Officially Home Owners

 

It's official!  We closed on our house on Thursday!  We are proud new home owners.

 

 

We went to the NVR Mortgage company on Wednesday to fill out our paperwork.  We were there for about a half an hour signing papers.  I think we probably signed 50 documents.  After that we met Tim at the house around 10 am on Thursday morning.  We walked around the house and pointed out a few things we wanted them to fix.  He also showed us how everything in our house worked, and he told us about general maintenance and our warranties.

 

 

Here is Cody opening our door for the first time with our own keys!  By the way... our door... it was painted the wrong color.  Cody and I thought that they had just primed our door, and that they were waiting for it to heat up to actually paint it the right color.  But no, that was the color they were going to leave it...  It is supposed to be a blue door.  The current color does not look good with our house at all.  They are going to change that out next Monday after we move in.  I'm glad that I mentioned something about it!!

 

 

What was our first purchase for the house?  TOILET PAPER!  A key essential.  We were stuck there one day without it, and it wasn't going to happen again!  We went straight out on Thursday and bought a 12 pack.  Here you can see me placing our first rolls into our first floor powder room.  We bought a 12 pack of toilet paper and placed two rolls in each bathroom.  Which left us 4 rolls leftover...  I realized we are going to have to buy a lot of toilet paper to keep everything stocked!

 

 

Here is the view from our powder room.  Yeah... we are going to get some curtains PRONTO!  I felt like the construction guys were watching me.  We actually went to the Strongsville Mall on Thursday while we waiting to get our keys and we found some curtains that we both liked at Sears.  They weren't too bad price wise either.  We are still unsure of what we want to do for the morning room.  I want curtains for decorative purposes, and Cody only wants curtains that are functional.  We'll see what ends up happening...

 

 

We spent about 10 hours taping our house before we started painting.  I did everything on the floor and Cody did the ceilings.  Our first floor was really difficult because we have 9 foot ceilings.  The other ceilings are 8 ft tall and are a lot more manageable.

 

 

Here is Cody taping the morning room.  I was helping too.  It doesn't look like I'm working because I'm taking the pictures... but trust me... I taped a lot of stuff.  You can see on the sides where I taped up to where I could reach, and then Cody did the rest.  Taping is not an easy task.  It was tedious, but well worth it, because I don't see how I could have painted without it.

 

 

Our fridge arrived!!  I love it!  It's nice and big.

 

 

We made a walking trail for the delivery guys.  They didn't want to have to take the doors off of our fridge because they thought they could make it through our front doors and they ended up dinging up our wall.  I wasn't too happy about it, but Tim already told us that if anything like that happened he would send someone over to fix it for us.

 

 

Here is the walking trail that they set up.

 

 

I love the way the kitchen looks with the fridge in.  It looks complete now.

 

 

Friday was our delivery day.  Here you can see our washer and dryers being delivered.

 

 

The guy wasn't able to set it up because he couldn't use our drain line.  I guess it has to be punched out and it wasn't.  It was too much a liability for him so they wouldn't set it up for us.  A plumber came out to hook up our sump pump later on in the day and he helped us get the drain cap off.  I think that Cody mostly set it up.  Our washer sits back against the wall, but our dryer is out a foot.  The guy from Best Buy said that our piping was extremely long and that it couldn't go up against the wall. I'm not 100% sure the guy knew what he was talking about so I'm going to have my dad come out and look at it eventually.  I'm hoping that we will be able to get it to go against the wall at some point.  It sticks out a bit now, and I can't really use the shelf above it.

 

 

Here I am taping the basement.  And yes, I made Cody actually take a picture of me!  :)  We actually ran out of tape on Thursday.  We had to go to Home Depot a couple of times to buy more tape.

 

 

Here is the sump pump guy hooking up our back up sump pump that runs off of a battery.  We wanted to get this done as soon as we could, because we wanted to protect our basement from getting flooded if we lost power.  Our basement is nearly completely finished so we don't want that to happen.  The sump pump guy just closed on a Ryan Home a week before ours.  He was really nice about taking off his shoes on our carpet, and then he helped us with the drain cap.

