The planning kind of continues...

So Monterey is out of the question now. It would have been either hotels or the beach...and I'm not super enthusiastic about getting married in a hotel or getting sand in my shoes. We were pretty set on Saratoga Springs for a while, but that's not going to work out.

What I do know is that I would like to have the ceremony outdoors in a forest somewhere. Hopefully. I'm still looking. The current  front-runner now is Palm Dale Estates. Josh and I have decided to have the reception in a banquet room at a buffet. The room comes with a dance floor :P and I feel that all the choices would appeal to everyone instead of people having to choose between only two entrees.

Either way, the final decision will be in December when we are back in California and can to physically see all the venues. We're hoping that we'll be able to book the venues for August 2013, which is a bit earlier than I had been thinking, but why not?

I'm starting vet school next Monday, so planning will slow down. However, I guess that's not saying much since I haven't been doing all that much. I think a lot will happen in December when I'm physically back in California. Yay for cake testing :D

Location, location, location....

Josh and I have been tossing ideas back and forth on where we want to get married. We know it's going to be in California, that was the easy part. However, the location is driving me mad. At first we talked about having a church wedding. I think that idea is mostly off the table. With the color theme, I was thinking of some sort of garden with a nice lawn and pretty flowers.

Josh is really pushing for Monterey. That area is very special to him. Would people actually drive all the way to Monterey for the wedding? If the wedding was in Monterey, would it be a beach wedding? Wouldn't it be stupid for making people to drive all the way there just to get married in a garden? And a beach wedding would mean a change in color scheme. Teal? Beige? Geeeehh....

I think we should just elope. That would solve all the problems :P

The paint job and the move

Yes, I'm still alive. Moving day was 4/21/12 and things have been insane before and after. I wanted to get painting done before the move. Unfortunately, we only did part of it. But I'm happy with what we got done (more than I expected).

The kitchen

The bedroom

The kitchen is a pale honey color. I'm super excited about the color. The bedroom is moss print. And I have the paint bought for the living and dining room (Chinese jade) but haven't had a chance to paint yet. It's a really pale green and then we're going to have white trims in the house.

Everything is now moved, but unpacking has been slow. Josh is in the middle of preliminaries so he's out of commission for a while. We did finally manage to get internet set up. And just got a quote on the gutters yesterday so we're going to have people fixing the chimney, roof, and gutters soon (yay).

In addition, a few days after we moved, we brought home kitty #2. His name is Kronos (that was actually the name they gave him at the shelter). Since Kronos is a titan and the father of gods and Theia is also a titan and the mother of gods, we kind of took that as a sign :P They are getting along better now. Theia was none too happy with us at first. Kronos is doing great. He really just doesn't care, about anything.

Kronos

I don't have a single photo of Kronos in which he's not sleeping. He's friendly and adorable. And Josh is over the moon having a cat that will beg for table scraps -____-;;

The repairs: Part II

Lookie, lookie! :D

The drywall in the closet is now FINALLY all up! Josh and I are super excited that it hasn't all fallen down. Now that the water has finally been turned on, we can get the joint compound on and finish up with this job and feel marginally good about ourselves.

Speaking of getting the water turned on, that in itself was a nightmare. The city of Jackson just recently passed a law saying that if the water has been turned off in a house for more than 6 months, then it needs a water inspection before the water can be turned on. When we called the water department that is what they told us even though the water was just on last month mid-February. The water inspector was out of town for a week, so it was a while before we were able to even schedule an inspection. After the inspection, I called the water department to schedule an appointment, and was told that I needed an inspection. When we tried calling the water inspector to see what was going on, we couldn't reach him for two day. Then we were told there was a mix up in the paper work and that he'd call the water department himself. When we called the water inspection, we were told yet again that they don't have an inspection on record. It took another few days to get a hold of the water inspector again, who told us that he had actually already talked to the water department. Josh called them again, and pretty much lost it when they said they didn't know what was going on. In the end, it took about 3 weeks, to finally get the water turned on, but it finally happened today.

We can now stay at the house so hopefully we'll be able to work a bit faster and get a few more jobs done before we have to move in. There's a whole laundry list of things to do and appliances to buy. We'll be moving some things in slowly over the next month as well before the official moving day. Fun, fun.

The repairs: Part I

Josh and I are beginning to think that the house is cursed. That, and that the previous owners were incapable of doing anything right.

The first project we decided to attack was drywalling. More specifically the closet ceiling in the bedroom. A part of the ceiling was bowing out, so it should have been an easy job. Remove drywall. Replace. Done. Instead, it has been a nightmare. First off, for some reason, the previous owners  had decided to nail the drywall pieces into the support beams instead of using drywall screws. So tearing the ceiling down was all sorts of fun. After tearing the ceiling down we realized that instead of using fiberglass insulation, they had decided to use large pieces of styrofoam. In addition to that, we realized that the previous piece was sagging because the owners had not followed the cardinal rule about drywalling; each piece has to start and end on a stud so that the edges are screwed in rather than flailing around in midair (what were they thinking???). Because of this, we had to keep cutting sideways to find a stud. Unfortunately, this also means that the edges of the other pieces in the ceiling are not secured to studs, meaning we have to keep tearing down drywall (Whhhhhyyyyyyyy?).

