The Living Room

Update on the Living Room... We are 98% done. Just trying to find a nice 8x10 or 10x10 rug and i need to steam one more curtain. Here are some pics. I love the hardware on my curtains. Don't mind the sleepy dogs.

Closing and the last 12 days

Closing went so quickly.  We were worried that since it wasn't until 1pm we would be bored and anxious until then.  We were so busy all day long from 7am until we finally laid our heads down at 11pm.  

I do believe we had the quickest closing attorney out there.  Shout out to Dodds and Hennessey!  They were great.  It took us all of 29 minutes to close on the house. 

We had been planning for several months for my sister-in-law Alinda (Chris' sister) and her son (our nephew) to move in with us sometime in February.  They were going to bring my brother in law Greg (Chris' brother) with them to help with some of the projects around the house.  They ended up coming on closing day instead of a few days later which actually worked our great because we have 4 more hands to help unpack boxes and get things in order. 

Everyone that comes by the house keeps telling us that we have gotten so much done but we are still living in chaos so it doesn't feel that way.  I've taken pictures today of how the house looks.  The only thing I did was put a little windex to the storm door because we had not cleaned it since we put it up. 

Here is what we have accomplished: 
*All blinds are up.
*All ceiling fans have been installed.
*Only one set of curtains have been put up.
*The fence is 98% complete.
*All furniture is in the house.
*The apartment has been cleaned and the keys have been turned in.
*Replaced outdoor lights
*Installed Storm Door
*Installed Baby Gate

Here is what we still have to accomplish:
*Complete the HDMI to the TV on the porch
*Curtains up
*Crown molding
*Determine which rooms we want to paint a different color and paint them
*Hang art work
*Finish decorating
*Put Cabinets in the Laundry Room
*Finish sealing grout
*Kitchen backsplash
*Install garage opener

I'm sure I've forgotten about 8 projects.  We will probably delay the housewarming until May simply so we feel like the house is put together by that time. 

Here are some things I love:
Our Dining Room - I love that room. It is so elegant and classy and our craigslist furniture fits in their perfectly. 
I continue to love Magic Erasers.  No worries about marks on the walls during the move I've been walking around magic erasing the walls to keep it looking new. 
Our Bathroom - I took a bath the first night we moved in because my muscles were so sore.  I sat there looking around thinking, 'I don't even think I've stayed in a hotel with a bathroom this nice.'
Our Back Porch - We have a screened porch and an open patio.  I'm so glad we spent the extra money on both. 
Natural Gas - I love it!  Cooking with it is great.  The gas dryer drys our clothes quicker than it takes to run a load in the washer. I use to wait on clothes to dry after the washer was done.  Now it is the other way around.   We connected our new grill directly to the natural gas outlet we had them install during building.  That is nice! 
Our Kitchen - The kitchen has always been my favorite and it still is but I'm in love with my convection oven.  If you have to replace your microwave anytime soon and you like to cook, I encourage you to spend the extra money and get a convection oven.  It is great!  I have made pizza, pork chops, garlic bread, and then of course we have used it a lot as a microwave. 
Our Fireplace - I'm so glad Chris was so passionate about getting the fireplace.  There is nothing better than waking up in the morning while everyone else is asleep, getting coffee, turning on the fireplace, and enjoying some Amy time.  By the way, I mentioned in a previous post that Chris was admanant that we would need a blower to enjoy the heat from the fireplace.  Not true.  That bad boy puts off some heat so unless you plan to move somewhere freezing cold . . . a blower is not necessary.  It heats up our open floor plan very quickly. 

Enjoy these pictures. I've been sick this week and dragging with little energy.   I know some of them are bright but I was too lazy to close the blinds. :)

The new storm door.  Along with Buddha Frog and Maxwell blessing and protecting our home. 

The first foyer.  Chris hates this rug.  We will get a new one but need one there since this is a high traffic area. 

The second foyer.  We decided to put my Mom's piano in this room.  I love it! We need to finish the crown molding and put up art work. 

The view from the foyer into the family room.  We have gotten so many compliments on this sofa table.  Can you believe that came from one of my Daddy's storage sheds? Think American Pickers!

