Home-owning Husband

I think my wonderful husband has taken to home-owning much better than I have!

Since we bought the house, he has:
- Fixed the poorly sealed area under the shower door of the master bath.
- Torn out the walls around the tub of the main bath.
- Contacted the city to get the water turned on.
- Dewinterized the house.
- Turned on the hot water heater (which took some investigation and finagling, with the heater locked in behind the washer and dryer in the back of the downstairs half-bath).
- Called the locksmith to change the locks on the house. (Thanks, David, for being around when they came.)
- Called to have Internet scheduled for connection to our house.
- Diagnosed and fixed a leak in the shower drain of the master bath.
- Cleaned up the mess of tearing out the walls around the tub of the main bath.
- Positioned two of our three bookcases in the living room.

Since we bought the house, I have:
- Watched his family move all our large items (beds, dressers, couch, bookcases, etc) from the old house to the new house.
- Watched his family gather and move all the boxes of stuff from the bedrooms (and some other areas) in the old house to the new house.
- Rearranged our bedroom furniture in the new house, making a mess of all our clothes and leaving them piled on the floor.

And in the midst of all this, he still bought me flowers and surprised me with them already in a vase. :-)

First night in our new home

... wasn't last night; it was the Thanksgiving weekend while my family was down helping us move stuff.

I think it was Thursday night. Our old home was full to overflowing with family, so C&I thought it would be a good way to loosen everyone's sleeping arrangements if we were to sleep over at the new home on an air mattress.

We trooped over (in the cold) with our nice, big double air mattress and lots of sheets and blankets and stuff. The electricity was on and the house was nicely warm.

We started unrolling things and Charlessa noticed a little glitch in our plans - at some point we had lost the plug to our big air mattress. Hmmmm. That would make things a bit rough.

So I carefully ran back over to our old home (I happened to be wearing a kilt. Don't ask.) and grabbed the first air mattress box I saw, and again, ran carefully back over to the new place.

We unrolled it and saw ... that it was a twin-sized air mattress!

Oh well. We love each other. We can sleep on a narrow air mattress without divorcing, right? Right. Builds character!

We inflate it, get the sheets and blankets set up, and manage to fit together on there. We chat away, pretty comfy at first, but I have a strange sensation that with every exhalation, I'm sinking in toward the middle. Must be my imagination.

After five minutes, I notice something. My hip is feeling something under the mattress.

It's the floor.

After another 15 seconds of verifying that, yes, it is the floor, I say "Charlessa?"

She cracks up laughing!

Thus was our first night in our new home!

(Everything turned out well. We re-inflated the mattress and tightened up the plug and cap as best I could. It probably took until 3 or 4 in the morning before we started hitting the floor again. We're even still married!)

Housing

I'm really beginning to get excited. On Friday, we close on our first house--a townhouse about a block from where we currently rent.

The rental lease is going as smoothly as we would've liked, so we'll probably have an excess of housing until June, unless we find someone to take over the lease of our current house.

More than two years ago, we looked at the market a bit before we got married. In Purcellville and Round Hill (where were living at the time), there was nothing habitable for under $300,000. We couldn't reasonable afford that, so we ended up with a rental in Leesburg and have continued to watch the market. It's been going down for more than a year, so that houses in this area are reaching a range of affordability for us and we've had most of two years to save toward a down payment.

When we first made the offer, we were thinking about all the work that should be done on the house and how much money we were going to be spending and we were feeling more anxious than excited. One friend suggested we shouldn't go ahead with it unless we were really excited about it. We continued to pursue it anyway and we are now getting excited!

The 30th

Today is the 30th. That means I can be sappy and wish my husband a Happy Anniversary! Yep, 21 months ago, we got married!

House update. The bank didn't laugh, but we haven't seen a signed contract yet. There'll be some projects to be done if we get the house.

Our laid-back house search

It's been a very low-grade sort of search since we're satisfied with where we are now for the most part. Eventually we want to own, but we like our neighborhood and general location quite well, and the townhouse is big enough and nice enough to serve well enough. With all those enoughs, our current place isn't our dream home, but certainly satisfactory for now.

All that to say we haven't quite been pounding on the realtor's door. Instead we've got some automated Internet searches for listings. Since we're not in a hurry, we've been pinging our realtor for the occasional house viewing for a year or so, some of them more out of curiosity than actual interest.

Since we aren't in a time crunch, we've narrowed down our search to an almost silly range of variables. It hasn't been until 2008 that anything really started showing up in what we would consider our price range, and even then they were typically dumps. Prices have continued to fall, so we've slowly seen more places that are in our price range and are less and less dumpy.

