So much wedding.

It’s true. Go tell your friends. I’m officially the worst at chronicling my life through blog.

Some things have happened—including but not limited to:

1)      I’m now a wife.

2)      We went on our honeymoon, and Josh and I finally saw the Pacific Ocean for the first time.

3)      I decoupaged for the first time.

Really. The first time I used modge podge was the Thursday before our wedding, and I had to convince myself not to take on three new (non-wedding-related) projects within those final days before the wedding. I only had a couple other things to think about ;)

I could go through and journal exactly how I was feeling at each checkpoint of our days, but boy I’d have so much to say. Instead I’ll give you some bullets, because my technical writing side says it makes sense:

·         The day before: High gear. My sister, my maid of honor, and my mom (who has never had her nails done before) went to the salon and got mani-pedis. It was so bizarre to see my mom getting her nails filed and painted and making small talk with the lady at the salon. I think that was the moment I first felt how special these days would really be. And honestly, I was so relaxed.  My manicurist asked if I was nervous and I can honestly say no. I wasn’t nervous at all. I was psyched (By the way, if you are in the market for manicures, get shellac—it’s a little more expensive, but honestly, it has been a week and my nails still look perfect).

o   After our salon appointments, we headed over to the reception hall and set up. After we had all of our decorations in place, I can say, I was not impressed. I spent hours on these. I spent hard earned dollars on these—and they were boring. We had table runners, centerpieces, favors, vases, pumpkins, table numbers, etc. etc. and it just looked so blah. BUT, once we lit all of the candles, it came together so well. We lit 8 candles on two of the tables before we left, and I felt so good about the way it felt. Notice I say felt, not looked. Yes it looked great, but it felt so intimate and US.  I was so happy when we left. I couldn’t wait to see all of our friends' and families' faces in that room.

o   We spent a little time in our hotel room doing our hair and getting dressed for the rehearsal. Josh and our best man, Andy, and one of our groomsmen, Ben, watched TV while the girls curled their hair. From there, we left for the church for the rehearsal.

o   After the rehearsal, we had rehearsal dinner at Josh’s and my house in Stoughton. It was amazing. We fit 21 people in our basement for dinner. Thanks to Josh’s parents, we had EXCELLENT food and drinks. I can say, thinking back, that I definitely tried to keep myself busy. I started feeling some nerves that night, so I tried to keep thinking about whether I had my bags ready for the honeymoon (Friday night was the last time I would see the house until after our trip), whether everything was set for the morning, and I tried to make sure everybody was fed and happy. I was losing it a little. J

o   That night, my bridemaids and I slept in two hotel rooms at the Radisson, where our reception would be. I slept for only three hours. At about midnight, we all turned in. I split a bed with Meredith, my friend for 20 years, and I could not handle our mattress. Every move I made, I was worried about waking her up. So I moved to the floor at 3 am. Then I started running checklists in my mind—do we have the programs? Does my mom know what to bring? Will Josh forget the rings? Did I forget anything? I slept from 4 until 7. I felt awful. I will always remember, though, Meredith asked me that morning – “How do you feel?” And I told her:

 “Today, I’m killin’ it.”

o   We all woke up by 8, grabbed some Starbucks, and got our hair did. We ordered some skinnies from Jimmy Johns and then made our way to the church. We did our makeup and got dressed in the bride’s room at the church. My mom helped me put on me great grandmother Frida’s pearl necklace.  Still, I was not nervous. Just so THRILLED. I was and am so excited to be married to my best friend.

This is a long blog. Later, I’ll write about from the moment I started down toward the church and through the reception. Then maybe I’ll give you some honeymoon deets. Then I’ll tell you about that modge podge business. I also realize that my bullet points were, in fact, just me going through every detail even though I told you I wouldn't (not every detail, but a lot). Deal with it. :)

Most recent addition

Love our new clock from Target on clearance and the blue curtains from BB&B!

The things that keep you up at night

I woke up a bit early for work this morning and decided it was absolutely crucial that I add up (again) what we still owe wedding vendors. I'm not a huge fan of that number.
Being a spreadsheet freak has helped me realize what we can afford and not afford in the past year-- which is nice, but it makes me constantly worry. It isn't that we are in dire straights or anything, but here is the order I recommend:

1. Wedding
2. House
3. Car

Not:

1. Car
2. House
3. Wedding

Waiting is not my strong suit. The bank will probably tell you, "don't buy a car right before you start looking to buy a house because we won't give you a loan." I'm not sure how we became the exception.

