TOP TWENTY!

What we have learned since buying our house...

1. If you have an open floor plan and you paint the kitchen/dinning room and not the living room, the living room will look like crap so you mind as well plan on painting it too!
2. When you have multiple floors you find yourself doing a lot of yelling from one floor to the other. We need to invest in an intercom system!
3. Not EVERYTHING can go into a dishwasher! Trust me I have tried and it doesn't.
4. People are very worried about our carpet. They think they must take their shoes off since it is a new house. We are not those people. Please leave your shoes on and feel comfortable in our home. We have dogs... need I say more.
5. Our neighbors cut their grass like every other day. Come on now!
6. I am not sure any of our neighbors work. I never see them leave for work in the morning. Nor does Josh.
7. We are the ONLY ones on the block that does not have kids!
8. A programmable thermostat is great if you set it to cool down at 2:00 PM and not 2:00 AM. Stupid PM and AM
9. Josh and I enjoy sitting at the dinner table eating together every night. So much better than eating in front of the TV.
10. No matter how hard I try, what products I use, or how often I clean it, I will never be able to get the hard water residue off the glass shower doors!
11. We really will not use our Jacuzzi tub that often. It is a bitch to clean. BTW we each have only used it once.
12. One of us is bound to get a ticket. Cops just sit and run radar all the time! Every morning I see at least two cops, one is sitting in the parking lot next to the daycare on 155th and one sits on Parallel next to the football field.
13. Even though I love our new home, I still miss my parents house!
14. We have a lot of carpet that needs to be vacuumed! It takes much longer than our duplex.
15. We really need stairs off our patio! It has become a pain in the ass to walk down two flights of stairs to let our dogs out!
16. Josh truck DOES NOT fit into the garage, unless may tahoe is not in there and he parks at an angle. (and we are guessing this will work)
17. We are very limited on places to eat out at. Sonic is the only fast food option.
18. We have lived in our house for two weeks now and I have come to the conclusion that this house just keeps sucking our money!
19. The carpet downstairs is much softer than the carpet upstairs
20. I swear that it is much more windier at our house than my parents. The wind seems to always be blowing!
Bonus: We picked out a great house in a great neighborhoood! We are so happy to call it our home!

One Desk, TV Cabinet, and Redbud later.... we made it through our weekend!

This past weekend 6/19-6/21... Monday 6/22 too!

FRIDAY.... we took my dad to dinner for Father's Day. He wanted BBQ so we ended up at Rosedale. After dinner Josh and I headed home. Josh decided he wanted to paint the garage. So we sat down and went through those "Josh" tubs and moved everything to the middle of the garage. I headed to bed around 11 PM and he had just started priming the first wall. I never heard him come to bed that night, but he said he came to bed around 3:30 AM because he had to watch the Texas game. I woke up Saturday around 7:30 (thank you Ms. Harlie and Ms. Ella) and went downstairs to check out the garage. It was all done! Everything was still in the middle of the garage, but it was painted! So I ate breakfast, folded laundry, and worked on straightening the man room up. Around 8:30 I went in and woke Josh up to see if he would come help me put the garage back together. He said thirty more minutes. I agreed and decided to go downstairs and move what I could. Right off I decided to move the book shelve back against the wall. I had to move one side and then the other. About 3 minutes into moving it Josh opens the garage door dressed to help. Our conversation goes like this....

Me: Hi honey. I thought you were going to sleep for thirty more minutes.
Josh: I was until I heard the screeching of book shelve being moved across the garage floor. Kinda hard to sleep through that when your bed is above the garage.

Me: (laughing) Sorry honey!

So we ended up moving everything back and the garage looks fabulous! Best of all I can pull into it! Love it! The rest of Saturday consisted of $215.00 Wal-Mart Bill and a $77 Price Chopper Donation. My husband thought we had no food and need to go get groceries! So $292 later we were good to go!

SUNDAY....

This is the conversation my husband woke up to...

Me: We are going to go buy a desk TODAY!

Josh: (not quite awake and aware) What? OK?! Why?

Me: Because I can't organize anything! Or get rid of these last few boxes because we need a desk to set our computer on and our bill stuff on. We are going to NFM today and buying a desk.

