Haven't Forgotten About the Blog -- Just Busy With Uchi

Wass up people - one day before the year changes. Time to complete last year's blog!

We finally moved into our Uchi.  The last 2 months have been craaaaaazyy, so I didn't have enough time to work on the blog. So here's what happened so far:

1. Our home was complete on November 2nd, and it took them several days to do touch-ups and a final walk-through and inspection.
2. We officially became home-owners on November 3rd at 2.30 PM
3. We didn't move in right away since the days after our purchase were really cold. We did several stages of moving, the first one was November 9th where just for ceremony we boiled a pot of tea in our kitchen for the first time, and then we officially moved in on the weekend of November 13th, half the stuff by ourselves, and the other half with some help from friends.
4. Our first project was replacing the basement door knob (door between first floor and basement) with a knob which we can lock. This project was done before we moved anything.
5. For the first few weeks, we were either sleeping on the bed without any linens or sleeping inside our sleeping bags. We were really slow in buying our furniture.  But we already had a sofa and dresser from a bit furniture sale earlier that month.
6. The first bigger project was replacing the carpet on the second floor. At the same time, we completed painting our laundry room prior to Best Buy's appliance delivery.
7. We didn't have a refrigerator and washer/dryer until our 3rd weeks living there (the garage was our fridge for a while). The first appliances we bought were refrigerator, washer and dryer from Best Buy which we returned a week after that - they were either too expensive or too big. At the end we got everything from Lowe's.
8. We celebrated our Thanksgiving with our nice neighbors, who invited us to eat dinner with them. The next day we spent going around buying furniture for the house and cleaning out our old apartment, a huge chore.
8.5. I lost my phone a week before Thanksgiving and finally found it on Thanksgiving when we were going to use our dryer (yup, first electronic device to be ruined inside Best Buy's washer). Finally we bought $8 cellphone from Best Buy during Thanksgiving.
9. One week after Thanksgiving, Jermaine & Russian built a new desktop computer and painted our guest bathroom.
10. We put up our first blinds in the master bathroom.
11. The kitchen was the first room we completed unpacking. The second one was our walk-in closet.
12. Early in December, we finally got our furniture (dining table and chairs, tv stand, bed frame and mattress)
13. We completed painting our loft before Christmas.
14. We spent our Christmas vacation building book cases and rearrange the loft library. We also didn't really do Christmas gifts, since we had bought so much house stuff at random sales during the holidays.  Whenever there was a good deal, we'd buy games and books and comics as well.
15. Russian experienced the joy of shoveling the driveway three days in a row!  We had lots of snow during Christmas weekend.
16. We've managed to avoid the swine flu so far, but both of us got colds during Christmas weekend.  First me, then gave it to Russian.


As you can see we have been really busy taking care Uchi, our selves and working to earn bacon and eggs. Slowly we started to decorate and clean and unpack.

So far we really like Uchi and really glad that we decided to purchase this lot.
HAPPY NEW YEAR And See you next year ....

P.S: I still could not find my usb reader, pictures from above home improvement/mess will come soon.

Home Construction (Day 74 - October 27)

Today our porch got painted - below is the picture we took:
1. Our last window is installed.
2. Our porch has been painted (halfway)
3. Our door is painted
4. Our garage doors are painted

Home Construction (Day 73 - October 26)

On Monday, there were small changes in Uchi :

1. The painter was there and just started his work.
    We noticed our door was painted

2. The mosquito netting was installed.

I hope they will double paint it again

The mosquito net

Home Construction (Day 72 - October 23)

We visited Uchi today again - but there were no changes. The weather has not been friendly to our painter guy this week. He hasn't been able to paint our porch or front door or our garage doors this week.

During the weekend, we visited Uchi again and met him. He was trying to start his work by preparing the taping between windows and door. He needed to catch up with his schedule since we are closing om our Uchi soon.

This weekend, on Saturday especially, the weather was quite friendly to him, so he was able to paint all the garage doors.

Our pictures will follow soon.

Home Construction (Day 71 - October 22)

Finally we could enter our Uchi today...
These are the changes from yesterday:

 The knobs for our closet doors

 

The knobs for all regular doors

Another thing we noticed is that Uchi has been cleaned : )  someone came to wipe and vacuum everything and did other small touch-up paint jobs.

Home Construction (Day 70 - October 21)

Today we visited Uchi and the ironic part we could not enter because

Can you tell the difference?

Yes, they changed our main door knob and added the deadbolt -- tonight we arrived a little bit too late, so the main office was already closed. We'll have to wait until tomorrow to get in...

For today, the changes we noticed are:  just that they added door knobs to all the doors (including all the closet doors).

Home Construction (Day 69 - October 20)

Today we didn't visit Uchi and, just as we've started noticing, whenever we don't have time to visit our Uchi they manage to complete another milestone!  So, for today it's:

MILESTONE#9 FLOORING INSTALLED

It seemed to us that they had finished the carpet a couple of days ago -- but today is the official completion day since they cleaned (vacuumed) the carpet.  Before, it was covered with lots of little fuzzy fuzzballs.

