Is It Really Mine?

We closed on our house on Monday and got the keys on Tuesday. I still feel like a stranger in my own house. Seriously. I feel like I'm walking around in someone else's house. I'm too afraid to touch anything. It just seems too good to be true. I've considered treating my kitchen like a museum and not using it! Ha ha! This place is just so gorgeous and BIG! Whenever we would visit the house during the construction phase, I thought the house looked bigger and bigger with each visit. I thought filling it up with our stuff would help but I swear the house keeps growing! Even our king size bed looks small in our bedroom!

We started moving stuff in as soon as we got our keys on Tuesday. We brought over one truck load - my dad let us borrow his huge truck - and unpacked it before I had to go to work. We brought the smallest of our three beds so that we could spend the night that first night and anything else we would need right away. My husband brought over and unloaded two more truck loads while I was at work. I felt really guilty for working but our original plan was to move on the weekend. Our air conditioner still isn't fixed in our condo because we are still fighting with our insurance company, but that's a story for a different day! We didn't want to spend one more night in that place! 

In order to save money, we only had the moving company move our big stuff. We also weren't in any kind of hurry to get everything out of our condo since we still own it and won't even be able to list it for rent until the air conditioning issue is resolved. We scheduled the movers for the day after we received our keys. I told my husband to have them come while I was working because I would be a total basket case watching them move my things! My husband said they were great! They were quick and very careful. They seriously didn't leave any marks on our walls. They helped him move extra things without charging him and our total bill matched the quote they gave us a few weeks ago! We are super satisfied and would totally hire them again! If anyone in the Columbus or Cleveland area is looking for a moving company, check out Leaders in Moving and Storage. Here's their website: http://www.leadersmoving.com/

Our Guardian appointment was scheduled for the day we got our keys. I thought this appointment was just for them to show us how everything worked. Apparently they have to hook everything up and this takes about two hours. It turns out there was some kind of miscommunication with RH and the electrician because they did not install enough outlets for our Guardian stuff to be connected. They installed one outlet when we needed five. Now we have to wait for an electrician to come back and then we have to reschedule Guardian. He was able to hook-up our security system, which was a relief. I will not give my final opinion on Guardian until everything is set up and working next week. I am disappointed that my PM did not have the electrician come out right away. This all happened on Tuesday and we still don't know when it will be taken care of. My husband put a surge protector down there for the time being so we can still play with our Guardian toys.

I love my house but I'm a little disappointed with how a few things have been handled. We had our final walk-through on the same day we closed. During this time, we had our PM put blue tape in a million different places for things we had issues with. It was supposed to be taken care of the next day by the punch-out guy. I feel like this guy seriously just came into the house and removed the blue tape without doing a damn thing. I think the painters and the trim people were very sloppy in their work too. There is paint everywhere there shouldn't be - like in the carpet in almost every room, on the vinyl, on door handles, and on our stained banister. I can see where nails were placed in the trim and this doesn't make me very happy either. There is a botched patch job on the back of my kitchen island. I paid WAY to much for this island to have it patched in the first place. I hope our PM takes care of it. The front of our house is filthy. There is dirt covering our brick for the first several feet and there is mud on our second-story shutters. There is also mud splattered ALL OVER our front door. Our PM said this would be taken care of.  He thought it had already been. The keys for our house don't work on the dead-bolt for the service door on the back of the garage or for the door that leads from the garage to the house. The door handle on the front door is very loose. Our postlamp also does not work. 

I am also not happy with the cleaning crew. My windows are streaky and still very dirty. My PM had them come back to clean the two-story window in the foyer because I noticed it was dirty during our walk-through. They came back with a ladder that was not even close to being long enough. They reached what they could on the window but just left dirty streaks all over and left scuff marks on the wall below the window from their ladder! Every mirror in the house is streaky and so is the stainless steel. I still want someone to clean the two-story window because for now, I have no way of getting up there. As for the rest, I will just  have to take care of it myself. Now that we are moved in, I don't want the cleaning people moving around my house. It totally sucks to buy a brand new house and still have to clean everything.

So you know how I told you that our AC is broken in our condo? We seem to be having the opposite problem in the new house. We have the first-floor thermostat set at 72 degrees but the air keeps running! The other day it was 67 degrees in here and we were freezing! I'm sure it's even colder in the basement! We even turned it off but it just kept running! The thermostat on the second floor seems to be doing fine. It is much warmer up there. I thought for sure this was something our PM would have addressed immediately, but he still hasn't. Hopefully our electric bill isn't through the roof. For now I will just have to wear sweatpants and a sweatshirt in the middle of AUGUST! I guess it's better than having no AC at all!

I'm done ranting for now! I'm sure there's more but I will just leave it at that for now. I was going to wait for things to be resolved and then only post what hadn't been corrected but I always try to be straight-forward with my blog. I swear I will post an entry about all of the things I love soon! There are so many things I love and I think they deserve their own blog entry! I will also have to post some pictures after this weekend when our new furniture for the family room and morning room gets delivered! We will also be getting our fridge and washer and dryer on Saturday!  I've never been so excited to do laundry before!

I'll leave you with a picture of our kitchen since I left it out of my last entry! I still haven't unpacked my kitchen stuff though. I want to buy liners for the cabinets and drawers but I just haven't found the time. During the building process, I was worried that the island would make the kitchen feel too small. It doesn't at all! It's much bigger than it looks in pictures! I could stare at my kitchen all day and never get bored! As a matter of fact, I do spend a lot of time staring at it! We literally upgraded everything that we could in here and it's absolutely PERFECT!