Josh: Ok, what time do they open?

Me: 10:00 AM. Get up and get ready.

$600 later we had one desk and a TV cabinet for Josh's Man Room. From NFM we headed to my Parent's House to give my dad his Father's Day card, hug, and kiss! We then met up with Lexie (vern) to get a gift for a Bachelorette Party she was arriving late to. One our way home from Overland Park we decided to stop by Earl May and use our gift card we received last year from our Couples Shower. We left Earl May with one bag of mulch and a redbud tree! Mind you my Tahoe still has the three boxes from NFM and the tree is longer than my Tahoe! We were those people driving down 7 hwy with a tree hanging out my back hatch window! Needless to say it was a hot ride home!

MONDAY....

After work we decided to plant our tree. Below are some pictures of Josh and DJ hard a work making a new home for our tree. Oh, some background/reasoning on why we bought a new tree... originally the contractor planted a bradford pear tree (they don't hold up in bad weather very well) directly in front of the double windows in the living when the house was completed. Me being me and thinking ahead- One of the first things I said to Josh when we were in the process of buying this house was that I wanted to cut the bradford pear down and plant another one farther over to the side of the house. He asked why and I informed him that people will not be able to see our Christmas tree in the window because the stupid outside tree will be in the way. Currently we have two trees in our front yard because I would not let Josh cut down the bradford pear until the baby birds were out of the nest.

Our little birdies!

Boxes be GONE!

This post is going to sum up Sunday 6/14, Monday 6/15, and Tuesday 6/16 of the BiG Move.

SUNDAY was a finish cleaning day! The highlight... Josh using his brand new mower to mow our lawn! Josh is very very particular about his grass! He is that guy. You know the one that puts the lines like on the baseball field in his front and back yard! It is great. He was so excited to get to use his new mower! Here are some pictures of him mowing our yard for the first time with his new mower....


MONDAY....We woke up and it was raining outside! Yuck! So Josh ended up not going to work.... so we ended up a Home Depot picking out paint for the guest bathroom and the mater bath. Since Josh wasn't working he decided to paint both bathrooms in one day and be done with it! So while he painted my mom and I put things away in the kitchen and unpacking boxes. Until Josh comes out of the guest bathroom and says he is done with the first coat of paint in the guest bathroom. Ok so I walk in and it is dark. I know we picked out a dark brown, but I just didn't realize how dark is was going to be. I hate picking out paint. It is one of the hardest things to do. So about 30 minutes of conversation between me, Josh, and my mom, I decided that we are not painting that color in our bathroom. So off to Home Depot my mom and I go! We pick out a lighter brown and and a rust color for our accent wall (the triangle piece above our shower and whirl pool tub). By the time we get back the the second coat is on and is dry in the guest bathroom and Josh had put up our shower curtain back up. The shower curtain made all the difference in the world. It looks so much better! The master bath turned out great too! Great job painting honey! We also began going through all the tubs/boxes in the garage and by the end of the day we were down to 5 tubs/boxes that would have to be gone through by Josh. It was amazing to see garage floor and I was one step closer to being able to park in it! Yay! Oh, this was also the day AT&T came to set us up with cable and Internet! Josh was so thrilled! Here he is setting it up...





TUESDAY... we finally finished unpacking! Which meant we had a lot of stuff we needed to get rid of! So we loaded my Tahoe full of boxes and dropped all the stuff off at Good Will. Oh, and we also amended our taxes and expect to have $8K in 8 to 12 weeks! Yeppie!

So as of Tuesday we were pretty much unpacked and settled in! and we LOVE our new home!

City Wide Garage Sale... ARE YOU KIDDING ME!

