We're In!

Hey everyone, we’re finally in our new home!! I love my new house.  Love love love.  Love.

Here's some photos of the finished house and some of us moving in:

We closed a week and a half ago on Friday and didn’t waste any time. Our friend Andrew came and helped us unload our storage units the next day.  I helped a little bit too and then I went back and kept packing up the apartment.  We had dinner at Walter’s mom’s house and slept on an air mattress in the new house that night. The next day, Sunday, I went back to the apartment to finish packing before the movers came to get our furniture after lunch. We moved in 110° heat until dinner time and called it quits.

Walter and Andrew went and hooked up our media room (although we still don’t have anything to sit on in that room yet). The kids slept in a tent in the gameroom. I kept packing and cleaning.  I took most of Monday and Tuesday off from work to get the last few things from the apartment and clean it up before we went to officially break the lease on Tuesday. What a racketeering job they got going on there too. We tried to negotiate with the office to get out of some of the you-break-your-lease-we-break-your-arm fees, but we just ended up making fools of ourselves. Hey, can’t hurt to try anyway. Bygones…

On Friday, we drove up to see Andrew & Helen and the kids. We had a fantastic time. That night, we went to a circus.  It was a smaller production and it was stinkin’ hot, but the kids had a good time.  The main clown guy was pretty funny.  Chloe and Haylee rode an elephant too.  Roman got up the ladder and got scared, so Walter had to bring him back down while the girls rode. On Independence Day, we hung out at Lake Cheney. The kids loved the sand and water; I can’t wait to take them to Florida! Andrew and I geeked out with our cameras. I got second-degree sunburns on my legs.  You’d think I’d learn by now that I can’t go more than 20 minutes without sunscreen! 

Andrew & Helen cooked out on the grill that afternoon and let the kids run around with squirt bottles of water.  Helen had a great idea and made a cake, then let the kids decorate it with berries in the shape of an American flag (blueberries for the square and strawberries for the stripes). We kept the boys on a budget for their explosives.  I told Walter not to spend more than $150.  That equals A LOT of sparklers. The one device that they built with the sparklers left a huge crater in Andrew’s back yard! (Okay, it was kind of cool.) We stayed up really late with and set off fireworks with the neighbors.  Despite all the explosive cacophony, Roman fell asleep in my arms. The girls were tired, but stuck it out until we went inside around 10:30 pm.

Pics from July 4th weekend:

Before we closed on the house, our lender rep couldn’t get us a final number for our closing costs.  He quoted us a higher number and said that we’d get a check back for the difference at closing. The number he quoted was higher than we expected, so Walter took a withdrawal from his 401K. Well, we ended up getting almost 8K back! (It felt like a bargain, even though it was our own money to begin with.)  So, on our way back from Kansas on Sunday, we took a detour to Dallas to spend some of that at a bargain furniture store. They have really expensive furniture marked way down. I sat on a $30,000 sofa! Not everything is that expensive though, lol.  We got a couch for our media room and a new dining room table.  I was also looking for a rug for our entry way, but didn’t see anything that I loved that was in my price range.  (I liked the rugs I saw at a different bargain store better, but Walter said they were too cheap and wouldn’t let me get them.)

So, this month, we’ll be unpacking and organizing and starting our “house projects.”  I don’t think we have anything really exciting planned, so we’ll get some down time before August.  Next month, I start my last class for my Master’s degree, we have vacation bible school, Chloe starts kindergarten, and we’re going to Disney!