At this point, we decide to stop tearing down the ceiling and start putting up pieces of drywall. When trying to put up the first piece, we found out that the previous owners used a different thickness for that ceiling than the other ceilings (the ones we bought drywall pieces for) so we had to go haul more home. Then after cutting the right size (Josh is now a cutting pro :P) we find out that for some reason the owners had not cut the previous pieces straight (wtf), so the piece we have isn't going to fix, which means more drywall being cut out.

Look at Josh hard at work :)

After finally getting a few pieces of drywall up we're feeling a bit better. And we proceed in cutting the rest of the ceiling. We finally cut to a point where, amazingly, the drywall was actually screwed into the beams. After a mini celebration, we cut the final piece that should have completed the length of the ceiling we pulled down. Until we found out that again, they had not made a straight cut. No big problem, we'll just cut off 1/8 of an inch off part of the piece and then eventhing would finally fit. That was until we looked up and saw....

Oh the horrors!!

 Apparently the piece put up by the former owners hadn't quite reached the edge of the ceiling. Instead of patching it up, they decided to use expanding foam. -_______- In fact, expanding foam seems to be their quick fix of choice all over the house. So when we have finally gotten to a edge that we could have kept, we now have to but more of the ceiling until we can get to the next stud. But that can wait until next weekend.

My new house key :D

With the drywalling started, the next project on the list was re-keying the locks. Josh has done plenty of this while working at a hardware store, so this should have been a short, easy project. We bought a re-keying set and set off to work. An hour later, we still have not yet been able to pop the cylinder out of the first doorknob. Frustrated, we take the doorknob into Home Depot, where the re-key guy was finally able to pop it out. So we manage to get the doorknob and deadbolt in the front door re-keyed. On to the side door, back door, and garage door. None of the cylinders want to pop out of these doorknobs. Josh, meanwhile, is about to break something out of frustration. We take those doorknobs back to Home Depot and even the re-key guy can't pop the cylinders out (and boy did he try). According to him, he's never seen a doorknob that he wasn't able to pop the cylinders out of. Yay for us... So after wasting an entire afternoon, it turns out we need to get some new locks and re-key those. 

On the bright side, we manage to re-caulk the bathtub without blowing anything up XD

More repair jobs to come...

The house!!!!

So we actually did it. Josh and I now own a house, free and clear :D 206 Marshall St., Jackson, MI 49202.

The bank made us wait until the very last minute to sign for the house. So Friday morning, we drove a hour through a snowstorm to sign some papers. We were in such a rush that we didn't even have time to pick up the keys :( We then hurried home to catch a ride to the airport to catch our flight to Taiwan.

Here's a repeat picture of the house. It's a one and a half story single family home with a one and a half car detached garage. There are two bedrooms upstairs and a small one downstairs (that we may turn into a library/study) and 1.5 baths. There's a large paved basement and an enclosed porch. I'm so excited to use the porch. And also super excited to have a yard! Josh is already making plan for a garden (which I'm not allowed to touch due to my black thumb :P) and I want to hang bird feeders :D

Here's a look at the inside. The living room, dining room, and kitchen are all continuous. The kitchen looks like it was recently redone, and just needs some scrubbing. There's no room for a dishwasher which makes me sad. Josh said he'd do the dishes so I'm going to hold him to that XD Buying appliances is going to be interesting.

We already have a long list of jobs that need to be done on the house. It needs to be scrubbed from top to bottom, the roof and chimney needs a bit of work, we need to put up a bit of drywall, work on some trims, repair the porches, and repaint (among other things). The funny thing about the house is that the previous owner seems to have done a whole lot of remodeling everywhere, but it just seems that they did it extremely poorly. A great example would be the insulation they put in UPSIDE-DOWN in the basement. So there are lots of issues like that to fix.

We going to take the rest of the week to recuperate from the trip and then we're going to start working on the house this weekend. I'm just excited because I get to go to Ikea and buy all the cool stuff I've always wanted :D

The home inspection...

So the home inspection yesterday was interesting...there seems to be a bit more work that needs to be done than we were expecting. We're weren't able to see the roof because it was covered in snow, so we're waiting to hear about that before we make the final decision. But it will be by Saturday.

Here's a picture of the house. It's quite cute. And it has an enclosed porch :) I'm hoping we hear good news on the roof. Looking forward to working on a house together with Josh and having an actual place of our own.


On the way home, we stopped by Grand Traverse Pie Company and had some yummy pies. Shepherd's pie pot pie (Josh had a chicken pot pie), and then chocolate cream pie for dessert :P

Yesterday was also Valentine's Day. Unfortunately I had to work the night before so I spent most of the day sleeping because I had to work last night as well. While I was passed out, Josh made me a yummy dinner. He also surprised me with a fairy jewelry box. He's the best :)