Saturday was not as fabulous to say the least. After everyone left Friday evening Josh and I stayed up unpacking our dishes. We were so excited to finally get to use them and to spend our first night in our new home! Anyways we had to pull the stickers off and load them in the dishwasher. We went through our wedding gifts and organized them into piles. Pile one- return or exchange, Pile two- dishes that need to be washed, and pile three- well it was the catch all. Josh's man room looked awfully girly at the end of Friday evening. Ok so anyways back to Saturday. We woke up at 6:30 AM, yes you read that correctly 6:30 AM. Let me tell you how early that is after a very late night of unpacking! The reason for the 6:30 am wake up call was because Ben and Trevor (Ben is my mom and dad's neighbor and he paints for a living. Trevor is his apprentice) was going to be at our house at 7:00 am to begin painting the Kitchen, Dinning Room, and Hallway. Well Ben did not show up till 7:45 am! While we were waiting for been to show up Josh got out his brand new coffee maker and put it to work! Ben arrived and coffee was done around 8:00 AM. Josh offered Ben and Trevor coffee, only to realize we couldn’t find Josh a mug to use much less two more! Hello honey! Luckily I remembered that there were some plastic cups buried in the wedding pile down in the Man Room. Coffee was served! The plan for Saturday morning was we would leave Ben and Trevor to paint while we loaded the stock trailer and Yukon (I had switched vehicles the night before with my parents). So I headed to the storage unit to load the remaining wedding gifts in the Yukon while Josh picked up one of his buddies and headed to my parents house to pick up my dresser (side note: my dresser sucks! it is huge and extremely heavy. The night my mom and I brought to home from NFM my dad asked me in a very pissy tone "Did you pick out the heaviest damn one there?!") Within an hour I had loaded the remaining wedding gifts/breakable items into the Yukon (btw it did it by myself) and headed to meet up with Josh at my parents house to give him the key to the storage unit. When I got there Josh's dad and step-mom had arrived from Ft. Scott! They were just finishing loading up and then were headed to the storage unit to get the remaining items. The plan continued with me, my mom, and Josh's step-mom heading to the new house to begin unloading the Yukon and Josh, my dad, his dad, and Josh's buddy heading to the storage unit. Here is when the drama began! I arrived at our house to find our street covered with cars. It was a flippin' mad house! Apparently our entire block decided to join in on the City Wide Garage Sell and put all their crap for sale! People were parked in front of our house, our mailbox, they were just lining our streets. Instantly I think- Hmmmm... how in the hell is my husband going to weave in out of this circus? He has a one ton truck and a stock trailer. This should be interesting. So like a good wife I call to warn him that our street has been taken over by garage sellers. Josh arrives with the stock trailer packed to the gills! He comes down our street very slowly and carefully as not to take out one of the many garage sellers. Luckily when he gets to our house there was an opening that allowed him to back up to our house. Sounds easy enough... Wrong! As he is backing the stock trailer into our driveway one of our neighbors freaks out and starts yelling "Don't hit my car!" Josh stops backing up and, now mind you by this point is starting to get hot out and we are working on like 5 hours of sleep, nicely tells this lady that he drives a semi for a living and hauls huge cranes and that he will not hit her car. Now me being the wife I know to things 1. Josh is going to kill this lady and 2. I need to go over and smooth everything out. So I go over and tell the lady he does this for a living and we have insurance. (side note: her freakin' car was parked in front of OUR MAILBOX. Hello move your shit lady!) She smiles and laughs and everything is fine, except as soon as Josh gets done backing in and gets out of the truck he is hot, not temperature hot, but pissed off at the chick hot. He said "Stupid (insert a few choice words here) why doesn't she get off her ass and move her car if she is so worried! I know she is dumb she is wearing an Oklahoma shirt!" (Josh is a HUGE Texas fan) The remaining morning we unpacked the trailer and Yukon. We decided to grill at our house for lunch. After lunch nothing was accomplished. More bull shitting and drinking happened then unpacking. Saturday was a very eventful day, but we got everything unloaded and by the end of the day our garage looked like our storage unit! And we were exhausted!

Pictures from Saturday:

Bright eyed and ready to go at 6 AM!

Trevor working his magic on our hallway!

Me and Marky Sparky!

There is some serious thought going into the washer and dryer!

Josh and my dad putting setting up my brand new washe and dryer!

Ta-DaH! They are freakin' awesome!

Josh grilling lunch on our patio for everyone

Lunch time!

The garage after we unloaded the trailer! Our dog harlie too!

This is how Josh's Man Room started and.....

This is how it ended! Doesn't Josh looked worried about his Man Room!

Moving Day.... Horray! Day ONE!