Home Construction (Day 68 - October 19)

Today I got a chance to visit Uchi earlier than usual.  I had an appointment with a local carpenter to install hardwood on our main floor.  So I was there for 2 hours and no activity was happening during those hours - seems we won't have much progresses today.

The one change I noticed is that our lawn became all green today...   well, sort of green...   kind of fake green, actually.  They did hydro-mulching, which is basically hydro seeding but without seeds in the spray, and it looks something like this:

Yuck!

It looks like our lawn is made of moldy nasty bread now.

Of course, we were planning to do hydro-seeding for our lawn since it will be cheaper than sodding - but I just found out today that our community would not allow that.  What?  YES.  The builders can hydro-mold our lawn, but then we aren't allowed to hydro-seed it.  How's that for fairness?

Oh yes.  And today our Uchi was still really dirty - no one has cleaned him up yet!  : (

My NEW Hair Style

Guys, take a look at what came off of my head today:

WOW.  You could build a whole Lili-wig out of that!

OK, you ready to see what's left?

Check it out:

Tadaaaa...!  That's the top, and are you ready for the "big reveal"?!

THAT is the new hairstyle, ladies & gentlemen!  I hope you like it.

It's way way more comfortable, low-maintenance, and cool.

Home Construction (Day 67 - October 16)

Today was "carpet day!"  (Isn't there some saying like "carpet diem!" or something like that?  Carpet the day?  No?  Maybe?  Hmm...  my Latin is rusty.)

So Uchi is basically done - except for a few small things they still have to touch up, such as:

  1.  Vacuum the carpet -- right now it's covered in carpet-fuzzballs
  2.  Clean all the windows (covered with stickers) and countertops (covered with dust)
  3.  Clean the bathrooms -- all the debris in the tubs is gross
  4.  Remove all the cardboard covering the floors
  5.  Install our remaining bedroom window, the one above the garage
  6.  Swap the two toilets which they installed in the wrong bathrooms!

They have 1 week to finish all these things, and then the home will be ready for inspection!

Here is all the progress they made today & yesterday

1. They added these wire shelves to the laundry room closet, to the main coat closet, the guest bedroom closets, the linen closet and walk-in closet.

2. Added hangers for toilet paper and hand towels to all the bathrooms.

 

 3. Carpeted the foyer, main room ("great room" or "living room" -- we keep hearing all these names, and they seem to all refer to the same room?), the stairs, all the bedrooms and closets (except for one closet in the laundry room, which would be silly to carpet, since the laundry room itself doesn't have carpets).

 

4. Installed the glass door of the master shower.

So, with today's interior work, our Uchi is basically DONE.  (Not counting the 5-6 items listed above...)

Home Construction (Day 66 - October 15)

After 2 days of toxic-fumes, we decided to skip visiting Uchi today - to give our lungs a chance to recover.....

Home Construction (Day 65 - October 14)

Today when we visited Uchi, we could see from outside that all the lights were turned on - we were wondering why??????

It turned out the painters were still painting and doing some touch-up around Uchi.

That's one of our painters - and below are the touch-ups he just completed for our staircase.

He did a good job - I didn't notice that it was a touch-up

They also installed all the doors which used to be here and left their marks (they were spraypainted yesterday).

Home Construction (Day 64 - October 13)

Today we got a chance to preserve the memory of our Uchi's first snow fall - his first winter : )

Our roof was a little bit covered by snow

It was snow heavily yesterday - the manager decided to post this on our main door

Uchi smelled like toxic-fumes today - they decided to paint all our doors (they un-installed all doors and placed them in our foyer and our master bedroom).

All the appliances were covered --- they were preparing to paint the whole home again.

Home Construction (Day 63 - October 12)

Over the weekend, we had our first snow .... it was quite weird - the leaves have not change into fall color yet and the grass was still green

Then on Monday morning, we got even more snow .....

Ok now about Uchi, we didn't visit him today : (   But we had the best excuse ever.

Our good friend was not feeling well all day, so we decided to go with him to the hospital (same one Russian visited last year). He had stomach pain all day and though it was from food poisoning but boy was he wrong.

After 5 hours of waiting, 1 episode of Dancing with The Stars and couple of tests and 1 CT scan and 1 bag of fluid and 2 nurses and 1 room change and 19 millions personal questions which were mostly repeated by different people, 6-7 different forms to fill out and 2 glass of radio-active fluid, it finally turned out that he needed emergency appendectomy.  His appendix was swollen and infected, and his white blood cell count was elevated.  He was already fighting the infection...

The nice surgeon gave him a whopping TEN minutes to think about his life, call his mother in Florida, sign some consent forms, etc., and then he was wheeled off to surgery just like that!

We had been there since 6pm.  He was taken into surgery at midnight.  At around 1am he was woken up, and wheeled upstairs to the recovery ward.  We followed him, along with his older sister, saw him to his room.  He said two words and then passed out completely.  The poor guy hadn't eaten since lunch time, and was all drugged up and tired.

At 2am we left for home.  It was a looooong day.

So we hope that you (and Uchi) will forgive us about missing today's home-construction update.