 

 

Ok.... here are the before and after pictures.  We spent all day Friday painting the living room and the morning room.  Then all day Saturday painting our bedroom and the basement.

 

 

Here is our somewhat finished product.  We still have some touch ups to do, but mostly this is it!

 

 

Before...

 

 

After!  We loved the blue color that we picked out.  It was very pretty.  It makes the rom look so bright.  I love the way the sun shines in.

 

 

Sorry I can't find a before picture of our master bedroom.  But three of the walls are gray and then one wall is the same blue as the morning room.  We liked that blue color so much we decided to make it an accent wall in our master.  It is on the wall where our bed will go.

 

 

Our garage door opener was also installed on Friday!  Yippee for getting things done!  Our internet was supposed to be installed today, but apparently our house isn't wired for internet?  We don't really understand what the Time Warner guy meant by that, but apparently we didn't have the right wiring and he had to leave today.  He said that it could take 10 days for the correct wiring to come in.  We are going to ask Tim why we don't have the wiring.  It makes no sense that our brand new house wouldn't have wiring for internet.  I know we have all of the outlets already.

 

 

Here is our garage opener in the garage above our light switch.  We also have two garage door openers to put in our cars!  I'm super excited about it.  I've never had a garage that has a garage door opener before so this is cool for me!  We also went to Levine's today for their 56% off sale and we bought a new end table, coffee table, and sofa table.  I'm scandalized that I didn't take any pictures of them.  I guess you'll just have to wait until they come in.  We ordered them for April 13th.  Our end table is currently on back order so we won't get it until the end of April or early May.  Now all we need is a dehumidifier, ceiling fans, light fixtures, and a tv stand.  Have I mentioned before that I understand why the economy went into a recession when the housing market declined??  I can't believe how many things need to be bought for a house.  And most of it isn't even fancy exciting stuff that people actually want to spend their money on.  Like our back up sump pump for example... that sucker was $600 to buy and get installed!  I guess that is part of the joys of owning a home.

 

 

We also have a keyless entry pad outside our of garage.  We are so excited for all of the developments with our house.  We are about 70% of the way done with painting our basement.  I'll post some pictures when it's done.  I didn't take any today because our moms and Cody's aunt came over to see the house.  Then we went to have dinner at Applebees.  So our painting time got cut a little short, and I didn't get a picture.  But it is going to be the same gray that was in our master bedroom.  We are not going to paint our office, dining room, or extra bedrooms upstairs.  We are going to wait to do that until later... if we ever do paint them.  We will probably paint the upstairs rooms when we have kids.  I can't wait to post more pictures as we go along!  Hopefully next week I'll have pictures of us moving in!  :)  Speaking of... our neighbors who's house got started a week before ours just moved in last night.  There was a huge Uhaul in their driveway and there were a bunch of cars there.  Very excited for them.  There are also 5 other houses that have gone up in the last couple of weeks.  It looks like my supervisors cousin's house is finally up.  So exciting!!  :)  

Final touches!

 

We are so excited!!!  Our house is done!!!!  :)  We signed the paper work last night for our mortgage.  We are going on our walk through of the house and then we are getting our keys today!!

 

 

You can see that our garage was cleaned out.  We did try to save some spare scraps of carpet in here.  Cody and I dumpster dived to get it, but they threw it away with everything else in there.  Gosh I can't wait to have a two car garage!!  It will be soooo much nicer than having to move cars everyday!

 

 

Our stove is in!!  Yippee!

 

 

It has 5 burners.  It has three small burners in the back and two large ones in the front. 

 

 

Here you can see the inside of it. It had a decent amount of space in it.

 

 

Almost everything was fixed in the house.  There were a couple small things that we marked with tape throughout the house, but the main thing that upset me is my carpet in the basement was still dirty!  Tim has assured me that it has been cleaned, but you can see that I marked every step where the dirt was.