Friday 6/12 was a very intense morning. There we emails flying left in right between our agent, our broker, the sellers agent, and the President of our mortgage company. The reason you ask... Because as of 8:00 am Friday we still were not 100% sure we would be closing that day, but our agent being such a real estate warrior she made it happened! We had our walk through at 2:30 pm and signed the next 30 years of our life away at 4:00 pm. Oh, and Josh has the pen to prove it! ;) Below we are sitting at the table waiting to sign the papers. And the other is after we signed all the papers! Outside the title company!








First stop after purchase a home! HOME DEPOT of course! We were that couple that went straight from the title company to Home Depot to purchase a piece of fence and a programable thermostat! Yep I was already thinking about ways we could save money! The plan friday evening was clean the house and move in the neccessaties, like the bed, dressers, washer and dryer, etc. I think some how we ended up with moving more than the necessities. Below are pictures from Friday.

The scary storage unit! We were packed to the gills!

Even Tim and Josh helped with the cleaning!

Awww... mom! She did a fabulous job on our fridge! BTW Josh and I hate our fridge. In fact we fight over who is going to put the groceries away when we get home. You know that game 'Not it' well we play it with our fridge! It is a side by side and it sucks!

Josh putting up our bed! Note: Josh does not have a hat on! You will not see too many pictures of Josh without a hate!

Still all smiles even after cleaning the house from top to bottom! Love you mom! You are the best!

Our doggies checking out the new view! Or to see if there are any neighborhood cats they can go crazy on!

Don't worry I didn't fart in his face! We were vaccumming the carpet above the fireplace mantle!

Josh "organizing" his clothes

After one night of moving we still love each other and are excited to spend the night in our first home!


All in all Day One of moving was not bad at all!

High Fives all around!

This first paragraph was typed Wednesday afternoon regarding the house. Farther down is a to date update:
Right now we are in wait mode! We do not do well with wait mode. Josh REALLY doesn't do will in wait mode. The past two days he has called me like crazy. Have you heard anything yet? Did JD (broker) call? Is our loan out of underwriting? Has Renee (agent) said anything? I mean he really has been antsy about this whole thing. He really wants a yes we are closing on Friday or a no we are not closing until the 19th. It is kinda cute because he is so excited to move into our very own place, but after the first couple times of calling I am starting to get annoyed by it.

The paragraphs below were typed today, Thursday:

We had pretty busy weekend. Friday evening we drove up to McLouth to support the Sloppy Hogs (this is my cousin's bbq competition team). We ate wonderful BBQ and enjoyed hanging out with some family!

Saturday I began training for the 5 mile Tiblow Trot! Lord help me! I ran my first two miles that morning and ended up getting rained on! Considering I had not ran in some time, I did pretty well I only had to walk a short stretch due to side cramps. So I was pretty proud! Later that evening I was co-hosting a baby shower with my Aunt Nora. It was a lot of fun and the decorations turned out really cute! Yes I made those 'baby girl' blocks from scratch, with some help from my mom of course! The shower was great and everyone enjoyed themselves. I was kinda disappointed in the number to people that showed up, but oh well it happens and life goes on!

Now Sunday was house day! We spent the day running around buying a dryer cord from NFM, a lawn mower, paint for the kitchen/dinning room, and another dryer cord from Home Depot, purchasing essential items from Wal-Mart, and buying a new dog bed from PetSmart!

Interesting Home Depot Story: We realized we needed a trash can, like the big one you put out on the curb for the trash company to pick up and dump. Well we found one with wheels that we really liked, I mean for a trash can we liked it and it was pretty sturdy. So Josh asks me if I want to push the cart or the trash can around. I chose the trash can. Trash can in tote we head to the lawn mower section. We turn down a aisle and a guy with a little girl starts following us. We make it to the lawn mowers and the guy stops and says "I wish I could sell you my trash can. It is like brand new". Of course I say "Well if you are willing to sell it I will buy it! How much do you want?" Now we picked out a $70 trash can and this guy tells me he will sell his (which is exactly like the one we picked out) to me for $10. Now I like a good deal, but shit this was a GREAT deal! I jumped all over it! He explained he bought the exact same trash from Home Depot about 3 months ago. Then Deffenbaugh (big time trash company) issued trash cans to them that they are required to use. So he wasn't too happy of a camper. I got his phone number and told him we had a couple more places to stop, but we would call when we got done in an hour or so to stop by his house and pick up our new/slightly used trash can! Rock on! We were so excited this guy stalked us in Home Depot!

