway pictures:

Black Door

That is all!

Weekend Update

My brother-in-law is in town this weekend, so we took him over to the house today to see it for the first time. They were working on installing carpets while we were there, so we tried to stay out of the way. I was able to take some pictures of the progress since last Monday's visit.

Carpets are going in, most hardware is on, yard was graded, some countertops were installed...it's really coming together! Three weeks until closing!!!!!