Making It Home

We’ve lived in the new house almost a week now and I have not written about it yet!  It was because this week was the busiest week at work on record for me so far (well, at least at B+L).

But we made it to the weekend and I am going to recap the last 6 days.

Monday, 1:30pm – We met Maria and the seller’s agent at the house for the final walk-through.  It was not pretty.  I had to take pictures of the house for the lawyers, so here are some of the things we found that day.

First, there was a new leak around the furnace.

Then, we discovered the rest of the house was a MESS.  It looked like no one had taken anything out… in fact, it looked like it was the same amount of stuff just messier.  The former owners were definitely hoarders.  (Two days later, we had even found canned food in the pantry that expired in 2001.)

Crowded closets:

Bedrooms were turned upside down (more so than they were before):

The attic was not touched:

There was still food in the fridge (including frozen lasagna!!):

And the garage was PACKED!

Dave and I were a little overwhelmed – and I was slightly panicking.  However, we went to the lawyer’s office and worked out an agreement that they would have the place cleaned by the end of the week.  Plus, we still got all of the furniture we requested, so we proceeded.

Closing took a little over two hours.  Not as stressful as I thought, but I think I was working up to this day for a while now.  Once we finished, Maria gave us a little gift (a Christmas decoration) and we went to our new home!

The first thing we did was call a guy named Paul… the caretaker of the house who was the person assigned to clean it all out.  He came over that same night and spent four hours working on it.  We ended up liking Paul immediately – he was almost like a live-in handyman for the week.  It was comforting knowing he was around since I would point out problems.  On top of that, he was going to take care of both the furnace leak and the leak beneath the stairs at the water pump.

Paul also allowed us to keep as much stuff as we wanted – dishes, artwork, book, and other decorations.  Here’s the table where we piled the stuff that we wanted:

Dave and I moved some things in that night, and Mommy and Daddy came over to help.  We got as much as we could done and we set up our bedroom.  We also brought over Sam and kept her in the bedroom while Paul was around.

That night, we went to bed around midnight and proceeded to sleep only 2 hours the whole night because Sam (and us!) were kind of nervous!  The house made a lot of noises and just felt so big.  Sam could not sit still for one minute and paced around the bed the entire time.

The rest of the week will be recapped in the next post!