WE LIVE HERE!

919 days after we closed on the house, as of January 27, 2013, I can finally say we live here.  I'm sure most of you thought that this day would never arrive, and I'm still in shock that it has.  Now, I know most of you want a grand tour, but that is going to have to wait. You know when you just move in a house and there is stuff everywhere? Well, add have a newborn, a cold/ear infection for said newborn, a case of walking pneumonia for the mama, and a sick kitty and let's just say that the house isn't quite ready.  It will be soon though.  In the meantime, you will just have to deal with my largely sickly/delirious sense of humor I have going on here.

In preparation for the blog, I looked back and the naive Jessica of 900+ days ago and came across this "plan" for the house:

July 30, 2010:

"Some people have been asking what our plan is. This is a great question that keeps evolving. As it stands now, our goal is to get the place health hazard free so we can move in. What that means is the roof has to be completed, we need new gutters (we're going with Peters on that), then we need to fix all of the water damage on the 2nd floor and in the closet in the apartment (first floor) area. We also hope to have a new heating system put in the house, as well as air upstairs, but that is actually more expensive than our roof, so we may have to wait.

Our goal for downstairs prior to move in is to get rid of all of the wallpaper, wash down and kilz the walls downstairs (kilz is a product that gets rid of allergens/odors, etc- we'll paint later), rip up all carpet on the 1st floor, refinish the hidden oak floors, and make one bathroom more usable. Then, we'll live downstairs, making the apartment our bedroom, while we work on other areas of the house. That's the plan, we'll see what really happens. "

So what really did happen?  Well, if you don't know the answer to that question, you have a lot of blog posts to catch up on.  We are living in the whole house and the whole house is still being (and will continue to be) updated for quite some time.  I'm sure that's a huge relief to all of you who have been following the blog for the past 919 days and didn't know what you would do with your time without having me post.

For a moment though, let's start with moving day.  It was a lovely ice/hail storm, which was terribly appropriate for us and this house. Fortunately, we had previously had 919 days to move in our stuff and my mom wasn't exactly evicting us, so we only had a few major items to move.  Our good friends, Casey and Missy, braved the weather to help make sure little Kieran had his rocker and other furniture that night. We had ALMOST considered postponing, but we figured it was finally time to go for it.  

The lovely weather:

Alok and Casey with the rocker at our house:

What also made this day fun was incredibly slick roads/walking surfaces for unloading and the fact that I (unknowingly) did not have a cold, but walking pneumonia.  Again, that seems pretty fitting for our move in day.

The crew!  Thanks guys for helping with moving in and numerous other days as well.  Food/drinks over here anytime! (and we won't even make you work for it!)

After a long day and finally getting relaxed, I decided to take a nice hot bath in my new bathroom.  My mom was even nice enough to clean the bathtub for me since I was sick.  I ran the bathwater and guess what.... no hot water. Alok also got to enjoy a nice cold shower.  

We couldn't figure out what was going wrong because there was hot water coming out from the other bajillion faucets that we have.  We went to bed cold and decided to come back to it later.

Here is Alok the Plumber trying to fix the faucet:

Let's just say after 919 days of working on a house, he's gotten pretty handy. Hot water had magically arrived (I have no clue how).

We (of course) weren't without other bumps along the way in preparation for moving day.  One was getting our washer/dryer that we bought when we first bought the house to work.  While they are new to us, let's just say that Sears probably doesn't consider them too new, since they've been sitting in the house for nearly 3 years.  

The good news is that despite Alok's pose below, the washer started to work when we actually turned the water on to it :-)

Alok also spent hours and hours setting up our new entertainment system.  How do you think it went?

Let's just say that it had shorted out previously, he ordered stuff to fix it and here he went to turn it on again and it shorted again.  He may or may not have flung himself to the floor. Also notice that the receiver is sticking out of the bottom of the new entertainment center he bought.  He didn't account for the wires out the back when measuring to see if our receiver would fit, so after threading about 200 wires through (OK maybe not that many, but it was a lot), he realized he would have to start open.  Luckily, he's learned to adjust to disappoint and problem solve and a saw to the backing to open it up more took care of the problem.

Other issues we didn't expect to encounter included a sick kitty.  Poor Animal (yes, that's the cat's name....he's named after the Muppet) had to be secluded in part of the house.  Easy, right? Well, if you have doors!  Alok first put one baby gate at the bottom of the attic stairs to try to keep the cats up there; however, putting a gate at the bottom of steep stairs where a cat can jump over it didn't work well. After several attempts that included boxes and chasing cats throughout the house, he tried this:

Viola!  No escape kitties here!

Poor Animal:

 

"Nobody knows the trouble I've seen....":

Let's just say that the dogs are adjusting fairly well too, although Marley (the little black dog) isn't quite sure what to make of the rosters who are our neighbors.  (Frankly, I'm also not sure what to make of rosters in the middle of the city that cock a doodle doo at 4pm).

We are also adjusting well.  I can tell you though that the last time we had our own place, we lived in a condo in Chicago and we had incredibly thin floors.  When I hear something moving upstairs, I literally have flashbacks and think we have neighbors. It's kinda strange.

Thankfully though, we at least don't have neighbors in the house (as far as I know... Cape Fear anyone!).

Speaking of which, I really thought that moving in would be a bit creepy since the house is huge and old, but I haven't been at all..... partially because it is Quincy (and we have a security system) and partially from sheer exhaustion. Sheer exhaustion which is causing me to write these exciting thoughts :-)

The first night in the house I said to my husband, "Can you believe this we own this house?"  He replied, "That we OWN this house, or that we LIVE in this house?"  I said own.  Instead of a weird black hole that sucks up every minute and penny we have (and the time of many of our family members/friends), it's an actual house.  I'm still in disbelief.

I also have to say that thanks to my husband learning how to do pretty much everything you need to know to build a house, this house is pretty bad ass.  It really is amazing that we are here and that this much work was put into it. It's also really amazing that we didn't kill each other and that he was this motivated/dedicated to do everything and to do everything right. I can finally say (for the first time), I'm really glad we bought the house :-)

More to come later, including pictures of the bad ass-ness ;-)

Jessica

P.S. Sorry for any crazy typos or spelling errors... I didn't proofread and am... as I said before....delirious

P.P.S. (yes, I just wrote that) We are basically now taking out stock in Bed, Bath, and Beyond so if anyone gets those nifty 20% off coupons and doesn't use them, please send them our way!