Brian-Foley.net

It’s been awhile since my last post. Sorry, been dealing with a stressful situation. Closing the new house! I went through with the closing on Monday morning, even though there were still several issues on the punch-list to be completed. I’m now battling with the builder (M/I Homes) to finish our house to my satisfaction. It’s all a bunch of stupid little things, but I would like to have it completed before I move all our posessions in. I don’t want to have to take even more time off from work to sit around and wait for contractors to do the work they should have already done months before. Hmm, my bloodpressure is rising as I type about it…

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It’s been awhile since my last post. We’ve been a little busy with stressing ourselves out over wedding details, house stuff, work, etc…Also we took a little time off this past weekend to visit the annual Florida Strawberry Festival with some friends. We had a pretty good time, even though the festival was kind of unimpressive. 90% of that whole festival was just food vendors! There were some rides, and the rest was sort of an agricultural display. I was looking forward to the strawberry shortcake, but honestly, Amanda makes far better strawberry shortcake.

I visited the house this morning and it’s come along pretty well so far. The floors are done, both the wood flooring and the carpeting. All the faucets are installed. The dishwasher was installed. Airconditioning has been completed with the installation of the thermostats and air-filter monitor. They have permanent power to the house (the meter has been installed). I put up some of the pictures I took before the weekend, I didn’t go into the house this morning because the carpeting was just installed and I didn’t feel like taking my shoes off. Basically they need to install the door to the pool bath, poor a concrete slab under that door, replace the door handles and hinges, fix a couple cable outlets, and finish the study and we should be pretty well off. I’ll get an electrical tester to test the outlets the next time I go there.

Here’s a link to a 360 degree tour of the home we are building, this might give a better feel for the place than the construction photos do.

photo credit: Stephen Poff

There’s nothing quite like the stress of constant anticipation…You know like when your a kid on Christmas Eve and you just can’t fall asleep because you can’t wait to tear into all the gifts left for you under the tree. Or that feeling you have when you purchased something online that you’ve really been wanting, everyday watching for the UPS truck to come deliver the goods…Well take that anticipation and multiply it by 1000 and that’s what I’ve been feeling lately. Everything in my life has been put on hold until we can close on our new house. We’re trying to plan a wedding, but I can’t really say how much we have to spend because I don’t know what my monthly mortgage will be like. We need to buy furniture and appliances, but I don’t want to buy them now if there’s no place to put them, and I’d rather not have to pay for something that we can’t use right away. Another factor of stress for us is the fact that we’ve been crammed into a small home, the two of us with our two large dogs. I went from living alone in an 1800 sq ft home to living with someone else and two dogs in a 900 sq ft home! Anyway… I put a call into M/I Homes today to try to find out what the hold up is and when we can expect to close on this house. This process has taken almost a year from start to finish, originally we were told we’d be living in the house by Thanksgiving (of last year!).

I updated some of the pictures from the previous House update post. We stopped by last night before dinner to see what kind of progress has been made. Since my last post, they had installed tiolets and put some of faucets in the spare baths. They installed a mailbox and put the numbers on the front of the house, too bad they don’t match. The mailbox says 703, the house says 730…That’ll confuse the hell out of the pizza deliverly boy! Not much happened yesterday, they just installed shelving in the closets. I think the cabinet people came back as I noticed the glass that was missing in the butler’s cabinet is now installed. Hopefully more progress will happen today.

Countertops and microwave installed

Our new house is starting to come along, slowly but surely. I stopped by this morning to see how much progress has been made in the past couple days. Mandie went there last night (before going to her sencond job) and said they had delivered the counters, so I had to see for myself. The countertops in the kitchen were installed, with the backsplash and electrical outlets. The microwave was installed, and the dishwasher was delivered but not yet installed. They air conditioning units were also fully installed (including my fancy electronic air cleaners). This morning there were a couple of guys there patching holes in the garage wall, hopefully they’ll make the concrete slab outside the pool bath door. Mandie said there were some people there cleaning windows last night, but the windows I saw were still filthy. That’s to be expected while being in a construction zone.