Happy Little Family

So we have a small hairy addition to our family these days and his name is Huck. Huckleberry to be exact, or Hucklebear as I call him. We've had him for nearly two weeks now and though he is precious, he is certainly at the stage to be a stinker.



He loves all things bad for him including chords/plugs for appliances, trying to chew on cleaning rags, even trying to lick the outlet in our bedroom - that was after we told him he COULDN'T chew the chord. He also loves some things that are harmless like scooting along in the grass and licking water off blades of grass when it's rained or the sprinkler has gone off.



We've successfully had him sleeping in his crate rather than our bed but it hasn't been without a little bit of crying... from me. :) He's played some with Lexi, my grandparents dog, and some with G & Lu's dog Charlie Daniels, both of which he has aliented with his rough housing. Hopefully they can be better friends after he realizes you don't make friends by biting.

Parched since Monday...

While last night I had a fun time writing about our funny water shut-off incident and how it's allowed us to have some time with our friends, today we are less optimistic about the situation. We have not stayed at our home for two nights now and we're going out of town this weekend.


Today Michael called to check and see if our water was turned on yet (so we could figure out if we could stay there or not) and the woman says "Oh yes, we can schedule that as soon as I get blah blah blah blah blah." You can imagine our surprise that they have yet to SCHEDULE our water to be turned on after we showed proof of ownership YESTERDAY. As I write, Michael is providing the necessary information, after which she'll put us on the 24 to 48 hour turnaround schedule to turn our water back on. If it is 48 hours it could be as late as 5pm on Friday before our water comes back on.


5 full days of not being able to stay at our house, 5 full days of 100+ degree weather with NO water on our grass or other plants. This battle is sure to have casualties not the least of which will be the hydrangea, passion vine and other landscaping that our seller so lovingly maintained. What if we didn't have people here to stay with? How can you live in your home with NO access to water? You can't!!!


Sigh. I feel better now after my mini-rant.

Slumber Party Fun

So yesterday we received notice that something had gone in the transfer of our water bill and it was still in the sellers name. Actually, she found out that something went wrong and stopped service immediately. This meant that we had to get the water transferred into our name but something else happened that required a bill to be paid before 5pm and it wasn't.... yada yada yada our water got cut off.

Michael had already given our friends Garrett and Lu a heads up that we might need a place to stay and so last night we packed our bags and headed north to Carrollton to stay with the Frith fam. We had a nice dinner, Lu and I got to watch the Bachelorette together aaaaand Michael broke the handle on their back door - it wouldn't open anymore. Whoops! Anyway, G & Michael took the door knob apart and got that fixed ...

Then today Michael tried to get the service up and running again but alas, it may be another 48 hours before our water is back on. We packed our bags and are again playing double household with G & Lu who are nice enough to host again. Michael eats it up getting to play with their Boston terrier, Charlie, and we even worked in a dinner-for-six tonight with our other friends Ben and Amy.

A little inconvenience has allowed us to enjoy some more time with friends so I'm just going to look for the silver lining. However I DID just watch Michael - who was blowing in Charlie's face to make him do this crazy bite-at-the-air licking thing - spit his gum across the room onto their carpet. Forgoing any other broken doors or gum in the carpet, perhaps we'll be allowed to stay again one more night should our water still be off come 5pm manana. ha!

Have a great week!

Officially Out

As of Monday night we are officially out of our apartment. Looking at all the moves that we have made together each of us from one apartment to the next I would say that this, by far, was our most challenging move. In the past, we were two people moving one person... this time, all of our stuff was combined and we were two people moving two people!

We reserved a truck for 9 am Saturday morning ... I confirmed this Friday night. Saturday morning at 8am I got a call that said the guy that rents the trucks wouldn't be in until noon, so I should wait and pick it up. We finally got the truck at 1, but not until Michael was able to throw in an awesome Seinfeld reference at the rental place.... "Anybody can just take a reservation...it's the holding that is important..."

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A7uvttu8ct0&feature=related

We moved all day Saturday with some help from Nate and Caleb (thanks so much) but we made countless trips following the return of our truck in the 4-Runner. It's like our stuff was multiplying... we are SO ready for a garage sale! As Michael put it, "If we were doing this in reverse and I was standing in our house with all this stuff, and you told me that I had to move all this stuff into our 1200 sq. ft. apartment, I'd tell you there was no way." And that is the TRUTH!
Last night was the first night we did laundry in our house, the first night I attempted to use the gas cook top (more on that later) and the first night I used the tub (ahhhhh). We're making progress unpacking, but there is still a ton of stuff just dropped wherever we could find room to put it! We are REALLY looking forward to our long weekend to make some huge strides. I'll post pictures of the 'wreckage' soon but for now I'm attaching some painting pictures...
Our breakfast nook got a couple of coats of paint before I pulled off a huge strip of paint like a big gummy worm - I was trying to pull a paintbrush hair off the wall (lesson #1: cheap paintbrushes are cheap for a reason and nice ones are worth the investment!). We're now going to have to sand and start over in this room, but the other rooms were more successful.

