Goodbye Philadelphia

Well, we are officially out of our old house.  Settlement is occurring as we speak.  It was a hectic couple of weekends, but we finally got everything out.  Greg and I did one last walk-through of the house together yesterday and recounted some of our favorite memories.  It's bittersweet leaving the home in which we spent the first year of our marriage.

Our last meal as Philadelphians

Now we have to make sense of all of the boxes in my dad's house (where we are living until our house is finished) so we can live somewhat normally for the next month and a half.  We only brought about 7 or 8  boxes of stuff (clothes, toiletries, sheets and towels, etc) to my dad's so I was hoping to be able to just live out of the boxes instead of unpacking and then packing again, but boxes take up a lot of space!  We have them stored in my brother's old room for now, but this isn't going to work, so I think I'm going to have to do some cleaning out of drawers/closets so we can store our clothes at least. 

I don't know why I can't get this picture to stay rotated... you'll just have to tilt your  head to view it.

Everything in my and my brother's room has been sitting there untouched for at least 4 years (since I moved out), so theoretically I should be able to throw everything in a bag for goodwill, but I'm sentimental so I have to go through every single thing first.  So move #1 is not quite over yet!  This is giving me a little taste of what's to come with unpacking at the new house :/.

In new house news, I drove past our house on the way to my friend's last night and there was a wire hanging out of the other side of the front door now, so my front door light issue has been fixed!  I didn't even call PM about it yet (I lost his cell number so now I have to wait for him to call me again).  I was in a rush, so I didn't go inside but I'm excited to go this week to see if anything has been done on the interior.

In other, somewhat related house news, my cousins told me this weekend they are thinking of building in a Ryan community which is right across the street from our community!!!  I'm trying (unsuccessfully) to not get too excited in case it doesn't work out, but it would be so awesome if we were neighbors.  I told them to read all of your blogs for information!

Siding Complete

We have been busy packing/moving every free minute the past few weeks and I am exhausted!  Settlement on our current home is this Tuesday and our house won't be finished until September so we are moving in with my dad temporarily.  We're lucky we have a (free) place to go in the interim, but moving twice is going to suck.  We're also lucky that my brother has a 3-car barn is his back yard that he's letting us store our furniture in (for free).  AND between my dad and brother they have three trucks (yes, that's three pick-up trucks for two guys), so we've been able to make our move essentially for free.  We're going to rent a Uhaul for the move to the new house so we wanted to save as much money as we could for this one.  Luckily we have family members with lots of extra bedrooms, storage space, and trucks. :)  We are almost finished getting everything out... one more day of hard work then we can relax for a month before we have to do it all over again!

Anyways.... we stopped by the house today and our siding is complete, garage door has been installed, well has been drilled, and septic system is basically complete (just needs to be back filled)!

Closeup of the garage door.  The wires on either side will be lights.

Septic system drain field.

Close up of the tank.  That black cap will be what shows in our yard... looks kind of like a manhole.

Connection to the house.

Our well.  It's interesting how much different the soil from deep down is than the surface soil.

Concerned about this.  There's supposed to be a light on each side of the door, but they have two wires coming out of one side and none on the other.  Do you think they'll fix it or should I call PM about it?

Ceiling fan rough-in has been fixed already!

Mudroom doorknob.  It kind of irks me that the garage-side doorknob is a different color (it's a dark bronze), but I guess I can live with it.

Shot of my car in front of the house :)

 One other issue I noticed that I missed at the pre-drywall meeting is that we have zero switches in our study.  What is everyone else's study switch situation?  Do you have one?

Our current house is listed for sale!

Getting our current house ready to sell, plus keeping up with our Ryan appointments, plus renting out my condo (oh, and keeping up with our full time jobs) has been so stressful/tiring these past few weeks.  Being a homeowner is hard work!!  The silver lining is that our current house is absolutely cleaner than it has ever been (and more than likely cleaner than any house of mine will ever be... my aunts would be proud :)).  If I had known how much work this would be I would have hired someone else to do it; but you live and learn.  Now that it's done, I'm proud of all of the work we did.  It looks awesome and I hope it makes it sell easier/faster.  Here are some pictures of the house we are moving out of:

living room

living room and vestibule to the left

dining room

kitchen

kitchen looking into dining room

back "yard"... can't wait to have a real yard!

master bedroom... look how clean!!!

vanity/dressing area... we plan on using our sitting room in the new house as a dressing area

master bath (I will miss our double showerhead)

2nd bedroom

3rd bedroom on 3rd floor (we use as an office)

"den" area with kitchenette

Outside

I find it funny because the house we are in now is 1500 sf and we only use about 1/2 of it (we hardly ever use the 2nd bedroom on the 2nd floor or the entire 3rd floor).  Our new house is almost twice the size of this, so we are going to have plenty of space that we won't know what to do with!  Hopefully it will all be filled with little ones in the coming years though :).

Kudos to my dad and brother (and everyone else who helped on the house renovation).  They really did a great job. 

Hopefully everyone's hard work pays off and it sells quickly.