I love the ceiling fan we picked for this room.  We still have to determine artwork and finish decorating the entertainment center.  We also need to buy a rug for the floor. 

The dining room is almost complete.  We need to complete the crown molding and paint the room a different color.  This is a room I need to get a picture of at night so you can see the colors of the rug and window treatments. 

My office is a hot mess right now but at least I can work from it.  I have so much to do with this room.  Blinds, bookshelfs, paint the desk, put up art.  The furniture piece you see in the corner is not going to be in the office long term.  We just had no clue where to put it when we moved in so it is holding hard drives and curtains right now. 

My kitchen.  This is a picture while standing at that sofa table in the family room.  It will be done after we put in the back splash, more under counter lighting (we only have two under counter lights right now and need two more) and figure out if our pull out trash can will fit in one of our cabinets.

 We replaced the outdoor lights that were standard with these pretty quickly after moving in the house.  We love the lighthouse look of these and they are motion detectors. 

Our three rocking chairs barely fill up the front porch.  We may get a swing or another rocking chair to balance it all out.  That is low on the priority list right now. 

The garage is still a mess but actually looks better today than it did last Saturday. 

 

The last few weeks before closing we went all over town trying to find outdoor furniture.  We ended up buying a couch from Home Depot but buying 3 extra chair pieces to make it a wrap around on the porch.  We still have room for a bistro set which we are going to get from Lowe's that will allow us to eat outside on pretty days.  The TV has been installed on the screened in porch but the company that did the surround sound and cable has to come back to finish up the HDMI cable so the cable will work on the porch. 



 



Kudos to Chris and his brother Greg for building a great fence.  It looks so good but is not finished just yet.  They still have to finish up the caps on the top of the posts.  Eddie and Cooper love their yard.  While it took longer than hiring a fence company, it saved us a lot of money doing the labor ourselves. 

 

That's about it for now.  I'll take some more detailed pictures of the rooms after we get everything finished. 

 

We are still very happy and in love with the new house. 

 

Until next time . . .

Amy

Inspection Day

Today was inspection day and it started off kind of rough but ended well.  We had to be there at 8am (or so we thought) and it was hard getting up this morning.  I didn't sleep well last night because of the excitement so that made it even harder to wake up this morning.  We were late leaving and then I spilled coffee all over myself on the way.  Great start to the day!  We ended up getting to the house early (even though we thought we were going to be late).  Our realtor and the electrical guy came up right behind us.  At about 8:10 and no one else arriving, Chris called our builder to make sure he was coming.  Evidently, we were the only ones who got the 8am meeting request and everyone else got a 10am meeting request.  Our builder, Kelvin, rushed to get there since he knew we were there early.  He arrived at 9am.

We were cold when we arrived and couldn't get the heater turned on so we turned on the fireplace to keep us warm. We are thankful we got the fireplace.  The house would not have as much character without it.

The inspection went well.  Chris had gone out to the house on Sunday and inspected it from top to bottom.  He had put sticky notes on every imperfection.  He had 33 sticky notes in total!  LOL   Most of the items we needed them to work on pretty simple (simple for others to do not for me to do) repainting and I also heard the word "buffing" a lot.  Evidently you can buff out a lot of stuff.  The biggest issue was that the hearth on the fireplace was scratched.  I don't know that you can buff out slate so it might need to be replaced. Kelvin found some things that Chris didn't find so he was impressed with his detail.  :)

We will do another walk through at 11am on closing day before we head to the closing at 1pm.

Tonight we are spending out last Monday night in the apartment.  Eeeek!  Thank goodness I have a job that keeps me busy because it would suck if I wasn't distracted during the week.

I believe in my last update we were waiting on the screen from the porch to be put in, the stove and fridge to be installed, and the shower to be finalized.  That is all done as of today!  They finished up the shower last night.

These pictures are from yesterday and not today.  My camera was causing me all kinds of trouble yesterday when I tried to take pictures. I wasn't able to get any pictures of the upstairs bedroom/bonus room and bathroom or the 2nd guest bedroom downstairs.

Our cars look good in that driveway don't they . . .

 We've got mail!

Chris says the 8 is crooked on the door.  I don't see it.  Kelvin said he would fix it.  Also, who knew that peep holes are not standard in doors.  How in the hell am I going to be able to see the murderer on the other side when they ring my doorbell!?!