The Master Bath all ready for painting. The lighting is bad in this pic but the tile is a beige color and the walls were yellow.

Michael hard at work painting his walls this lovely "Dry Pasture" color.

Priming the niche in the secondary bedroom for painting. It was a VERY dark red and you can tell it's been painted about a hundred different colors so it was pretty crazy texture AND color to paint over.

Anyway, we also painted the other bathroom and got the final color on the niche so more pictures are to come! Thanks to all of you who are sharing in our joy for this very exciting step in our lives - it's an adventure!

Natasha

New Homeowners

Friday night we had access to our new house. We ate Taco Cabana on the back patio and marveled that we were sitting on OUR patio! We also went hunting for things left behind and things that needed to be done over the course of the weekend.

Our seller left a variety of things in the fridge including champagne and some really pretty glasses, some coffee and two coffee mugs with sugar in the cabinet and more, including an ironing board, TV tray, gold brick (random!), a quarter, plungers (ew), saran wrap and other handy kitchen items, a picture in the master bedroom (we later found a nice big hole behind that picture thank-you-very-much), a fan, a beware of dog sign (ready for our Doberman ;) ) and a trash can already taken to the curb (score!).

We assessed the interior damage done by the foundation work and thankfully no cracked floor tiles were found to be hidden under rugs. The only cracks we found were inside cabinets and everything else was pretty clean and move in ready! We met our neighbors over the course of Saturday and Sunday and there are two very cute kids next door that said "Didn't I meet you the other day?" - about 6 hours after meeting us - as well as a guy Lance that ride bikes (that should be easy to remember huh?).

We got some painting and other projects started as well, but that is for a later blog... Happy Monday!

One big box of surprises...

So closing day is tomorrow. We went by earlier this week and saw the foundation work complete, added some top soil, and watched some construction guy haul off all the yucky dirt and cement on our back driveway.

We also peeked in the windows and saw no major cracks or anything from the foundation work and our Realtor's walk through confirmed the same. The sellers movers have come, her maid has come, the yard guys have come for the last time (on her bill at least) and the house sits in wait for us.

Because we've purchased a few items from the seller those things remain in the house, but we were told on Saturday that there would be an additional "surprise" for us. Then, we got an email this week saying she left "more than one surprise". Some surprises we know we're getting are awesome, like the extra speakers for the surround sound in the livingroom.... others are questionable, like the 'disco pillow' we saw when we went to her garage sale last Saturday.

I guess for now all we can do is wait until tomorrow night when we go to our new home to evaluate whether or not which of these surprises are 'the good kind' - she has promised it's not her standard size Poodle Emmy or Tess the Schnauzer. Any and all surprises aside, we are SO very excited about our new home.

Natasha

The Move

We close on our house this Friday and the big move is upon us. Today they are supposed to finish the foundation work and we should be able to assess the success this evening. Yesterday was the first day that we packed together - as opposed to one of us packing odds and ends on our own - and though we got a lot accomplished there are still a lot of little things that need to be put in boxes. (Like, ahem, everything in our kitchen.)

It's pretty exciting as this is our first house and because it feels more like our first place together than our apartment did. Because I moved into the apartment first and lived there for about 6 months before we got married, it felt a lot like we moved Michael's stuff into a place that I was living ... I guess because that's exactly what we did. Now we'll get to pack our things and have a true merger of our stuff when we get to the new house.

The house is also different because we know that we'll stay there for a while and we can really get settled. Since my Junior year in college I've changed residences at least once a year. My senior year at A&M I moved in with Meredith, then my first year of grad school I lived with Marcus, then with cousin Stephen for a semester. Then I moved to San Antonio for about 11 months and lived with mom, then to Austin. In Austin I lived by myself in an apartment for about a year, moved out and ended up living with a lady from church for a few months (that's another story), then got an apartment again in Austin by myself. After living in that apartment for just under a year I moved to Dallas. Between the moves that Michael and I have helped eachother with and the moves of others, we have been part of a LOT of moves over the last 5 to 6 years and we are sure looking forward to settling down.

All of this is made more joyous by the seller who has turned out to be a really cool lady (aaaand she's had some great furniture that she wanted to unload that we have purchased!).