If there’s one thing I hate more than packing, it’s unpacking.  Almost three weeks into the new house, and we’re slowing down on the unpacking.  Mostly because the house is functional “enough”, but there are  boxes everywhere still and it’s starting to drive me nuts having them around.

All of the kitchen stuff is unpacked and put in the kitchen, but I just shoved stuff in the pantry, so it needs a bit of organizing.  I gave in and ordered two Elfa door “systems” for the spices.  The pantry was too deep and the spices kept getting lost – and I really missed my spice racks from our old house.

Spice racks In our pantry

I still hate that the pantry has the open metal shelving – anything small tends to fall through or over.  We picked up some shelf liner to help, but I haven’t emptied the pantry to put it in yet.  We also made the mistake of putting packing tape on all of our plastic containers, now we’ll be scrubbing them with Goo Gone for the rest of our days 🙁

There are more pressing things than the pantry, everything fits, and we can (mostly) find things when we need them.

We still have a lot of stuff just hanging out on kitchen counters though because it doesn’t have a new home yet.

Dining Room with blinds

We added honeycomb blinds to the house.  I *highly* recommend blinds.com – awesome customer service.  I got one blind with a frayed string, called them up the next day and they shipped me a new one, no need to return the old one.  They’re also quite easy to install at least with their “interior mount” option – four pilot holes with the drill, screw in four screws into the window frame, and then the blinds just pop into the mounting brackets.  Also, relatively inexpensive for the honeycomb cordless that you can also pull down from the top: ~$85 for a 36×60 window.

The only room that I feel is really done is our master bath. Since my office is off the master bedroom and it’s not close to being done (I’ve opened exactly 1 box in it), the master is still questionable as well.  We’ve put aside 4 boxes to be donated/sold and continually add to it.  I have one box set aside for Daughter Person’s toys that she has grown out of, and our friends with a 1 year old get first rights of refusal on that box.

This weekend, We’re borrowing my uncle’s truck to go pick up our storm door, some more metal shelving from Costco, another trip to IKEA for a bookcase and a grandfather clock from our friends.  We’ll also be loading our old freezer on it to go to my uncle’s.  We bought a larger one, and they’re taking the older one off our hands – it’s currently in the garage (another “room” we’ve barely touched in the unpacking…).  If I can get my car in the garage by winter, I’ll be a happy person.

We are now officially home owners again!  Closing was this morning and everything went well.  We even had to bring 1k less to closing than the GFE since they adjusted our initial escrow amount.  I’m still keeping some set aside until we know how interim taxes will affect us and what the property is appraised at for tax purposes.

Tomorrow the deliveries start, and the movers indicated that they would likely be delivering our things out of storage on Monday (we won’t know for sure until Sunday).

We also have a mortgage again, so our updates will reflect that as well.  Now, I can get started on our free trip to Disney.  Brad recommends 18 months, we’ll be trying ~8 months (next January) – we have a relatively high rate of spending, especially with new things to buy for the house, so we should be good.  I just need to get on applying for those cards now that we’ve closed (finally!).

We now have a closing date set for April 30!  They’d have had to get special permission to do the 1st, so we said OK to the 30th.  We’ll do our final walkthrough on the 24th to give them the list of “little things” to fix prior to closing.  I’ve placed a call out to the moving company to hopefully get them up here on the 1st to move in (or even afternoon of the 30th since closing is at 9am).  I’m still waiting for them to call me back.

We’re ready to do this!

Last week’s pictures (Thursday evening):

The kitchen from the living room.  All of the hardwood is sitting on the left waiting to be installed.

  The tile in the master bath/shower is done.

  This is our “main” kitchen sink and looking into our sunroom, which will be Daughter Person’s playroom (tentatively).

  Some of the granite is already installed.  There’s some hardwood under that butcher paper.

 View from the front door (dining room and living room)

Theoretically, we should have been bale to move into the new house sometime in April – I’m thinking it may be May at this point.  We still don’t have an electric meter, and no clue on when that will be installed.  It has to be installed by the electric company, and my guess is that they’ve been busy doing other things this winter – like keeping the power on for everyone else.  Once the electric meter is installed, we’re looking at at least 3-4 weeks before the house is finished, then 2-3 weeks after that to close and move in. I’m going to put my money on sometime in May.  The worst part is that the builder has no clue when the install will happen, so therefore, we have no clue.