 

 

I also marked every spot throughout the house too haha.  Tim said they were waiting to clean the carpet last in case anyone else came into the house.  I guess that marks sense.  Also, the border dividing the lament flooring and the carpet on the top floor was installed in crooked.  Tim called me and thanked me for noticing that.  He had the guys coming out yesterday to fix it.  He said that he hoped that they would be able to just fix it without needing to order a new piece in, because that piece is currently out of stock.  He said if they had to order it, they would come in and fix it later.  He said it was only like a 15 minute job.  Let's hope that they were able to fix it without ordering in a new piece.

 

 

The windows in our bedroom have been replaced.  I think this is the first time I've seen them not broken in this room.

 

 

The shower curtain rod is up and ready to go.  We were excited to see that they put this into the house.

 

 

They have begun to dig the lot across the street from us.  I'm sure that house will go up real quick.  They only have 3 lots left in our development that are not sold yet.

 

 

Yesterday Cody and I went to NVR Title Agency to fill out our mortgage paperwork.  There was a lot for us to sign, but it was not as bad as the original time that we met with Keith and had to submit the paperwork to get approved for the loan. 

 

 

The door was really easy to find.  Right as you walked in, it was on the right.  We were there for about a solid 30 minutes signing various paperwork.

 

 

 

I can't believe that today is the day we get our keys!!!  :)  We are so excited.  This whole process has been a great experience.  I'm so glad that we decided to build and select everything out ourselves.  I can't wait until we get to move into the house!!  :)  I'll post another blog later when we get the keys.

HHGregg Fridge Deal!

 

Cody and I decided to try to go out and buy a fridge today.  Originally we were going to buy a fridge from the Sears Outlet, or scratch and dent store.  But I have heard that if you go to HHGregg that they will deal with you.  We wanted a GE fridge to match all of our appliances and they had a floor model on sale for just over $2000.  The guy (Bob) told us that we came at a good time, because it is the end of their fiscal year and they are trying to sell as much stuff as they could.  Bob's manager was standing next to him, and handed Bob a paper with their lowest bid on it.  Cody said we'd offer $1,600 for it.  Bob said... "Ah well I'm not sure if I can go that low."  But his manager was shaking his head yes!  They didn't even counter offer us.  We thought for sure that they would come back with a higher price, and we were thrilled at the deal!  We accepted on the spot, and they rung us up.  They even threw in a bottle of stainless steel cleaner.

 

 

This was my dream fridge.  We've been looking at fridges for weeks, and I really like the GE model the best.  I love all of the storage options that it has.  You can see that we have two large crispers and then one large one at the bottom.  Also, the bottom shelf retracts encase you want to store something tall inside of the fridge.

 

 

A lot of fridges that we looked at did not have a lot of storage space on the side of the fridge.  I liked that this one will be able to hold all of our condiment bottles.  The other area was similar.  On the other side is a sleek automatic ice maker.  I wanted an ice maker on the front of our fridge so bad!  I hate filling up ice cube trays!  I guess automatic ice is a luxory I've grown up used to, and I can't stand that our fridge doesn't have one.  This ice maker is very thin, and it doesn't take up any storage space in our fridge or freezer.

 

 

This is our freezer.  I wasn't 100% thrill with the small drawer in the bottom.  I kind of wish that it was one large drawer, but overall there is a ton of storage space.  Definitely a lot more than what we have now!

 

 

Here is a close up.  The bottom section is adjustable.

 

 

Here is a closeup of our drawers in the fridge area.

 

Here you can kind of see where the retractable shelf is located.  I am thrilled that we got this fridge in our price range.  This fridge was originally marked at $2,600!!  I didn't think we would get such a good deal on a fridge that didn't have any scratches or anything wrong with it.  :)

Carpet, Paint, and Appliances

 

We are within the two week mark!  Things are starting to get finalized in the house.  Our house is finally locked up.  We had to go to the office to get the keys to the house.  It was funny, the guy was like oh yeah you're house is really coming along.  I haven't been up there in a few days, but I know things are really coming along.  Cody and I were laughing afterwards, because Ryan Homes does not have a Palermo model in Ohio... or I guess I should say they won't in about two weeks!  I'm sure they are walking everyone and their mother through our house to look at what the Palermo model looks like.  I'm sure people from all over Ohio are looking at it.  They walked us through our neighbors house as it was going up, when we questioned what a Palmero looked like.  Oh well... all I have to say is that they better take their shoes off on my carpet!!!

