Well, we moved in on Friday the 26th.  I took the day off of work, and I had help from my dad, Luke, John, and Richie.  We got it pretty much all moved that day.  On Saturday, some of Rosemary's family came over and helped us unpack, and John and I spent a few hours reorganizing the garage so we could park both cars in there.

Now, a few weeks later, we only have a few boxes of stuff left.  The garage has maybe a dozen boxes of old attic stuff I'd like to clean out/throw away, as well.  I went out and bought a bunch of house and garden care things that any homeowner needs, and I brought my dad along with me to guide my purchases of a new homeowner.  We got hoses, a lawnmower, sprinklers, moss killer, extension cords, and much more.  Rosemary also went shopping and outfitted our two guest bathrooms, as well.  They look pretty good- much better than I expected we'd be able to do in the first year.  Thankfully we came out of the whole house deal with some extra cash left over, plus not having to pay the mortgage the first month in the house let us have the slack in our budget to afford the new house items we needed like towels, lawn mowers and whatnot.

The last few weeks have been interesting.  Lots of yard work, lots of house maintenance stuff.  The TV is still sitting on the floor, because it's about an inch too tall for the TV hole in the wall in the living area.  We've been moving stuff around, reorganizing the office, the downstairs, and getting things just put away.  My commute has been a little better- maybe about 5 to 10 minutes shaved off of the total time, and since my commute is about 5 miles less each way, I've been noticing my gas tank emptying a little slower lately as well.

It's not quite home yet.  It's still just a big house we live in.  It'll start changing once we decorate more, and once we have some more memories to fill our minds.  It sounds like Grandpa will let me have his awesome Weber grill, so I'm excited to throw some BBQs this summer to help create those memories.  The backyard is in a pretty sad state right now- it wasn't when we moved in, but I mowed the lawn, and put down some moss killer, so the lawn is patchy and black.  Once I rake out the moss, it'll be an embarassing bare patch of dirt.  It'll probably take me until middle of summer before it's in a good shape, but it'll be good to have a nice healthy green lawn for Judah to play on. 

Judah LOVES the new house.  He runs around, goes downstairs to play, and has a great time.  He does essentially have an 800 square foot play room all to himself, in addition to his bedroom.  It'll change once we get some couches for downstairs and a TV, which probably won't happen for quite some time, but for now... it's just this huge cavernous room with tons of toys strewn about.

It's been real nice having new home experiences.  A lot of work, but refreshing.  And that's been helpful, because work has been pretty stressful lately.  The midyear review came and went, and it didn't go very well.  My boss continuously tells me I am one of his top employees, but rated me pretty low.  There's been some contention lately, and it makes me feel icky when I know I'm partly the cause of that.  I've been working on reminding myself that I am a servant, and I am here to serve those around me, as if it was Jesus I was serving.  That's always done me well, and I need to stick to what I know works for me.

Refreshing the house.

So we got an estimate for carpet, and we decided we're going to go with that. So, we started painting last night while the old carpet is down, for a few reasons: we want the carpet to match the paint, and we want to paint while the old carpet is down in case we spill. So we painted maybe a third of our bedroom last night and taped most of it all off. We got rid of the extremely ugly aztec red wall, and painted over it with a darker warmer red color, and started painting over the super ugly peach with a gray based offwhite. It already looks a ton better. I'm so tired of seeing a peach glow in the house from all the ugly walls. Most of the downstairs has already been painted, just the dining room is left there. We need to paint the rest of the bedroom and the hallway area connecting upstairs/downstairs before we lay the carpet, and Dad is going to come over on friday during the day to help out with that (part of a little agreement he had with us to help paint our house in leiu of cash when we went on our mission trip to India. He's already painted the downstairs area, so I figure we're even after friday).

We had to go with a 15ft roll of carpet to avoid some pretty ugly seems, so we had very limited choice in that range, but the one that was there matched what we are going for and works with our budget, so I think we're solid there.

All in all, I'm fairly excited about refreshing the house. We've had ugly walls and nasty 10+ year old carpet ever since I've moved in, and having new fresh paint and carpet can really make you feel better about your living space, and in turn give you some motivation to keep it cleaner, too. hehe.