I’d really like to get in as soon as possible, for a few reasons:

1. interest rates may rise in June, I’d like a rate < 4% thank you very much
2. We’re all ready to move out of my mom’s house – desperately!

We can of course, walk away at any time and just be out our 8k escrow – and we’ve seriously considered it.  8k is a lot, but not that much in the big scheme of things, especially when we’d really like our own place.  Unfortunately, we’d have to buy a place and remodel the kitchen (at least), and that would take 1.5-2 months anyway, so we’re not really any better off if we go that route.

There’s no recourse available to us yet other than losing our 8k.  *But*, the builder can opt to raise the price 30 days after the estimated completion date, and we can simply choose to walk away at that point (with our 8k).  But that’s only if the builder decides to try to raise the price on us.  The next opportunity to walk away without losing the money is in early September – one year after the original contract.  For now, we’re just going to sit tight and wait.

We’ve put a lot of things “on hold” until we can move – like saving for a trip to Disney next fall using CC points, because we can’t be applying for new cards when we’re waiting to get our mortgage approved.  Dad is considering changing jobs, but we really can’t until the mortgage goes through. We spend a lot of time in the car driving to and from activities for Daughter Person, because we signed her up closer to the new house rather than my mom’s.  We’re also not as aggressively paying down our car loan until we get the final damage from closing costs.

Right now, our life is full of “when we (finally move)” wishes.

And I don’t mean the credit card kind.  I mean the apps that are available like ibotta, checkout51 and Walmart’s new Savings Catcher.

I don’t earn a lot, but in the last few months, I’ve earned about $20 between the three of them.  Sometimes, I earn a “cash back” on one item multiple times through the different apps – it depends on what it is.

Ibotta especially focuses on name brand items, but occasionally has “generic” items available, like milk, bread and eggs.  Checkout51 pretty reliably has bananas every week, as well as the occasional milk and bread. Ibotta is store specific, ALDI’s isn’t an option there, but Costco (and the local liquor store) is.  Checkout51 doesn’t care where the receipt is from as long as it’s pretty obvious that you bought the item in question.

The WalMart Savings Catcher is a relatively recent addition to my phone – it “scans” through published ads and matches them to items on your receipt – so you don’t have to remember your ads or remember to ask them to match.  From what I can tell, it doesn’t cover WalMart’s entire ad matching policy (doesn’t allow non-branded items like produce and meat), but it gets the rest.   Other than Costco, WalMart is my primary grocery store, so it was worth looking at (and I can still get ibotta/checkout51 rebates on the same receipt).

I’m not hugely brand loyal, so I don’t get a lot of money from these things, but if you are brand loyal or even brand agnostic, you might be able to “make” more than I do.  I don’t even bother to look at the apps until after I’ve already purchased my groceries, so I don’t tailor my shopping to meet their lists. I get the brand I want or the cheapest option – the 25-50 cents that I get from the apps doesn’t make up for the price differences usually.

Disclaimer: I just use these apps, I have no affiliation with them in anyway.  I also know that they are recording what some people refer to as sensitive information, and folks aren’t OK with that.  As I see it, the stores can already trace my purchases back to me via my credit card, so it’s not a privacy issue for me.

Does anyone else use the cash back shopping apps?  Or am I the only one willing to take pictures of my receipt and scan barcodes for some cash back?  Any other apps I should look at?

Framed House

We obviously have an extremely fast framing crew – apparently, we were assigned the Amish framing crew (which means quickly and high quality).  This picture was almost exactly one week after the previous picture with just the foundation.  I know the majority of the walls were delivered already put together, but I think this was *fast*.

They’re still telling us that we can move in at the end of March – based on what I’ve seen, we might be moving earlier, but I don’t know anything about building houses.  My guess is that they’re working extremely quickly to get the houses under roof and with the siding on before the weather turns too bad, then progress will slow down a bit.  The day before and the day after this picture was taken, there was a dusting of snow on the ground (not for long).

There’s already one mistake on the house (a missing window on the right side), and I’ve reported it to the sales guy and production manager – in writing.  They knew about it, and they expect it’ll be fixed in the next two weeks – as soon as the window arrives.  That’ll be interesting to see how they just cut a hole in the framing and put a window in.  I wonder if they’ll try to put the siding on that side last.  There are a few other places I’d like to see windows (like the two front upstairs bedrooms), but they weren’t options, so those’ll have to wait until it really bothers me to do something about.