Ok so after we loaded our new/slightly used trash can we headed back to NFM to return the dryer plug because we found a cheaper one at Home Depot. On the way there I raised my hand up and told Josh "High Five for the $10 new/slightly used trash can!" and he gave me a high five. Then Josh said as serious as can be and meaningful "High Five for not fighting!" and I gave him a high five! It was so flippin' funny! Remember in a previous blog a couple of weeks ago we went out shopping for house items one Saturday morning and it ended up being a battle, an all out war! Better yet a disaster! So I died laughing when Josh throw out the high five for not fighting!

It was a really great weekend and we really enjoyed ourselves!

House Update:
All I can say is BULLSHIT! Oh, and we are currently very pissed! It is Thursday and we still do not know if we are going to close tomorrow! Our agent called me at 8 am today telling me that the sellers are moving today and have scheduled a moving truck to be at their house at 8:30 am and if we do not close on Friday they are wanting someone to pay their storage fee. Well that is not happening! We are not paying a dime! So right now our agent is battling it out with our broker. The agent believes the broker should be paying it. Josh has been calling or lender on the hour every hour for updates and I have checked out! Our agent believes our broker dropped the ball and is not fulfilling his part of the deal! So we may end up closing on Monday. Oh the house saga drags on!
Keep us in your thoughts! Send good ones our way!

When it rains it DROWNS us!

I will try to make this one short since all my post seem so long. Tuesday morning I got a call from our Broker guy saying that money bags Josh makes to much money and his recent raise put us over the income eligibility by $1,900.00. Are you serious! And here I thought the whole getting approved for our loan was going so easy and smooth! HUGE speed bump! Now this is the loan that has a 100% financing and no PMI. It was a freakin' awesome loan! So needless my heart dropped and I began to panic at the thought of us not getting the house we LOVE! We are just over a week before our close date and he is telling us this. We had two options: 1) We could walk away from the house and the money we had already put towards it or 2) We could switch to a FHA loan. The FHA loans requires a 3.5% down payment and we would have to deal with PMI. Oh, and to top it off our interest would go from 5.25% to 5.5%, because we are switching loans and the rates went up over the past several weeks. So I call Josh and lay on the news. He is pissed at first! I mean hot. He could have killed our broker. There was some miscommunication and number figuring between the broker and the underwriters and the underwriters didn't see it the way our broker did. So once I explained our options to Josh. BTW this is all happening while we are at work. Josh is headed up to Nebraska and I am in the office. It is always fun to make life decisions over the phone! We decided to switch loans. Now I am frantic, because we have to come up with a nice chunk of money for closing costs and our down payment in a week! Crap! So Mark, my brother, comes to the rescue. He is giving us a nice chunk of the money as a "gift". Thanks Sparky! So the underwriters need a ridiculous paper trail of where this money is coming from. So Thursday afternoon I met Mark at the bank to get all the statements from each account the money had touched. It was a little excessive, but hey we got to do what they ask in order to get our loan! Josh later told me that he was so upset about the news that when he stopped at a gas station on his way to Nebraska he almost bought some chew. I asked what made you decided not to and he said the cheapest kind was like $5 for one can. LOL! I am influencing him! I love it! So Josh still is not chewing! We are still looking at a June 12th close date. Our broker says it will be very tight, but is still possible. The earliest we will know if we can close on the 12th is the 9th and the latest is the 11th! Lord please let us close on the 12th!

One last item! Thursday, May 28 when I was one my way home from work, not even one block from my office, a mustang rear ended me. No one was hurt. In fact the mustang had more damage than my tahoe. So on top of all the house drama I am dealing with getting my bumper fixed by the other driver's insurance company! It has been one hell of a week for us! I hope next week is much better and full of good news and not bad! Guess this one wasn't so short! I will work on it!