Time to start buckling down. Between Summerfest (beer), camping (beer), and multiple trips to the Comedy Club (hard liquor), we pissed away (...literally) a lot of money that could have been spent paying off our wedding vendors (more parentheses: I know we did not literally piss money. Stop hatin' on me literal police).

HOT

Oven Hot.

Literally, that's how hot it felt at 2 pm last Saturday as I went back up into our attic/crawlspace.  My uncle Jim arrived at 8 am to install a bathroom fan in our upstairs bathroom.  No, we did not have an exhaust fan in our bathrooms when we bought the house, and no, it is not necessary to have one for your house to be up to code. Apparently, all you need to vent out moisture in a bathroom is a window.

Jim had installed a vent at his old house so he was a huge help with this all-day project. Some things I learned while we were doing this:

1. Get started early. As the day goes on, it gets hotter and hotter. You will thank yourself at noon for starting at 8 am.
2. Electrical work, although complicated, was not that scary.
3. Doing work on your house seems to typically be a two-man job.
4. It was hot. Really hot. I was sitting on a board on top of insulation, and I had sweat rolling down my face as if I had just stepped out of the shower.
5. We don't have much room in our attic.
6.  I was surprised to find out that our layer of insulation is almost 1 and a half feet thick. That is pretty thick! We'll see if that makes a difference in the dead of winter.
7. Thank God for blown insulation. Anna might disagree (it ended up EVERYWHERE), but it saved us a lot of discomfort that fiberglass would have caused.
8. Did it mention it was hot?  If I had to guess (and Jim will agree), it was about 130 degrees up there.

I may also have cut too big of a square in the ceiling for the vent, but that's not a big deal (again, Anna might disagree). It always can be fixed. Also, I learned from Jim that you can always try to fix something, and if you screw it up too bad, then that's what the pros are for.

To make a long story short (kind of), we got everything done and working by 3-ish, but as we were crawling up on the roof to cut a hole for the vent, we noticed a piece for the vent was missing from the box it came in.  I am going to go pick it up tomorrow and (hopefully) recruit my brother Luke to finish up the roof stuff.  He knows what he is doing up there, so I trust him. Ha! We will keep you posted on the results!

Also if you would like, check out my new sports blog!
You can find it here:http://sportsanyone.blogspot.com/

-Josh

Chaos!

I came home to insulation all over the floor throughout the house. Josh and his Uncle Jim were installing a vent in the upstairs bathroom. He will make his debut blog authorship appearance soon to talk about what the heck happened. :)

3 Months and Counting...

"I don't know the key to success, but the key to failure is trying to please everybody."-Bill Cosby

Josh has had this quote on his Facebook page ever since I can remember. Yes, I realize how bizarre it seems to quote Bill Cosby when all you can think of is "Jello Puddin' Pops!" but I've always thought it was a great quote because it is completely true. Yet, I’ve never been able to accept it. I’ve caused myself a lot of stress trying to foster communal happiness, and I knew from the get-go that I had to take a different approach for our wedding.

But the wedding thing hasn’t been easy, especially under a budget. There’s only so much you can pull off, and screaming “It’s MY wedding!” is so bridezilla. Other people’s opinions matter too much to me, but drawing the line has been tough. I heed some advice too much, causing my unhappiness, while I other advice I don’t listen to at all. 

But when we peel away all of the layers of other people’s opinions, it really is OUR wedding. We are doing it our way—keeping it really small, only inviting the people whose names we know and who mutually know ours, the people that we talk to on a regular basis. The invites even say—

“Because you have shared in our lives

By your friendship and love…”

I think they key is “shared in our lives.” I don’t want to be embarrassed when I walk around the reception, chatting with guests and introducing my new husband. “Hey… you…. This is Josh. Josh, this is …. awkward pause… please, dear God, just finish my sentence for me….”

It’s all so much easier said than done. It doesn’t change the pain I feel when someone expresses their dissatisfaction with choices we have made.  How am I supposed to know? I’ve never done this before! I sure as hell will never do it again.

Though my growing ulcers hate to admit it, the wedding is less than three months away now. We have engagement pictures scheduled for this Sunday evening. Hopefully the heat wave breaks by then. My mop of a mane will not respond in an attractive way to this humidity. Yuck.

