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!!!!!

Making Serious Progress

Today we walked through our home to see all of the work completed since pre-drywall for the first time. It honestly was surreal. It's extremely hard to fathom that this will be our home in 25 days.

Our PM told us that carpets will be in early next week, driveway will be paved and the lot will be evened out by the middle of next week. He mentioned several other things as well, but I honestly was so overwhelmed by being there that the only other part I remember is him saying that by the end of next week 98% of the home will be completed.

Blogging from my phone has prevented adding captions, so here are some photos from today in random blogger app order: