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.

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!

Not so Fast!!

I posted last week that our loan processor told us we were cleared to close.... then yesterday I got an email from her saying there are 3 more things she needs from us.  I'm not that upset about it because it's minor stuff, but I just thought I'd share.  While everyone at NVR has been very nice so far, it doesn't seem like they are the most efficient when it comes to processing.  Oh, well... we will give them what they want and hope for the best.  I just hope we don't have any hiccups like this on closing day that would affect settlement.

 

The final grading has been completed on our lot!  (Thanks to my new neighbor for sending me a picture!!).

 

 

We also had our meeting with our propane provider (we have propane heat instead of natural gas).  I set up this meeting with the guy last week on the way home after a brutal day at work and didn't write it in my planner, and so I forgot all about it.  I got a call from him while I was grocery shopping last night wondering where I was.  I felt so bad, but he said he would wait so I quickly checked out and raced over there.  I was only 50 minutes late :).  He was super-nice though and didn't seem too upset about it.  The meeting was basically to tell us how propane works, show us where all of the shut off valves are and inform us that it will cost us about 50% more than natural gas.   Bummer, but we didn't really have a choice.  Greg and I will be sporting some heavy coats in our house in the winter to save on heat!  We will have another walk through with a technician after we settle.

 

Our foyer chandelier has also been installed (pictures to come)!  I think all that is left is the shower repair and installation of our stove (it's there, just not installed yet) and A LOT of cleanup work.  Oh, and another tiny to add to our punch list... one of our bedrooms has zero vents.  I can't believe our PM has not noticed and/or rectified this yet.  The air conditioning has been running so I guess the air from that line just runs into the drywall in the ceiling since it has no place to escape.  I can't imagine that is a good thing.  I wonder how they will find the spot to cut out for the vent.  I'm sure it will involve a lot of patching after the fact.  How does that happen and go for a month without being caught?