When I was in the third grade, I was forced into some bad habits. The only sister in the entire parochial school I attended (from Pre-K through eighth grade, mind you) taught third grade. Sister Marge had the tendency to amble back and forth at the head of the classroom, reading to us from third-grade novels, stimulating our third-grade imaginations. Our creative moments were mostly born from guessing at what she had in her pockets while she subconsciously crinkled whatever was in there. The crinkling overwhelmed her reading voice (I still don't know what happens in Tuck Everlasting). Candy wrappers? Receipts? Each step she took across the old classroom floor was emphasized by the creaking of the wood panels. Creak, creak. Crinkle, crinkle. Dramatic pause. Something about the fountain of youth. That was Sister Marge's bad habit. Crinkling.

Regardless of her bad habit, she instilled plenty of others in her students. While she was instructing, we weren't allowed to get up to blow our noses or run to the bathroom until the lesson was over. Really, the only lesson I gleaned from that rule was that a hand is as good as a kleenex (which doesn't really translate that well in adulthood). I also happened to develop incredible bladder strength.

This never seemed valuable to me until I found myself lying face up, staring at the ceiling of a tent from the 1980's as a barrage of raindrops assaulted the tent walls. This was the joy of camping. Josh and I had rented out a campsite at Yellowstone Lake State Park for the weekend, and prior to the 100 degree weather, the forecast was full of scattered thunderstorms. From 3 a.m. to 4 a.m., I scrunched my face and held my breath. All I could think about was how awful this used to feel while I sat through those third-grade reading sessions. Sister Marge never taught me how to drink half a cooler of sangria before bedtime, but she did guide me to a little self discovery. I learned that I'd rather sit in pain for hours before I'd face her scolding when I tried to run for the bathroom. The self discovery I learned while camping? I'd rather kill myself holding it before I would think about venturing to a bathroom in the middle of a rainstorm.

This holds true even when said rainstorm lasts several hours without breaking. What did break, though, was my spirit. Thoughts of inevitable UTIs seeped into my head as the rainwater seeped up from the floor of that 1980's tent. This was so not worth it. So I channeled my inner third-grader, twisting and turning and whimpering until I woke Josh up. Suffering with a buddy is better than suffering alone (unless you are the buddy, I'm told). Sister Marge's strength training had finally failed me. I was going to make the long, dark, wet walk to the bathrooms.

But just as quickly as I had finished off that last beer before bed, the storm let up. The light from the moon illuminated my path to the outhouses, and in what clearly sounds like the most glamorous moment of my life-

Victory was mine.

Thoughts as I Stuff Wedding Invites

When you send mail without enough postage, the mailman returns the mail to the address that is listed on the top left of the envelope (the sender). Although I'm sure it is some sort of felony, couldn't you just put the address of the person you are sending your mail to on the upper left corner, your own address in the center, and then just see if they send it to the person you are trying to send mail to for free?

Where We Are Now

This Friday marks three months from our wedding day, and there is still an incredible amount of work to do. I shouldn't complain, though. I recently saw pictures from a friend's wedding, and she literally put the thing together in just a few days. I noticed that her centerpieces are freakishly similar to the ones I spent weeks planning and still don't have assembled. Actually, her whole reception space looked freakishly similar to what we have planned so far, and yet I talk about how I can't possibly get everything done in the next three months.

I'm going to remind you that by our wedding day, our engagement will have lasted 14 months. Having this surplus of time has brought out a perfectionist in me that I didn't know existed, and has actually come up to bite me in the ass. Let me explain.

As of now, we are priest-less. As many of you know, our priest at St. Thomas Aquinas is a military chaplain and is being deployed at the beginning of October. He sometimes misses Mass due to training, and his substitute is a great priest (I'll call him Priest II) with great heart. The trouble is that Priest II's voice sounds like he lost it right around puberty and never gained it back. So when Priest I called us to break the news of his deployment, he naturally offered Priest II as a substitute. Naturally.

But this newfound perfectionist (bitch) quality inside led me to think we could refuse and go out to find our own replacement. We spent so much time picking our readings and planning our ceremony so that everything tied in together, and all I could picture was a church full of confused guests who couldn't quite figure out what this guy was saying. And besides, we know and love Priest I, but we have never even talked to Priest II. Don't you want somebody who knows you, at least a little, to perform your wedding?

