Category: House stuff

Well, the hardwood flooring throughout the house ended up being too expensive, so it’s back to plain old carpet. The flooring that the builder was going to be put in was the solid ~3/4″ wood plank-nail to the floor-3 coats of polyurethane type floor, not the thin snap together panel type floor. The wife is none too pleased about giving up the wood floor, but I figure we can always do the hardwood flooring a couple of years down the road anyway.

I think we’ll have to get a second Roomba to help clean all the extra space.

Posted some pictures of the house in various stages of construction. The drywall is up now so the house innards are starting to look more like house innards.A little bit of paint, some floors and a few lights and it’ll be ready to move in!

Today we head over to the tile place and pick out some tile for the kitchen and bathrooms.

Met with the selling agent today to go over our choices for the house innards. Chose stuff like wall colours, cabinets, flooring, tile and carpets. It all went reasonably well, although a few things we want will depend on the cost. If it comes in over our budget, then we’ll have to eliminate some of the upgrades we asked for and go with the standard choices. We have things prioritized though, and nothing will be really hard to give up. Besides, we can always go back in a year or two and have things re-done the way we wanted.

After that it was a stop at the house to measure out a few areas. Drywall’s been put up so finishing shouldn’t be too much farther away.

A trip to Sears netted us a swanky new refrigerator and washer/dryer thanks to the wife’s parents. All within budget (barely) too.

Next thing on the list to deal with are some forms that need to be filled out by the Payroll folks, setting up an appointment with the appraiser guy, going to the tile place and the lighting place and getting some insurance quotes.

Somewhere in all that I need to do taxes too…

Applying for a mortgage loan involves a lot of rummaging and running around, as I’m sure anyone who’s been through the process knows very well.

We opted to do our mortgage through E-Loan. So far the people I’ve been speaking to have been very friendly, helpful and provide most everything that needs signing electronically. And there are forms up the wazoo. Of course the signing thing still needs to be done on the dead-tree version, which means faxing it back to them. We’re in the processing and approval stage now, so there’s been a lot of paperwork that needs to be printed and signed. Hopefully everything goes through smoothly.

Along with the condofication of the apartments, there’s a lot of other stuff going on. A number balconies are being completely rebuilt, new landscaping, people driving around slow gawkingchecking out the place and installation of a gate. That’s right, it’s going to be a gated condominium community.

So now I have visions of us driving in late one night and suddenly finding the gate closed and locked and having no way of getting in. Whatever code we need to punch in to get in is tacked to our door (our usual way of getting messages from the apartment people) but of course we don’t know that because we haven’t been home yet.

That would probably suck.