Home Construction (Day 62 - October 9)

Guys we have more excuses for you today.  It's not like we didn't visit our Uchi -- we DID.  But then we went to Costco to have our prints printed, and I totally left my 8GB memory card somewhere at the photo developing counter!   : (   : (   : (


So the good thing is:  we have all the photos in printed form, but we just haven't scanned them into the computer.  For now, you'll have to take our word for it:  the only change to our Uchi was that they finally installed our dishwasher [FINALLY!], although they didn't connect all the cables in the back quite yet.

We'll promise more photos coming soon!

And today:

MILESTONE#8 Plumbing fixtures, heating/air conditioning equipment and electrical fixtures installed. 

Home Construction (Day 61 - October 8)

Today is "fixture day" -- maybe yesterday was, too, since we didn't visit Uchi.  They still have not installed our dishwasher.  Like I said, it took them a couple of days just to open the box:

...but they have not bothered to install it.  At least we know what kind of dishwasher we have...

Our kitchen sink is done - it is a regular one and we are fairly happy with it.

Wondering what's under the sink?

Nothing too scary, yet.

The fixtures for the bathroom are done too

 

We have toilets now - see all the yellow color around the walls, they are everywhere today. I think they are markers to repaint Uchi one more time.

 

Our main bathroom is done now

 

Our half bathroom is done also

Home Construction (Day 60 - October 7)

After yesterday's dissapointing lack of progress, we decided there probably wouldn't be many changes to Uchi today.  And today we will be really busy anyway... had to pick up parcels from UPS and had to meet a couple of people for dinner, which ended at around 9.30 PM.

Home Construction (Day 59 - October 6)

After all the changes from last week, this week they decided to slow it down a little bit -- we found no changes today, but we did find a couple of changes which we didn't notice a couple of days ago:

The outlets on top of the fire place are done. We don't know if we will place a TV there.

It's not enough space for a wide-screen TV.

 

Outlets for our TV and speakers are done.

By the way, there are surround-sound home theater speaker slots in the ceiling.  We don't have the actual speakers to install in the ceiling yet, and we're not sure if we will or not...  but the slots are there.  Who knows.

Home Construction (Day 58 - October 5)

After camping, the Russian was wondering about all the changes I saw on Friday before leaving for camping, so today I decided to take him there and to enjoy a little bit more time with all the changes from last week, since I wasn't able to stay very long on Friday:

 We have a doorbell now!  And it glows.

 

 

 They installed our microwave...

 

 We still don't have our sink and our dishwasher.  They haven't disappeared or anything, even though

Centex leaves our door unlocked sometimes!  (Not cool.)

 

 This is our dishwasher, by the way.

It took them one day to open the cardboard box.  Amazing.

 

All the air vents are installed, too!
I know that's not the most exciting part, but when it's -35'F outside
we'll be quite excited about them, I think.

Home Construction (Day 57 - October 2)

Today I left my work place earlier to be able to visit Uchi before departing to the wilderness of the Minnesota-Canadian Borderlands. But there was a car accident clogging up the road to our Uchi, and I ended up taking more than 45 minutes to reach it.

But I was really glad that I went there - Uchi is so different from the couple of days before!  I was late meeting others because of the visit, but I was happy to see all the changes inside our Uchi.

We've tried to post enough pictures today to make up for all the days we didn't visit Uchi in the last week or so.

Also, sorry about the blurry pictures, but I only had 5 minutes to wander around Uchi because I had to meet others to drive to the Boundary Waters for a weekend of camping & canoeing.

First of all, our driveway was done!  As you can see, the weather in MN is not that friendly -- we've had rain for a couple of days in a row already.  I, of course, really like the weather.   : )

 We also have lights outside our garage - they are so cute. They are really simple design

But they do not all match -- it's strange, and even our neighbors have noticed.

 

 This is another different style of outside lights. We are not really sure why we have 2 different kinds, maybe because we didn't do any upgrades : (  This one is more fancy.

The simple outside lights are by the garage doors

The fancy ones are by our main door.  Maybe we have to replace the simple ones with the fancy ones when we move in -- what do you guys think?

 

They also added light fixtures inside the home -- this is another upgrade we took. We like the oiled bronze design instead of the plain chrome ones. We were thinking to redesign those when we move in, but we decided too many lights need to be replaced. So we think it would be better to upgrade this.

...... and now, for the biggest change inside Uchi:

We have a kitchen now -- OK, at least half a kitchen.  We don't have our sink, microwave, refrigerator or dishwasher (yet).  Our kitchen countertops and island are installed already.

We don't really like our countertop pattern -- maybe one day we can upgrade our countertops to a different color.

Our chandelier light is installed -- it's not too fancy but good enough for now

All the light switch covers are installed, and we no longer see any wires hanging out.

 

The countertop for our master bathroom is installed - but not the fixtures yet.  All of them are white since we didn't do any upgrades.

 

The main bathroom countertop is done, too!

 

The light over our stairway is installed now...

 

And our Uchi is not cold anymore, since they have installed a thermostat and have set it to 65.