Our new house is finally complete and now it really is ours. Got the keys tonight and started putting our own finishing touches on it. We hope to be ready for move-in within the next 3 weeks.
New House, Old House, Busy Month
November 9, 2005 by
Other than a few minor issues, the new house is coming along nicely. The estimated completion is the end of February.
We’re going to be doing tile in our current house this weekend and hopefully new carpet will go in next week. Once those are done, we will be ready to get it sold. Not sure where we’ll move after that. I want to get a rental house until at least a month after completion of the new house so that we can put new flooring in. We didn’t upgrade any of the flooring from the builder because they wanted a rediculous amount of money for the upgrades. They also didn’t have bamboo flooring, which Christie and I are leaning towards for the hard surfaces in the house. Originally I wanted 24″ travertine, but after looking into bamboo and seeing some samples at Home Depot, I’ve decided that it is a great look.
I’ll be in Vegas next week for PubCon. It’ll be a great time. Sean, Chris and Nick from BootsnAll will be there and they’ll be bringing Ioan with them. Should make for a wild week.
We’ll be in Tucson at the end of the following week for a wedding and some relaxation. I’ll also be going to Portland for the BootsnAll Party.
Stainless Steel Appliances and Structured Wiring
May 25, 2005 by
I’m psyched about the new house. Can’t wait for it to be completed. Unfortunately, it isn’t supposed to be done until January or February of next year.
One of the coolest features so far is that we upgraded the appliances. I had been planning on upgrading and getting black appliances. When we went to the design center, the option was given for upgrading everything to stainless steel. I love stainless steel. The price difference was only a couple hundred dollars and in the grand scheme of things, that’s not a whole lot. The package we bought gives us a stainless steel dishwasher, range, microwave, and we added the stainless refrigerator.
The other upgrade that I really like is the structured wiring. I made sure to put at least one LAN port in every room. The LAN ports are close to the cable outlets (TV location) so I can play Xbox Live anywhere in the house without having to mess with my wireless game adapter. The company that will be doing the structured wiring is also wiring speakers to the living room, family room, back patio, garage, and master bedroom. The family room will have surround sound prewired in the ceiling, so I can keep Christie happy by not running wires all over the place.
Relief
April 16, 2005 by
This has been an amazing week. I feel like nothing has been accomplished yet we’ve managed to buy a house and prepare, file, and pay our taxes.
The biggest reason it was so amazing was that we shouldn’t have been able to get a lot for a house. There are people waiting for months to get one and we managed to get one only a week into searching. The house will be built by Beazer Homes and will be in the Morning Sun Farms development. It should take around 9 months for the house to be completed and I will be adding updates and photos of the progress as often as I can. We found out this morning that the model we purchased (Richland) has already gone up $8,000 in value, so we’re already ahead only a week into it. Yesterday we finalized the structural and electrical upgrades. May 4th we will be selecting interior design elements (cabinets, doors, etc.). Christie is actually getting excited about the new house, which surprises me because she didn’t want to move out there before. I’m pretty sure that she realizes that we’ll be getting twice the house for just a little more than we can sell our current house for.
Taxes were not too bad. We owed less than $3,000 this year…which is an improvement over the past few years. Next year we’re getting an accountant. Turbo Tax was tripping out on me for a while and I didn’t feel like I could trust it very much. Eventually the problems were sorted out and everything appeared to be okay.
One of the other highlights of my week was the delivery of my new license plate. I decided to get a personalized plate that had something to do with websites. When I was ordering the plate through Service Arizona I was trying to be creative and come up with something cool…most of those ideas were taken. I jokingly plugged “BLOG” into the search box and it was available. Being a person that likes to act quickly on cool opportunities, I ordered it. It showed up in the mail earlier this week and looks damn cool. I’ll get it put on the truck tomorrow after I wash it and I’ll post a pic of it.
So now that the week is officially over (12:37 on Sunday morning right now…assuming a Sunday – Saturday week), it’s time to get back working on the redesign for Travel Gear Blog and Bianchi Design…but first, I need some sleep.
