House Update

OK, so my camera batteries just died and I forgot to take updated pictures last night, so no visuals today. Forgive.

We close on the house in 8 days, and by our calculations, there is about 12 days of work left to do. Sales guy says 4 days, builder guy says 8 days. We are going to let them sink or swim. Actually, we are much more optimistic after yesterday's chat that they will have most everything finished by the night before.

We still need blinds, carpet, remaining tile, replacement tiles in the kitchen where they ate tacos and oil stained them, staining the wood on the stairs and front door, swapping out the toilets to human sized ones, take down the bricks they put in an archway that wasn't our brick, brick the back by the windows they repositioned, sod, finish landscaping, reposition outdoor lights, retexture and plaster wall dings, repaint the walls, paint the trim for the first time, fix the broken window upstairs, replace the dented new a/c they installed yesterday, clean everything. That might be about it. Not much, right?

Yesterday we drove up to our house and discovered they installed the sprinkler system underground, plus landscaped the front of the house. We now have some sort of purplish ornamental grass, shrub roses, a crapemyrtle, two other trees which Dad will identify for us next week, plus some other shrubby type clumps. Just as we predicted, they will plant something to intentionally obscure our house number, which was bricked into the column in front. Our bricking crew was chastized, and then fired, so we feel a bit of justice there. We mentioned they hadn't put the house number up while they were bricking, and asked if it could be done high enough so that people could see it from the road. Our brickers were a short collection of guys, and I guess they felt 5 feet high was high enough. No one will see it.

For some reason, we have a bit of renewed confidence that everything will get done. We picked a closing date, and they have to meet it. It's not our fault if they were delayed; I would have volunteered to pitch in and brick the back if they would have let me. We have a walk-through on Saturday to nitpick all the little things that are whack and again Tuesday night before we close to see if they all got done. So, now that we have much more peace about the whole thing, we are getting really excited about moving in.

Poor Mom and Dad are going to be worked to the bone, and have the complimentary floor to sleep on for a couple of nights. I tell you what, I'm keeping my parents around; I know lots of folks whose parents would never do the things mine have done or agreed to do for us. And the few I know with parents like mine won't lend them for cheap. Mom and I really enjoyed working together on Chris and Beth's house, so I have high hopes that this work festival we're about to do will have some visit feel to it, as well. If we only had some pregnant relative to run back and forth to Home Depot and bring us lunch and cook us dinner. Alas, Beth cannot travel this week. Bummer.

Our sales guy said he has had several people mention how good our brick looks, and they would have chosen it if they had known how good it would look. I think it is all because of the trim.

So, this is all just too much information. We are less enamored with our home building company than ever, but our confidence in our builder is pretty good now. I wish I had known summer mortgage rates are higher, just like travel prices. Oh well.