 The screened in porch.  It is much larger than we imagined.

On the outdoor patio.  

 Cooper will love sunbathing on this piece of concrete when it is warm.  That dog loves the sun!

The kitchen view with all the appliances.  

 The stove!

 And fridge ...

The view into the living room.  

 The fireplace lit.

The breakfast area.  

 The dining room.

The office.  You can see Chris' yellow sticky notes in the background.

Downstairs guest bathroom.

 The first guest bedroom.

 The railing was put up last week as well.

Our closet.  

 The tub and shower before they finished the shower.

 The master bath sinks.

 View of the master bedroom from the bathroom

 View from the master windows of the bedroom.

 View from the main doorway of the master. (so glad we did the tray ceilings)

We went shopping this weekend.  (Shocking I know since that is all we seem to do now a days)  We bought our duvet and duvet cover for the master bedroom.  We bought the rug pads so we will be ready to lay down the rugs.  We bought some really cute decor that I'll wait to share with you when we have everything set up in the house.  Today we bought the bathroom hardware for the guest bathrooms, garage door opener, two more ceiling fans, dimmer switches, and new outdoor lighting.  We don't really care for the standard lighting.  We are now on the search for patio furniture which is really hard to find during the month of January.  This is what we looked like walking out of Lowe's today.

The next detailed blog will be after closing most likely.  I plan to do an overall wrap up of our building experience as well as a room by room before and after so you can see how we decorated.

Until then . . .

Grass and Trees

It's hard to believe in 2 weeks we will be going to sleep for the last time in our apartment. Our home for the past 5 1/2 months.  There were a lot of finishing touches this week to the house.  The more we go to the house the less change there is in the house because it is almost finished.  YAY!   This week's biggest accomplishments were the tile shower in the master and the yard.  I posted pictures of the shower (which is almost done) on Friday so I'll focus on the yard for this blog post. 

Here is the house and yard as of Saturday morning.  It is really shocking how quickly they turned this yard around.  I think it took them less than 6 hours and that yard was full of mounds of dirt and was so uneven.

Ryland gives you trees planted in the front yard and they leave trees in the backyard from the original landscape (aka "woods").  Here is our pitiful trees in the front yard.  We'll see how long it takes them to grow!

They painted our door black.  I'm sure they will put the numbers back on this week before the walk through.  The people you see in the background are the painters who were finishing up the trim work on Saturday.  One of them was a huge Taylor Swift fan because he had his phone playing nothing but Taylor Swift and he was singing along.

My sink faucet!  We went back and forth with the satin nickel finish and the oil rubbed bronze look. I'm so happy we did the oil rubbed bronze.

 Here is the sink.  We had two options.  This sink or one big sink.  Chris wanted one big sink and I wanted this one.  I'm still happy with the choice.  I need two sinks when I'm cooking.

 This is the railing for the stairs. They stained it and it was drying while we were there on Saturday.

Here are three pictures of the backyard.  As you can see, we are still waiting for the porch to be screened.  I'm assuming that is one of the last things they will do this week. The boys are going to love the size of this backyard.  We've already gotten approval from the HOA to put up a fence.  Now we have to get approvals from the city of Hanahan and Berkeley County, then that will be one of the first things we do after closing.  

This week they will finish up everything so the house is ready for the walk through on Monday the 21st.  We can't wait to start unpacking our boxes and decorating it.  We spent a little time this weekend at Lowe's pricing everything out to make sure we knew how much we were going to have to spend to put up blinds, a storm door, crown molding, a fence, and to try to find a grill and one more ceiling fan.  We did this same pricing between Home Depot and Lowe's about 5 months ago but of course we can't remember.  We went to the Home show that was at the convention center this weekend.  We just knew we would run into some companies that install blinds.  We can do it ourselves but we thought it might be a good idea to get a quote to see what the price would be since we have a lot of other projects to get done.  There was no one there selling blinds!  WTH?!  We did buy 5 sets of 1200 count sheets.  Not what we were shopping for but we needed them.

Unless something major happens, I'll wait and blog after our walk through next Monday.

Until then. . . .