The answer is clearly yes, but sometimes, life doesn't work that way. We contacted the following priests:

1. Priest III- The retired priest from St. Thomas Aquinas: Will be in Hollandale that day.
2. Priest IV- Josh's mom's distant relative: Performing a wedding that day. Not ours.  
3. Priest V- My mom's cousin: Being relocated to Missouri? 
4. Priest VI - Didn't answer our calls for a week. Finally answered. Performing a wedding that day. Not ours.
5. Priest VII - Not performing a wedding that day. Perfect. But he compared our relationship and the fact that we live together to a guy in the bible marrying the whore of Israel. Like I said, definitely not performing a wedding that day.

More and more, I'm realizing that if I even end up walking down the aisle that day, it will be next to a miracle. I've found myself picturing our wedding ceremony with Priest II performing the Mass, and it makes me laugh. Yes, people will have a hard time understanding him. Yes, our hard ceremony planning might be for nothing if nobody gets anything out of it. But by God, I will be looking at Josh, he will be looking at me, and we will be laughing because we actually made it. It will actually be happening when three months prior, it didn't seem possible.

That is, if Priest II is available. We still don't know for sure. But really, I learned my lesson. I can't control everything that will happen that day. I used to have these premonitions of my wedding morning:
I wake up in my hotel bed in a room filled with my best friends and sisters. I'm holding my breath, freaking out, crying, scared to death. Not because I'm marrying Josh, but because I'm just getting married. There's really no turning back. When I remove myself completely from the situation, and disregard how much love we have for each other, getting married is a BIG DEAL. The biggest deal. The most important and expensive day of my life. Why wouldn't I freak out? Why wouldn't I want to have every little thing go perfectly?

But post-priest I through VII-fiasco, I have these same premonitions. I wake up in the hotel, surrounded by my friends and family. The sun is blasting through the curtains, but this time, I'm relaxed. I'm excited. I'm ecstatic, actually. I've realized that I'm there for the biggest day of OUR life. I'm there for Josh. I'm not there for a textbook wedding, where everything works out the way people expect. Our relationship isn't textbook, so why would our wedding be?

Until next time,
-The whore of Israel

Things got busy, okay!?

So remember when I told you that you'd be the first to know about my tablecloth endeavor?

Well you weren't. Actually, you were probably the absolute last to find out about it (when I say you, I mean "blog," because the readers of the blog actually probably DID find out about it first. They are actually probably SICK of hearing about it because, well, I'm proud of the damned thing). But what I'm trying to get at is that I am embarrassed by my lack of blogging. Apologies.

Anyways. I shall present to you a list of things that have changed:
1. Everything.

Well, not everything. In fact, nothing in the house has changed apart from the main level, in which everything has changed. :)

And keeping in the pattern of presenting things to you in a dramatic way, I present to you before and after pictures of the main level!
Before:

After:

Oh wait. That's just Frank. Besides being the cutest, most endearing kitten in the world, Franklin is also a new addition to the McCann/Speaker household. Dane County Friends of Ferals found him in a ditch with his umbilical cord still hanging out. As soon as they removed that thing, we scooped him up. Gotta love those ditch cats.






But honestly, here's the after:

There's still a lot of work to be done, but I think we've made a lot of progress in the last month and a half. I also want to take some time to subtly brag about the pillow cases I made to cover the ugly pillows that came with the couch. I think I did a fine job. Is that too subtle? I could go on, I guess. But I won't.


And now, the least talked about tablecloth in the history of tablecloths you've never talked about:

It took a surprisingly long time to finish it, and Josh took a surprisingly short amount of time to immediately spill barbecue sauce on it. By the way, did you realize that barbecue is spelled with a C instead of a Q? This is news to me. And in more BBQ news: happy fourth of July everyone!

Grandmothery Tableclothery

I think I'm going to sew my own tablecloth.

Nothing can make a bigger impact on a room and is as easy to change up every few days. It's like changing your shirt-- which I also tend to change only every few days because I'm constantly soiling my wardrobe with PAINT!

