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!! :)
