Baby Bean is Growing

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Saturday, May 30, 2009

This Our House, episode 1

More house stuff!

Our new sofa arrived! It is awesome. It is a grown up sofa. (The sofa we currently have feels more like a teenage IKEA sofa.) It looks pretty good in our red living room, don't you think?


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Brandon moved all his plants over to the house. They seem to like the sunshine on the deck quite well.

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This Columbine is a volunteer between the flagstones below the deck. Pretty!

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This is the gargantuan lilac bush in the back yard. There's another that's just finishing flowering, but it is not nearly as gargantuan.

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Some of the local fauna.

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Yesterday Brandon changed the locks and reprogrammed the garage door opener. I think it gave him a feeling of power…

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He also took down the pink crocheted curtains in the master bedroom. He didn't like them for some reason. Can't imagine why.

Here's where we enter... the closet zone.

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That's the end of the master bedroom. You can see there's a closet down there, and what looks like space for another closet that was ripped out.

But if you turn left at that closet...

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...you find this closet, which was actually once a pass-through to get to the bathroom (but the door has now been blocked off with a shelving unit in the bathroom).

Riddle me this, my friends: why did anyone think this room needed three distinct closet spaces? And does that look like a load-bearing shelf unit to you, or do you think we could rip the whole thing out?

I guess we should just be glad that those three (two? four?) closets don't look like THIS:

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Yup. That's orange shag carpet. It's in the bottom of all the other closets. Which says to me that it was, at one point, in the entire rest of the upstairs of this house.

It was built in the '70s after all. That was probably the height of sophistication then.

By the way, that particular closet is in the fish room:

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Brandon thinks that curtain has to go, too. He's so picky.

Stay tuned! Next time on this our house we play "Name that plant!"

Friday, May 29, 2009

Homeowners

Well, we are officially homeowners!



It happened Wednesday afternoon. The husband and I each took a half day off work and met at the house around 1:15. I was a little early and a little dismayed to find the previous owners still moving a ton of stuff out of our garage and into the neighbor's garage! We met our real estate agent and walked through the house, which wasn't clean, but wasn't in bad shape.

After we made sure they hadn't knocked down any walls or anything, we all drove downtown to the Land & Title company for the actual closing. The seller's agent? Was ridiculously smarmy. Poufy hair, beady eyes, a navy blazer with bright gold buttons everywhere and a hideously false smile. We were really glad this was the only time we had to deal with him! Brandon leaned over and whispered "Don't agree to buy a used car from him!"

We signed a huge stack of papers, and then the title guy had to go email some to our mortgage company. They had already wired the money, but they wouldn't release it until they saw all the paperwork was in order. So we sat there for 45 minutes, making awkward small talk with the previous owner until we got the all clear. The title man came in, shook our hands, and said "Congratulations! You're owners!"

The drive back took way too long, and we decided to stop and drop off our rent check on the way. We didn't realize until we slipped it into the slot that it was our last rent payment ever! It's all mortgage from here on out.

Then we went to the house. We parked in the driveway. The keys worked. We went inside. We hugged and I got a little teary. It was really real.

We have a house!

Saturday, May 16, 2009

Seth and the Dimple


Seth and the Red Balloon
Originally uploaded by LacyLu42.

This little boy right here? He's totally stolen my heart.

Sorry Brandon.

You could just get lost in that dimple, couldn't you?