But let's be real: tableclothes are boring and grandmothery (as in, "like a grandmother," not "in the nature of a grand moth." I think the latter would be a little bit more hip, though). The patterns you can buy them in are stale and are limited to the following:

-damask
-stripes
-grand mothery floral
-solid

Don't get me wrong- Josh immediately pinpointed my love of all that is grandma. I call it vintage, delicate, and intricate. I love tiny little fancy patterns, but I've been having a hell of a time finding a tablecloth that matches my taste.

So what's stopping me from essentially sewing two sheets of sexy fabric together today? Besides the fact that I don't own a sewing machine, nothing is as simple as it sounds. I am going to add this project somehwere on my list of twenty-six bajillion things to do. And when I do-- you will be the first to know about it.

Painting. Painting. Painting.

It has been a week and a day since we moved into our house, and we haven't stopped running! We are still working on painting the main level and haven't yet started on the lower or upper levels. And we thought going through the loan approval was a process...

We did take some time on Thursday to enjoy our wood stove and Thursday night TV on NBC. We've had a lot of visitors coming and going-- Theresa and Matt came with Izabelle on Wednesday for a cookout, and Dana, Nate, and Andy came last night.... for a cookout. And we cooked out on Monday. And Josh's parents bought us a brand new, bigger, better grill for our patio as a housewarming present. Did I mention I ate burgers four out of the five nights this week? I think I can feel my blood slowing down.

We tried one of the restaurants on Main this week too. The Pour House had a special on Mai Bock so we had to stop in for a few. It's a cute little place with an old-timey stage and some ridiculously tasty southwestern wraps (Josh had the southwestern wrap and I had... yes... a burger). The Pour House is flooded in character and good, good food. We'll be back... maybe after the wedding, so I'm not flooding my wedding dress in ... "character" come October.

We spent the majority of the morning registering at Menard's. It is amazing how you need so much more stuff in a bigger place. Josh was happy to get some nice tools on our list. I apparently registered for 2 five cubic foot chest freezers, 1 seven cubic foot chest freezer, and 2 ten cubic foot chest freezers. I'm not sure that Josh should have let me have that scanner. Luckily, I could edit the list when we got back home. Just the 1 seven cubic footer will do, thank you.

We'll post pictures once we finish up our painting to give you a nice before/after series.

Moved In...Sort Of.

Things I've learned:
1. When closing on a house, you will be told your "payoff date." Depending on the terms of your mortgage, this date could be 30 years from the present date. May 12, 2041, is 30 years from the day we closed. Make sure you are sitting down for that part of closing.

2. Don't try to move a sectional couch in from the garage at 11 p.m. on the day you move. You will put a hole in the screen of the front door with the feet of the couch...and likely cry about it. Then you will wake up the next morning and figure out you could have unscrewed the feet from the couch for extra clearance, and you will feel dumb. Really. Really. Dumb.

3. Listening to "You Make My Dream Come True" by Hall and Oates does not turn every life experience into a light-hearted montage. In fact, it makes many life experiences downright ironic. For instance, listening to this song has the opposite effect when you are painting a wall at 10 p.m. on a Saturday night, taping off every piece of trim and fighting over the one roll of painter's tape. With this song, time actually SLOWS down, and that part where we should be playfully stuffing wedding cake into each others' mouths ala The Wedding Singer, turns into us ripping up garbage bags and taping them to the wall as drop cloths. (Awful pun alert:) We rolled with it with the help from that second bottle of champagne (though we had to drink it from giant beer steins because they are the only glassware we have been able to unpack).

4. Josh likes to be a man. Let me look up the definition of "man" for you:
Noun: An adult human male.
Verb: Provide (something, esp. a place or machine) with the personnel to run, operate, or defend it: "man the pumps".

Josh looked it up too. Here's what he found:
Noun: An adult human male capable of installing a doorknob incorrectly 3 times in one hour.
Verb: Provide your female counterpart with the necessary tools to successfully eradicate unwanted pests: "Anna, I'm going to man up and let you kill the menagerie of spiders in the basement with this here vacuum."

5. If I was ever going to contract tetanus in my life, this weekend was probably the most likely time. Staying up-to-date with your tetanus shots is important, and Josh assures me that I am "probably up-to-date." I'm not sure what the symptoms are of tetanus, but I am convincing myself that the tighteness in my fingers is from squeezing the trigger on the windex bottle enough times to go through one and a half bottles. Upside: our windows are clean.

