Our first home repair (a.k.a We meet the neighbours)

The same day that we were moving in, so to were neighbours on one side of house. While moving, we did a quick hello, but otherwise we went about our business. A week later, Husband and I were heading out to the garage to prep for our first ever garbage day (garbage has never been this exciting before!), and the neighbours were outside with some friends. They came over and introduced themselves. They have two adorable little boys and the family seems nice. A bit rough around the edges, but nice. She's off work on sick leave and he's in construction. Hmmmmm, a neighbour in construction. Convenient, no?

So we go about our business and prep our garbage cans and then go back inside. Husband goes to do the dishes (Mr. Picky Pants won't let certain things go in the dishwasher) and all of a sudden he notices water pouring out of the cabinet under the sink! Turns out our vegetable sprayer came loose, which caused the flood of water. Husband was able to identify the problem himself (I'm so proud!), but as we had just moved in, we had no tools other than a screwdriver and a hammer. My mom had already told me she would give us all her tools, but we hadn't gotten over there to pick them up yet.

So decision time - ask the neighbours, who we just met 10 minutes prior, if we could borrow pliers, or call my mom at 9 pm on a Sunday and ask her to come down with some tools? Husband volunteered to go and ask the neighbour, which I thought was ballsy, but what are neighbours for, right? Husband comes back with the pliers and the neighbour himself, who proceeds to fix the sink for us! Apparently it's very common for a vegetable sprayer to loosen a bit each time you pull it out to use and as you do this repeatedly, it finally loosens enough that it causes a leak. Now that we know this, we can be more mindful and tighten as needed. But we had planned on replacing the kitchen taps for aesthetic purposes anyway, so we may look at getting something where the sprayer comes out of the main faucet to completely avoid the problem.

Then, as if that wasn't enough, our neighbour asks us if there's anything else wrong with the house that he can look at and he proceeds to make suggestions on how we can easily fix a few things that we've noticed since moving in!

Having our own house to look after is a huge change from apartment living, so it's great to know we have someone who can help us out if need be.

Weekly Money Check-Up

Courtesy of My Pretty Pennies

1. The most I’ve spent this last week was on paying the credit card bill.
2. Today I am thankful for my husband. As often as I get mad at him, he does so many things for me.
3. Money can’t buy happiness. One free thing I did last week that made me happy was .
4. I will consider this week a success if I walk to/from work 8 out of 10 times.
5. One recipe I want to try soon is  No Bake Chocolate Oat Bars. They look and sound delicious! And with the hot weather we've been having, the no bake part really appeals to me right now!

Being a home owner

(Excuse the rambling in this post - so much to talk about in regards to the new house... I'll try to segment the topics after this!) 


Owning a house is a huge difference - I don't think I realized how much different it would be. It's one of those things where hind sight really kicks in. While I don't regret owning the house and I think this is definitely the house for us, I do wish we had planned everything a bit better. But then again, I don't think you can really, truly know what to plan for unless you go through it. 


I am very thankful for our family who have chipped in and given us items for the house. My mom, who just a few months ago went from a house to an apartment, gave us all her tools that she'll never need again, from screwdriver sets to a cordless drill to ladders. Now we're fully set for any emergencies - we have anything and everything you could possibly think of. Things that I didn't even know existed (who knew there were so many different types of saws!). My mom also said she'll buy us a closet organizer as a house warming gift (must needed as our house is old and the closets are small!). We just have to measure the master bedroom closet and go shopping. 


We also got a very nice gift card for a home decor store from my in-law's. I wanted to buy an area rug, as we now have hardwood floors (and we and the cats are used to carpet), but due to the price of rugs, I didn't think it would be possible anytime soon. But with their gift card, we were able to pick up an area rug, plus a few other things for around the house. 


Some friends also gave us gift cards for a house warming gift, so we'll be able to pick up other necessary things as they come up. 