The one we most recently saw is bank-owned, has some major mold damage on a wall and a leak that was heavy enough to soak down through from the upper floor down to the lower one and make a LARGE puddle. Even with all that, the bank is still asking for more than we're interested in paying. We would drop their price further, and require that they fix everything first. Other than those problems though, it's a nice place.

If they just laugh at us, then oh well, and we'll continue to wait.

Such is the exciting life we lead.

Lack of Posts

What?! We went a whole month without posting anything on here?! One would think that with less than 2 months to the wedding, we'd be doing SOMETHING as a couple that would be worth posting. Well, I can't say that either of us was much better about posting on our personal blogs.

Why the lack of posts? I won't try to analyze and answer that.

We did spend many hours addressing wedding invitations. I'd say we spend that time together, but I had an aching tooth that weekend. Jesse did most of the addressing while sitting at my kitchen table and I lounged on my couch. Jesse getting that done was a real blessing for me!

As a huge surprise, Jesse picked my sister up at the Baltimore airport and brought her into town to walk into the house when I was least expecting it! He also drove on the trip back up to the airport.

Jesse took the lead in getting our vows written. We'd found pieces of 2-3 different vows that we'd liked. He took the pieces and put them together for us. We then spent the next day or so proof reading the vows. The vows we'd ended up using as the base were off the internet and VERY poorly written. They had great sentiment, if you read them as intended rather than as they were written. For example, they included the phrase "until death do we part." I think if one diagrammed that phrase, you'd find that "we" are parting death, instead of death parting "us"--until death do us part.

One Saturday, we attended the Walk Through the New Testament seminar. (Along the same lines an the Walk Through the Old Testament seminar we attended in August.) Now we have sign/word cues to help us remember the major events of the old and new testaments in chronological order and enough geography to help place most of those events.

We spent Thanksgiving with Jesse's family. A very relaxing and enjoyable time. I'm very thankful that his family is so welcoming of me!

We finally signed the lease to rent a townhouse in Leesburg! We should be able to pick up the key today! Jesse's parents just got into town and are planning on helping me move this weekend. Then we'll move as much of Jesse's stuff as possible over the next month. His parents will move his final pieces after the wedding, before they leave town.

On finding a house, it got to the point where one just had to laugh or despair. We tried to put in applications on 3 or 4 different places, only to be told that we were too late--someone else had put in an application ahead of us or they weren't willing to negotiate on the price. Once the application for this place was in process, we got calls from two of the earlier places--for one place, the first applicant didn't have good credit history, so they were now willing to look at our application and the owner was now ready to negotiate on the price for the second place. But we didn't like either of those places enough better to back out on the lease process on the Leesburg townhouse. Though if they'd been willing to negotiate on the price earlier, it would've been very tempting--a house (not a townhouse) in Purcellville.

The final event of November--exactly a month before the wedding--Jesse was my driver after I got my lower wisdom teeth and the other problem tooth extracted. Thursday morning, Jesse picked me up. We stopped in Purcellville to pick up my prescriptions, a few groceries (soft foods), and the tags we'd had printed for the favors. My mother had mailed me (on the previous Friday) something for my recovery, but unfortunately it didn't arrive until today. We made it to the oral surgeons in plenty of time. They took my money and made me a follow-up appointment for next week, before I went in for the extraction. I'd met the doctor previously, but Jesse got the chance to meet him, ask questions, and hear all the instructions for after the surgery. He was also good about distracting me by talking about the heart monitor, controlling heart rate, and how much he'd like the chance to go under general anesthesia.

I had no problems with the anesthesia. They poked me, put on the oxygen mask, and the next thing I knew I was waking up and Jesse was coming back in the room. It was only about 40 minutes later. He helped me out to the car. I was definitely wobbly, though I've felt worse some regular mornings waking up. We made a couple of short stops on the way home--I was fighting falling asleep all that time I wasn't actually asleep.

Jesse helped me get settled on the couch with some ice chips on my jaw/cheeks. I was out for about an hour or so when I woke up to cold water running down the front of my shirt. I changed out the ice bag with the hole and fell back asleep. It was about 5:00 when I woke up more completely. Jesse had gone into work for half a day, as he had some pressing deadlines. He did stop by again between work and clogging. And brought me some food I was craving after clogging.

It's now about 28 hours after the procedure. My mouth and jaw are a bit swollen, but haven't had any real pain. Hopefully it will continue this way and I'll be able to enjoy the bridal shower the church is throwing for us tomorrow morning!