6. I have a new-found appreciation for ceiling fans with four blades as opposed to five. That fifth blade somehow attracts more dust than the previous four.

Been Busy, Will Post Later :)

It's closing day... so we are closing. In one hour. I'll let you know how it goes. :D

I've had that pee-your-pants type of excitement pretty much the whole day, though, in case you were wondering.

Four More Days

We are going to Stoughton to do a final walk-through of the house tonight. It is starting to get pretty real now. We spent a lot of time yesterday cleaning and packing. Mostly everything is packed, except for the stuff that we need for the rest of the week (like the TV :) ). It's going to be a long week, folks.

Last Friday in our Place

We said goodbye to our last Friday on our porch sharing an 1888 Bock and talking about the time Josh first told me he loved me, moving in, and the mornings when I would wake him up at 7:30 a.m. before I went to work, just to talk to him (when he was working evenings at Pizza Hut). We will miss this place. There are so many memories here. Our story continues, but we won't forget where we came from :)

Two Weeks Until Closing!

I've been feeling more nervous about our decision to buy a house with every day that we get closer to May 12. Between incessantly checking our bank account to make sure we will still have enough as an emergency fund in savings after we close, I start feeling trapped. With a house payment, I don't have the liberty to start a new career (unless it pays) or move across the country whenever I want.

Granted, when I really reflect on it, I would never do either of those things anyway. I don't have the guts. Instead, I have the guts to throw all of my money into a house in a town I know very little about (except for that is has a heavy Norwegian influence and a tiny four-screen movie theater downtown that only shows G-rated movies and serves pizza and ice cream). I guess that's all I'm really looking for in a hometown anyway--Syttende Mai and a big fat double-scoop of cookie dough while leaning back to a matinee of Cars 2. No really, that movie theater doesn't have theater seating. Each theater has a bunch of circular tables surrounded by chairs-- so you can enjoy pizza and a show. It's peculiar. Check it out.

I also stand corrected. Looks like they are showing Arthur, which is PG-13.

One thing I do want in a hometown is somewhere to buy rosettes and lefsa. I'm seriously striking gold here.
Despite my serious (though mostly facetious :) ) love of Norwegian specialty items, there is one thing that Josh and I can't really live without--and it appears that Stoughton has us covered.
Who could possibly fear settling down in a town that sells cheese by the name "Drunken Goat?" Please note that Cheesers is in close proximity to Cinema Cafe. Might have to wash that cookie dough down with some Gruyere. Did you check out their virtual tour? Looks like Cheesers also sells jam, sparkling wine, and stuffed animals. Look out Stoughton...it's time to party.

Chair!

Josh wakes up at 4:45 a.m. this morning to get ready for work:
"Chair!"
Josh brushes his teeth last night and pops out of the bathroom:
"Chair!"
Josh rounds the corner last night after dinner:
"Chair!"
Josh sends me a text message with this picture today while I am at work:

Subject line: Gets me every time!

So the chair itself is LOUD (it scares me to think of how I will be able to design a living area to complement that pattern), but when you stick it in a tiny 600 sq. ft apartment, it SCREAMS.

Change is good, but Josh is thrown off every time he sees the chair, and has developed the habit of screaming "Chair!" back at it every time he turns the corner and remembers that we now have a chair, yes, a chair, in our entryway (IT DOES NOT FIT ANYWHERE ELSE!).

Depending on which I can pull off, I might end up putting one of these screaming objects in a guest bedroom :)

Homeowner's insurance

Everything went great with State Farm. Our monthly premium is right about where we thought it would be. The last obstacle for us before closing was getting that nailed down and getting our insurance agent in touch with our lender, so now, we wait!

20 days until closing!

Side note: my shower curtain came and is darling :) Can't wait to hang it in my own shower in my own bathroom in my own house on my own corner of Stoughton! And by "my own," I mean "our own." Sorry Josh :)

-Anna

Inspection Day!

Nothing reaffirms your decision to put an offer on a house more than having a trained professional spend three hours in your potential future home, picking apart all of its defects.

We had an inspector...inspect (what else do they do?) the house last Thursday. For a 34-year-old house, everything went according to our expectations. There were some creaking stairs (go figure), and the house was also missing some GFCI outlets, sealant (around windows and bathtubs), and surprisingly, most of their doorknobs? It is baffling the things you miss the first time walking through a property.