There are a few little things that we want to do around the house, some we knew about before we moved in and some that are coming up as we live in the house. But we're trying to wait until we've been in the house for at least a month. I'd like to update the bathroom vanity (it has a pedestal sink, which I hate and wasn't really installed properly, so I want to get one with a vanity/cabinet), change the kitchen faucet (doesn't quite go with the modern decor) and paint a few rooms. Plus the inside front door is old and can be a pain to open and close and it doesn't have a lock, so I wouldn't mind changing that. We also want to get a new furnace, something that is high-efficiency, but that was built into our mortgage, so we can do that without having to worry about the cost. 


But, there's lots of time to get all this done and nothing is really a big rush. From what I hear, there's always some project or another to do once you're a home owner!


Up next... our first home repair is needed! (A.K.A. We meet the neighbours)

I'm back!

After a month of crazy changes, life is finally beginning to settle down. Here are just a few things that I did over the past four weeks:

- finished the last course in my management certificate program and submitted my graduation request! I will be graduating with a 4.0 GPA, which I am very pleased with! The grad ceremony isn't until October, but it's a great feeling to know that I'm done, with or without the paper in hand!

- had surgery. A very minor surgery, but surgery that kept me off of work for two weeks. Without going into personal details, I've had surgery for a genetic condition since I was a baby (more than a dozen surgeries in total) and this was the LAST one ever! It's kind of surreal, as I was told "this will be the last one" for a very long time, but this is it for sure now. This was actually on my baby bucket list, as I didn't want to have to go through any more surgeries once we had kids, and I most certainly couldn't do it while pregnant.

- and last, but not least - we moved! We moved out of our apartment on June 30th and into the new house on July 1st. It was actually a very easy move thanks to all our friends and family. We're settling in nicely, but it's a big adjustment. I'll post more on that later! 


For now, I'm happy to let life get back to boring. It's nice to not have to pack or study or worry about the move and I can just enjoy the house, husband, cats and life!

Our house!

I am thrilled to show off our new house! These are images from the real estate listing, so the furnishings are not ours and we will be painting some of the rooms, but you do get a good idea of what it looks like.

From the front:



The porch on the front of the house:
 

The living room view from the dining room: (that is an area rug, underneath is hardwood floors).



Second picture of the living room: (Through the doorway at the right of the picture, you see another room, which is the entry foyer at the front of the house).



The dining room view from the living room:



Kitchen:



The hallway, which leads to the front door, is behind the camera:




The doorway in the picture below leads out to the mudroom, which leads outside:




Stairs going up:



Master bedroom:





Bathroom:





Spare bedroom:



Spare bedroom #2 (which will become the office).



Off of the second spare bedroom is the sunroom.

And the outside deck: (to the left is the garage, to the right is the house).



The basement is completely unfinished, but we like that we have that blank slate to work with in the future. We may turn it into a rec room and then add a second bathroom. Right now it just has the washer and dryer down there.

All the stainless steel appliances are remaining, as well as the lighting fixtures. We are going to keep the dining room as is, as I love that dark accent wall with the white frames. The bathroom will be painted, as well as the two spare bedrooms. But all in good time! I like that it is essentially move in ready, and it's also to our taste, so we won't want to change much.

We've bought some new bedroom furniture already, which will be delivered to the new house. We also want to get some area rugs - one for the living room and one for our master bedroom for sure. Husband wants one for the dining room, which I'm not too keen on, but we'll see. We might get a few small ones for the spare room and office too, but no rush.

Weekly Money Check-Up

Weekly Money Check-Up is courtesy of My Pretty Pennies.

1. The most I’ve spent this last week was on assorted bills - parking, pet insurance, cell phone, etc.

2. Today I am thankful for my need to get things done in advance. Thanks to my compulsive nature, we are done half of the packing and I've already started on cleaning parts of the apartment. It's so much easier to do a little bit at a time, so this way we're not scrambling on moving day to finish it all. 

3. Money can’t buy happiness. One free thing I did last week that made me happy was go swimming with husband, a couple friends and their little girl. She's so happy to go swimming she literally shakes with excitement and it's contagious!

4. I will consider this week a success if I'm able to get notes made for my exam coming up in a week and a half.

5. I am currently reading Tina Fey's Bossypants. It's a good light read, which is perfect for my life right now - I can read a chapter here and there whenever I have time. Ultimately right now I'm focused on packing, cleaning and class stuff. 