 

 

Which by the way... is now installed!  Or at least almost all of of it is down now.  I like the color we choose in the great room.  It will hide any dirt really well.

 

 

Our dining room still needs to be completed, but other than that all of the carpet was down throughout the house.

 

 

Here I am rocking out a green shirt for St. Patricks Day in the kitchen.

 

 

This is the carpet in the office.  You can really tell the difference between the carpet in our great room, which was a premium upgraded carpet, and the carpet that came standard with the house that we put into the office.

 

 

We upgraded almost all of the flooring in the house, except the office and the dining room.

 

 

This is our basement.  The carpet color is grey incase you can't tell.

 

 

The entire basement has grey carpet.  Except our unfinished storage rooms of course.

 

 

It looked like Tim had been in our house since we had been here on Friday.  There was blue tap marked across the house.  I assume those are places that he is intending to have fixed.

 

 

Cody in his sanctuary.

 

 

I'm loving the basement!  I can't wait until we get everything painted!  Which... if I haven't mentioned it before... we are looking for recruits to help!

 

 

I was pleased to notice that all of our doors have locks on them.  NO SNEAKING ON ME!!  Cody loves to sneak into my office right now and scare me.  He won't be able to in our new house!!

 

 

This is the tan colored carpet we have for the entire upstairs.

 

 

I took pictures of every room, but I'm only going to show the master bedroom, because the carpet is all the same.  It is very comfortable.

 

 

They also put it in our closets.  That will be nice for the mornings.

 

 

I was very annoyed with how dirty our house still is.  I know that they still have a week and a half before we close... and I assume that time will be spent on touch ups and cleaning, but seeing all kinds of dirt everywhere really drove me nuts!

 

 

You can see how dirty our floors are currently.

 

 

After the guys installed our floors and walked all over them... they put down stuff on top of them. It seemed too little too late, because it was already dirty.  But I'm not too concerned about that, I'm sure that will clean up just fine.

 

 

What I'm really not happy about is that water got onto our floor by our hot water tank.  When we were at the house on Friday we did not have water.  Today we did, so I assume there were people working in the house yesterday and they hooked up our water.  (Plus the guys at the model home told us a bunch of people were working on our house yesterday.)

 

 

The issue is that they let the water get onto our BRAND NEW carpet!  You can see in this picture where the water dripped right from the hot water tank right into our carpet.  I'm going to have to call Tim about this tomorrow.  I'm not sure if he knows about it.  We only happened to discover it because we were walking in our socks downstairs and Cody stepped in the water.

 

 

You can see that there was some water in our storage room too.  We think that the water came from the pipes above the water puddle.  We're hoping that it's not coming from the foundation...  Cody touched the pipes above it, and it had fresh adhesive on it.  So we think that it happened as they were testing/hooking up our pipes yesterday.

 

 

Another thing that I wasn't happy about was that the water guys clearly didn't take their shoes off in our house.  They walked right down into our basement with their dirty shoes and tracked mud all over.  I'm not sure if you can tell in this picture, but there is mud all over.  There shouldn't be any brown tints in our carpet.  I was quite upset over this, but Cody has been guaranteeing me that they aren't going to leave it like this.  He is sure that Ryan Homes will steam clean it before we move in, but it irritates me none-the-less.

 

 

The workers have been working hard at the house, but Cody and I have been working hard too.  We are slowly but surely starting to pick out everything and set up installation dates for the rest of our appliances.  This is our garage door opener, it has two garage controls and a keypad.  Cody bought it online at Sears and we had to go to the store to pick it up.  Sears is going to be installing it on Good Friday.

 

 

When we went to the store, we parked in the front of the store.  The guy that gave it to us didn't give us a receipt, put a paid sticker, or anything on the garage door opener.  So we walked out right at that door, and walked clear around the store to our car.  Cody was carrying it the whole way.