While there was some evidence of past leaking in the basement, it was clear they had put in a sump pump long after the house was built. This was a little scary because we knew that the house had leaking problems in the past, but also encouraging that the leaking had stopped because of the actions the previous homeowners had taken.

But the biggest, most intimidating problem that the inspector found was that the boiler is 17 years old with an estimated life of 20 years. That is not that big of a deal, we hear, because boilers last far longer than furnaces if you give them a little TLC. But this boiler hadn't been serviced since 2004! There was corrosion around the joints, which is evidence that there is a leak somewhere along the way.

Yes. We could replace the boiler...if we won the lottery. Apparently these things run upwards of $5,000 to replace, and after putting a down payment on the house, we will be pretty much tapped out as far as major purchases go.

So we sent the sellers an amendment to our offer, adding the condition that the boiler must be serviced by a certified HVAC specialist, repaired/replaced if necessary, and that the sellers must provide us a report/receipt from the HVAC specialist. We were under the impression that they HAD to fix the boiler because it was a major defect in the house, and that if they rejected our amendment, we could walk. The sellers had until 9 am on Sunday to respond to our amendment. By about 1 pm on Sunday, we still hadn't heard anything. Things were looking pretty grim. While we convinced ourselves we were comfortable with walking away from that house (no air conditioning!), we didn't want to. We had already put so much time, energy, and emotion into this house, and we didn't want to start all over.

After a couple calls from our real estate agent, however, it came out that because the boiler wasn't specifically listed in a "major defect" section in the inspector's report, the sellers did not have to abide by our amendment. In that case, we would have to replace the boiler ourselves if necessary, and we couldn't just walk away from the deal. $5,000?! That's a pretty scary number.

But that loophole we weren't aware of flew over the sellers' heads too. Luckily, I received an email from Judy (our realtor) at 6 am this morning (Monday). Both sellers had agreed to and signed our amendment. Looks like May 12 is actually happening! So I celebrated by buying this chair. :)

So the moral of the story is: Make sure the inspector lists the major defects in the major defects section of the report! Do it!
Also: Don't go to Steinhafels on a beautiful Sunday afternoon looking for "design ideas" and let your fiance walk out with a brand new piece of furniture. Don't do it!

I Can't Cur-tain My Excitement!

I know. It's an awful pun, but really--

The one thing I feel I have power over at this point is my shower curtain. There are still major details to hammer out, like the inspection and final approval of our mortgage, but I've already done all I can to keep the gears turning as we approach May 12, our closing date. So in the meantime, I'm decorating the bathroom in my mind.

The house has two full bathrooms and Josh and I have already decided whose is whose. He thinks this bathroom assignment is in respect to who gets to decorate which bathroom, but to me, it is in respect to him staying the hell out of my WOMAN bathroom (though he still insists he will be marking his territory in my domain. We'll see).

But back to this shower curtain thing. There is only so much online shopping you can do for shower curtains...and that equates to about 5 hours worth. So I think I've finally settled on one. My inspiration? A paradox of masculine femininity--sleek whites, grays, and blacks with straight architectural lines... all with a sparkly softness :) With that theme in mind, I can easily envision myself showering behind this piece. It is simple enough to fit the masculine color scheme, but the ruffles amplify the girly-ness I'm looking for.

So I order it.

But in seconds, Target makes me perfectly aware of these.
$32.99 for three novelty towels.

"Gorgeous," I think.
"I need these," I know.
"Do I need these?" I question.
"No," Josh decides.

See the moral of the story is this: When you decide to take on a house payment, every little cent begins to count. Where $30 dollars was a quick meal out to eat on a second's notice before, now, if you make the decision to save that $30 seven times, you can buy that lamp from Pier 1, which would happen to look fantastic next to that floor mirror (that you could buy after make that decision to save $30 three more times).

So I didn't get the towels. Three towels for $32.99? Come on. Then again, I could have about 18 novelty towels for the price of that lamp. :)

Love, Anna

Welcome

Buying a house and getting married.

One is the scariest thing we've ever ventured to do. The other? Piece a' cake (we won't mention which is which). Both of these changes are lifetime commitments--but only one has impending fiscal consequence. This blog is to chronicle the updates to our new home and to share some life-changing stories as we take the plunge into married life. We hope you can learn from our mistakes!

Love,
Josh and Anna