We bought a house!

I know I've been MIA lately, but for good reason! We got home from Ottawa on May 13 and the next day, we bought a house!

While husband and I were in Ottawa, we chatted about the house hunting process and how exhausted we were. We had been looking for a couple months and nothing was really right for us. We saw two houses that we considered putting offers in for - one we didn't offer on because a family friend (who is is contracting) came to look at it and told us not to buy it as it had some serious foundation issues; the second one we were going to bid on, but by the time our realtor came over to go through the bidding process, there were 6 or 7 bids already, with several hours to go, so we knew the house would be bid up and go beyond our budget.

So while in Ottawa, we decided we would stop looking for awhile. But, we had already made an appointment to see some more houses on the Monday morning when we returned, so we kept that appointment with our realtor and said after that, we'd take a break and let the bidding war that is called summer go on without us.

We met up with our realtor (actually our realtor was on vacation, so we met with his colleague) and the first house we saw that day was it! We both loved it - the location was ideal (even close enough to my office that I can still walk to work if I want), husband loved the kitchen (his domain, not mine) and I adored that there was an entrance foyer and a mud room at the back, so the cats would have a very difficult time trying to escape.

(Side note: I'm such a worrier when it comes to my fur babies - one major reason why I didn't want to buy a house is because I feared our cats would escape out the door and be lost. Right now if that happens, they can only get out into the apartment hallway. So with this house, there are two doors that we have to go through to enter or exit out the front or back, so you go through one door and have to close the second and walk through the foyer/mud room before you get to the second door. That peace of mind is priceless in my opinion.)

Anyway, so we went and saw the other homes on the list for that day, but we kept going back to the original house. By the time we were done for the morning, we knew we wanted to put in an offer.  So we went for lunch while the realtor went back to the office to dig up some information.

After lunch, we went to his office and saw the comparables, chatted about what the listing agent had said and debated our options back and forth. The listing agent had said the couple selling wanted between $20,000-$30,000 more than the original asking price, so we put in a bid that was on the higher end of what they actually wanted, as we knew there would be multiple bids. We also had our family friend, the contractor, come by and take a look at the house and sign off on it.

And then we waited... offers were due at 7 pm that night. That night! So that means we saw the house at 10 am and we would know less than 12 hours later if we owned it! At 7:05, the realtor called us and said there were 7 bids on the house and did we want to change our offer (the message from the listing agent). We said no, as we knew our initial offer was a good one. About an hour later, I got a call - it was down to us and one other couple, and did we want to up our bid. I woke up Mark, who had been sleeping during this time (he had to work that night at 11 pm). He said to up it $3,000 and then went back to sleep. So I phoned my sister and she said that the other couple was probably thinking something similar - increase their bid by $2,000 or $3,000, so if we upped ours by $4,000, we had a better chance to get it. And really, what's another $1,000 when you're spending that much money? So that's what we did. About half an hour later, we got the call that the house was ours!

We are sooooo excited to be homeowners. A couple days after, the nervousness kicked in - so much money and stuff to do! But now I'm back to excited.

We move out of our apartment on June 30th and we get possession of the house on July 1st. We'll be spending the one night at my in-laws and leaving all our belongings in a U-Haul truck.

So, over the past month, I've been calling around for home insurance, getting quotes on some house stuff (we want to replace the furnace as it's old, and potentially the front window, which is the only window that wasn't replaced in 2010), getting mortgage stuff settled, finding someone to sublet our apartment and playing with all the budget numbers.

We've started going through all our stuff and packing the non-essentials. I actually love the whole moving process. Well, not the entire process, but I love the packing and unpacking part as you get to purge your belongings, find old treasures, sell/donate stuff and just 'cleanse'. So we're doing that right now and I am loving it. Not loving the mess though... :P

So hence, I have been rather quiet on blog land. But I will try to post more often now as I think things are settling down a bit.

I will post something about our Ottawa trip soon! And I'll try to get some house pictures up.