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Wednesday, October 24, 2012

Photo Shoot


This past weekend my lovely and talented sister-in-law came over to take some pictures of us and our house for our Christmas cards this year!  Here's a little sample of our photo shoot:
 









 
Deck Update: We just got word that our building permit application has been approved by the Township!

Friday, October 19, 2012

Lawn Pictures

I promised some pictures of our beautiful lawn that my green-thumb of a husband has painstakingly seeded, raked, fertilized and sprinkled to life!  Unfortunately I don't have any great pictures of what it looked like after it was first seeded... but it didn't look too good.  Here's one taken a few days after settlement (the strip along the road was sodded and the rest of our lot was just seeded):


And here is a close-up of what the hyrdoseeding looked like with all of the straw on top (and my cutie-pie niece posing for the camera :)):

You can see that we just had a few tiny sprigs of grass sprouting up when we moved in.  Today, less than a month after settlement, we essentially have a full lawn.  We (Greg) concentrated on getting the front lawn looking nice, though thanks to all of the rain we've been getting the back doesn't look to shabby either.  Here's some pictures of our beautiful lawn!
So green!
The sod is on the right and the seeded area is on the left... looks pretty similar!

We still have a lot of landscaping work to do, but at least we now have a good base.  We actually just ordered 10 trees for $10 from arborday.org, which will be delivered in December.  They will only be 1-2 feet tall, but we couldn't pass it up for the price. I have started thinking about what I want to do with our landscaping, but we probably won't get to that until the spring.  We just submitted our township building application to build our deck, so hopefully we can at least get that started this fall.

Thursday, October 18, 2012

Two Week Punch-List Update

Sorry I have been MIA for a while!  Work has been crazy and unfortunately has prevented me from doing much around the house.  We did have our two week punch-list items addressed.... well, some of them at least.  Here's the original issues and what was done to rectify them:

1. Cracked grout in master bath shower.  It seems like the tile on the bench in our shower is not securely attached to the framing so the outer corner tiles are pulling apart leaving a space in the grout.  I hope we don't already have mold forming under our bench.

They applied some caulk/grout combo, which helped somewhat.  But they missed a couple of the areas so this is staying on my list. 

2. Chip in the hall bath tile.  Not sure if they'll be able to fix this.

Replaced the tile.  Looks great.

3. Some nail holes in our hardwood have not been filled in.

Fixed.

4. Carpet not attached to the floor in some corners/edges.

Apparently they nailed some of them down, but our rabbit managed to find one corner that was missed and tear it up :(.

5. Our sink is rusting already.  Again, not sure what they can do about this, but it's worth mentioning.

The rust marks wiped right off, so I didn't bother mentioning it.

6. The biggest issue we have is the grading of our lot.  There are two very prominent low spots in which there has been standing water almost constantly since closing.  There are two swales on either side of our property and they were not graded correctly, which has caused ponding, which will eventually cause a mosquito problem, so this needs to be addressed.

As I expected, the PM gave us a hard time about this.  Of course it hadn't rained in a few days when he came out so there was no standing water and no way for us to prove that it was there previously.  He offered to lay down some sod in the area (not sure how much that would help), but so far we haven't seen anything.

Speaking of our lawn...  I have to give my husband props on his lawn-growing skills.  Our lot was only seeded, so there was literally no grass when we moved in and we already have basically a full grown lawn (in the front at least... that's what he has been focusing on).  You can barely tell the difference between the adjacent sodded areas and our lawn. 

He re-seeded and fertilized the whole front and part of the back lawn (seed is expensive!) right after we moved in in September.  There were still a few areas that weren't growing very well, so he went back and raked, top-soiled and seeded those areas.  He's out there every night moving sprinklers and pulling weeds and it's definitely paying off! 

I will dust off my camera and post some pictures very soon!

Wednesday, October 3, 2012

Two Week Punch-list

In our area Ryan Homes comes back after two weeks to take care of any issues that have popped up since settlement.  (They also come back after 10 months).  Luckily we don't have too many issues, but there are a few and one of them is pretty major in my opinion.  Here is our punch-list so far:

1. Cracked grout in master bath shower.  It seems like the tile on the bench in our shower is not securely attached to the framing so the outer corner tiles are pulling apart leaving a space in the grout.  I hope we don't already have mold forming under our bench.

2. Chip in the hall bath tile.  Not sure if they'll be able to fix this.

3. Some nail holes in our hardwood have not been filled in.

4. Carpet not attached to the floor in some corners/edges.

5. Our sink is rusting already.  Again, not sure what they can do about this, but it's worth mentioning.

6. The biggest issue we have is the grading of our lot.  There are two very prominent low spots in which there has been standing water almost constantly since closing.  There are two swales on either side of our property and they were not graded correctly, which has caused ponding, which will eventually cause a mosquito problem, so this needs to be addressed.

The annoying thing is that I brought this to the PM's attention during our walkthrough (it was not wet at the time, but I could tell it was graded wrong... this is what I do for a living), and his response was that it passed the grading inspection so it should be fine.  I'm sure he tried to brush it off because it's kind of a big deal to re-grade about 1/4 of our lot.  But I wish I had pushed the issue because it's a bigger deal now that we have actually started growing grass (our lot was seeded, not sodded).

The grading of the entire front lawn is wrong as well, but I care less about that since it's not causing any real drainage problems (yet).


Ponding in back/side yard

Ponding in front yard

Ponding in front/side yard.
We really should have curbing along all of the property frontages (at least the ones with elevations lower than the street elevations) to divert the water from the road into inlets, but that's definitely not going to happen at this point.  The drainage design of our community in general is not good.  It's poor design to have roadway water running through private property via swales, but that was how the plans were approved (several years ago... I have a feeling this wouldn't have gotten approved today).  I was wary about this when we choose our lot, but it was the best choice for us in many other ways, and overall I'm still glad we chose it.  And if it were graded the way the plan shows, we should not have these problems.

We will see what he says when we give him our two-week list, but I don't plan to back off until it is addressed.

Bathroom Pictures (for Julie S)

Julie S had asked how I liked the standard 6" white tile in our bathrooms so I figured I would share some pictures.  I would have preferred something fancier (but I didn't want to pay for it :)), but I'm totally ok with the way it turned out.  We haven't done much decorating or any painting yet, but here are some pictures of both of our upstairs bathrooms:

Master bath




Hall bath


As I mentioned, the tile is the 6" white that was standard in our community.  It is matte on the floor and glossy in the shower and around the tubs.  We upgraded the cabinets one level to Fairfield Maple Spice, which was $90 for the hall bath and $190 for the master bath (master would have also been $90 if we hadn't gotten the upgraded master suite).  We got the standard white cultured marble vanity tops in both bathrooms and upgraded to add the second sink in the hall bath for $695.  I just thought it looked silly with only one sink in there.  Plus having two sinks probably avoided a lot of morning fights between my brother and I when we were growing up. :)

I hope this helps those of you who are debating whether or not to spring for the better tile!