As you can see thebackofmymind is back online.

Yes, we are now moved into the new house. As expected, it is a mess with packed boxes everywhere. The unpacking has begun, but it will be slow and take a while to get completely settled in. We need to clean the place as we unpack; not dirt, but a fine dust from the sanding, grouting, etc. Yes, they cleaned the house after it's completion, but just not to our satisfaction.

We need to make a few large dollar purchases relatively soon; living room furniture and a riding lawnmower that has a snow thrower attachment for the front. These are the most crucial as we need someplace to seat guests when we have them, and we need something to remove the snow from our long uphill driveway to allow those guests to visit in the winter.

We also need to finish the basement over time. Originally I was thinking about using the Owens Corning Basement Finishing System, but that idea came to an end relatively fast after I researched the price a bit. For example, this one person I read about received an estimate of $45,000 to finish a 1000 square foot. basement. Oh, and that was just the walls and the ceiling. Basically, they tell the potential customer it'll be $70 per square foot, then explain how they are having this great deal if you buy right then and there. Um, the presentation supposedly took three hours as well. I'm sorry, but I can finish my basement for under $5,000 by utilizing drywall & paint, a drop ceiling, and carpet remnants.

Anyway, Dustie the Cat seems to be comfortable here, which is always a good thing. All the smells here are new, fresh, and not of somebody else's dirt and pets, so she appears to be happy. Home is where the cat is.

It is imperative I locate some work within the next 45 days. I need to be working by November since our mortgage payments begin that month. In order to look nice for any job interview, I need to have my suit taken in, because I lost 15 pounds since I bought the thing.

The Wife loves the new house. Especially the size of her kitchen. However, I can tell right now she is going to drive me crazy moving stuff around after it is unpacked and in the cabinets.

Now I need to design some house warming invitations to send out the first week of October. We are going to have a local house warming party the first weekend of November; for the people that live nearby. I will then have to do the same thing in the summer for my family. They live too far to simply come by for a house warming party, so for our summer party we will be hosting a family reunion instead.

So, that's that.

First and foremost, there are a dozen more pictures posted in the Interior section of the House Building page.

Next and lastly, there is this picture I managed to catch after The Wife called me to the bathroom window of our rental:


Yes, that is a fox running through our current backyard. I was really lucky to get the picture as it is just about to go into the woods.

Welp, more to do with regard to the move, so I'll leave this post at that.

Woohoo! We had our closing today. Yes, that's right, we now owe our lives to a bank, but we have our very own brand new house.

We were up at 4am to get ready to go to the house for a walk through at 6am. The closing was at 7:30am. We were there until 11am.

Then we went to our rental where we ate lunch and packed our cars for a trip of moving. We moved a bunch of the heavy stuff to our house (books and LPs ... yes, I still own vinyl records). Unfortunately, when we arrived, we found out they gave us keys that don't work in our locks. They must have given us the keys to another of the houses being built. Fortunately, we had the garage door openers, so we were able to get inside. We really like the house, but have a couple of pet peeves, that are manageable. But then, I'm sure that is always going to be the case; just part of home ownership I guess.

Anyway, after that we hit the bank to deposit the money we received from the closing. When we finally arrived back at the rental at 4pm we opened a bottle of white and had some cheese.

We have determined we are too exhausted to go out to dinner tonight to celebrate, so it's pizza for dinner and bed early.

The Wife has to work early tomorrow. Me? I get to mow the yard at the rental and take another load or two to our house.

I am not posting any pictures today, as I am too tired to deal with the upload from my out of date camera. They will be posted some time soon.

Until next time, have a great weekend!

We went to the house on Saturday to take some pictures of the outside.

I changed the picture on the House Building landing page to the one we took Saturday with the groomed front yard. All other new pictures can be seen on the Landscape page.

Not much else to say, so enjoy!.

Here we are in September. No, we didn't close on the house at the end of August as planned. The master bathroom wasn't completed in time. The vanity counter top, sinks, and faucets still need to be installed. The countertop is scheduled for installation on Tuesday the 5th. Then it has to cure for 48 hours. So, on Thursday the 7th, the plumber should be able to install the faucets (the sinks are undermount, so installed by the countertop installers). What this all means is that we have a walk through of the house scheduled for Friday the 8th in the morning, and the closing currently scheduled for 11:30am that same day.

We can start moving in on Friday; one week from today. We have extended our stay in this rental for a week, so we have until the 15th to get moved into the new house. We are almost completely packed. Just a bit more to do this long weekend.

I have changed the Images page for the pictures of the house building process. The main House Building page now only has one picture on it; the most recent picture of the house from the street. I have added links underneath that picture for other picture pages separating the Design, Exterior, Interior, and Landscape pictures. This should make load time much shorter. However, it means that if you want to see all of the pictures, you will need to check each page. For future updates to those pages, I will specify which page has new pictures, but for now, you will want to check each one to catch up.

On a completely different topic, weight loss, The Wife and I are doing extremely well. Although it wasn't our weigh-in day (the day we track how we've been doing each week) we checked our weight yesterday. I broke the 140 lb. mark and was at 139.8 lbs. The Wife just missed breaking the 130 lb. mark, by weighing in at exactly 130 lbs. We are very happy with our progress. We started our weight loss on May 13th. I was at 155 lbs. and she was at 142 lbs. I believe our long-term goals are set at 130 for me, and 120 for her. I will keep posting about our progress.

As a side note to the weight loss information, we have discontinued our accounts with eDiets in order to save the money. We also discontinued keeping a record of our daily calorie intake (but that was several weeks ago). Now we basically, keep mental track of how much we eat. If we make a meal we have never calculated the calories for, we do that in order to know how much we are taking in. Anyway, this is probably way too much information about our eating habits. Just be glad I am not bringing up any other habits. :p

Have a great holiday weekend!