Closing Time(Movin’ on up to the East Side)

Tuesday 01-22-08
This post will grow a little each day between now and Thursday as I have time to add to it. But for now I just wanted to throw something out to announce that the end of our exile is near; Michelle and I will finally reach the promised land this week.

Yep, we had the walk-through on our new house yesterday and we close on Thursday. This week is gonna fly by because we obviously have a bunch of things to do in the meantime.

Although it won't be nearly the chore it was to go from the house to the apartment, there's still a considerable amount of packing that needs to be done to get what little stuff we still have in 'living space' ready to go to it's final destination, our new 3,000 square-foot home, on which finishing touches are now being placed.

I have this morning already done the legwork to have our utilities transfered/initiated on this Thursday and Friday, our first full day in the new house.

I'll have lots of pictures to post at the end of the week, as I'll also be adding daily installments to this post as we get closer to Closing Time.

Tuesday 01-29-08
The new house is wonderful, but I’m not so giddy right now. After a weekend of joy (emotional) mixed with pain (physical), we’re all moved in, but have experienced our first post-close gotcha. So please forgive my frustration; I’ll have a lot of GOOD things to say later, but now I need to vent.

The reason I’m just now posting is that we JUST got our Internet access installed today. Comcast was supposed to come last Friday to hook us up with Cable TV, Internet and Phone Service (we’re doing the Comcast Triple Play offer for one year). However they never showed, and I was waaay too busy to put up a fuss.

So I called first thing Monday A.M. and a guy did come out promptly to hook up the TV service (seems they were just too busy to make it on Friday, and apparently too busy to pick up the phone and punch in my cell number to let me know as well), but we had to wait until today for the ’Net and phone.

And then in the midst of the ’Net access install this afternoon, I found someone else to get steamed at: our builder — or, more specifically, the A/V networking vendor who supposedly did the home network wiring during construction. I say ‘supposedly,’ because I was informed this afternoon by the Comcast tech that the network nodes I paid a premium price to have installed in my house don’t talk to each other; the connection wires that were supposed to physically link three rooms in my house were never connected as I was told they were when we went through our final walk-through.

This is a long and arduous story that I don’t have time to get into right now, but will fully expound upon once I have all the facts. And I will say that I was afraid this would happen because of how all the final preparations came down during the last week before we closed. I’m going to give that A/V vendor a phone call/piece-o-my-mind later today. I’ll let you know all the details soon.

So while we do indeed have phone and HDTV service as scheduled — be it five days late — our Internet access is limited to my computer only, which will be plugged directly into the cable modem. Michelle is none too happy about this and neither am I.

In a quick fix to solve the problem, I could go with a wireless network, but not without shelling out more money for a new wifi router, something I was planning to do anyway, but later on down the line. We’ve been spending money like crazy and there are a lot more things on the list we need to invest in instead of throwing money at a problem that shouldn't exist.

Like I said, it's a lot to talk about and I will a bit later on, once I get all my facts straight. What I do know, however, is that I shouldn’t be dealing with this right now.

On the bright side, the house is absolutely beautiful! Michelle took this week off from work to do her magic and transform it into a showplace with her mad decorator skillz. Multiple pictures to come.

But for now I gots some bugs to get worked out. I know, I know, I need to stay positive, and honestly, I am. I suppose it was almost inevitable that someone would piss in the punch bowl at some point; I should probably take this in stride and look at the bigger picture, and the truly miraculous event our acquiring such a wonderful home really is.