 

 

The most tedious part of this process, for me, has been trying to pick out paint colors.  There are just SO many options, and it's so hard to know what will look good.  I don't really have any designing experience so I feel a little bit lost during this process, and it tires me out!  Cody and I have been the most snappy at each other during this part.  Before we agreed on everything, but we do have some differences of opinion when it comes to picking out exact paint shades.  But after MUCH contemplating, searching, and reviewing numerous paint colors... we think that we might have selected our colors. We are thinking about the middle color for most of our first floor.  We wanted a tan color, but not too brown, but not too light, but then not too dark.  It was hard to find the color we actually some what settled on.  Then we were going to do a bright blue in the morning room.  I was planning on buying some blue accents for our living room.  I wanted to look at some curtains.  I'm hoping to find some blue ones that will go good with it.

 

 

We also saw a blue back splash that we liked at Home Depot.  We were thinking about putting it up in our kitchen.  You can see the white space inbetween the cabinets and the counters in this picture.  We are hoping that this will tie it all in together.

 

 

We are thinking about doing a silver color for the basement.  You can see that we circled the middle color.  Again... this was another hard color to settle on.  I can't tell you how many shades of grey we looked at before we decided we liked this one.

 

 

 

Our master bedroom was the hardest decision.  I wanted a peach, cream, or yellow color... Cody did not want that at all.  We were at the store for quite a while debating colors, and we finally decided that we both liked this tealish blue color above.  However, after all of this debate Cody went in to turn our keys in to the office, and he mentioned that we were looking at paint colors.  And the guys told them that they have paint templates, or guidelines that we can look at.  Which would probably be similar to how we picked out the colors for the outside of the house.  So when we go to the house on Wednesday we are going to stop in and talk about paint schemes with the guys.  I'm torn on how I feel about this, because I feel like it could cause us to go back to the drawing board and do all this all over again.  But at the same time I'm happy to do it because I feel like we could use some help or at least some more ideas. I don't want to settle on paint colors we don't really like, and have to live with them forever.  I'm most worried about the master bedroom.  I'm not 100% sure on these colors.  I'm sure it will end up looking fine, but I'd still like to look at some more options. I'm going to be looking at pictures of Ryan Homes models online too.  They have "walk through" tutorials online.  That was how we got the idea to paint the morning room blue, because we really liked how it looked on the online model.  So... we'll see what ends up happening paint-wise in the house.

 

 

Here is our long awaited dishwasher.  It was finally installed!

 

 

My first reaction was a little bit worried, because it seems a little bit small.

 

 

I think that the dishwasher we are used to is bigger, but hopefully this one will work better.  Brooke told me that this is the one she has in her house, and she likes it... so hopefully it will work out.

 

 

The numbers for the front of our house are in!!  I can't wait to see them up!

 

 

After we walked through the house I really wanted to go to J C Penny's at the Strongsville Mall to look at curtains.  However, when we got there it was closed.  So we decided to go Bed Bath and Beyond to look at their curtains.  We quickly realized that there wasn't anything that we liked at Bed Bath and Beyond curtain wise at all.  Best Buy was across the street so we decided to stop in to browse at appliances.  It turns out that they had a GREAT sale on washers and dryers!  We ended up buying a pair on the spot.  We told them to install it on Good Friday.

 

 

Now we have our couch, washer and dryer, and garage opener.  Our list of everything that we need is starting to get smaller!  Our big ticket item is still the refrigerator.  After looking at about 1,000 fridges, I think that I like french door GE fridges the best.  Of course those fridges are the most expensive out there, around $3,500...  I am hoping that we can find one for a decent deal.  I'm hoping to find a nice looking floor model at Best Buy.  The Best Buy that we went to today had one for $1,900, but it had a scratch on the front of it so we passed on it.  The Sears Outlet store gets them in every so often... I'm just hoping we'll get lucky.  I can't see us spending more than $2,000 on a fridge.  I don't mind getting a floor model, or one with a scratch or dent on the side.  I'd just rather not have a scratch or dent on the front of it.  We still have to buy our paint, dehumidifier for the basement, and a backup sump pump battery.  Not to mention any decorating things that we want to buy... Lots of shopping for us still!