(I’m typing this on my wife’s laptop at 9:30 p.m. Wednesday evening. I’m sitting at my desk in my new house. My new house! However, the internet is still connected at our apartment, about six miles away, and won’t be connected at the new house until Monday. So this blog won’t get online until sometime Thursday, probably in the afternoon.)

Let me catch you up.

Monday (16th) morning, first thing, we went to our bank and turned half of our savings account into a cashier’s check. A flimsy piece of paper worth more money than anything I’ve ever owned in my life. That’s our down payment.

Then, while my wife worked 1 p.m. to 11 p.m., I worked hecticly. To shorten my account of that day: I moved everything into my office that we didn’t want the movers touching, and moved everything out into the open that we wanted the movers to take.

That included a queen-sized pillow top mattress, box spring, dismantling the frame, six-foot tall bookshelves, tables, chairs. In fact, on Monday, I moved just about everything in our apartment at least once. Keep in mind that some things I moved several times — in limited space, this is sometimes required to keep a walking path open and to not damage anything.

I was worn out at the end of the day.

Tuesday (17th), we drove to Sun City, Texas, where the sales office for our mortgage company (same company as the builder, actually) is located. We had a choice to use an outside mortgage company, but our bank didn’t offer us a fixed rate as low as our builder’s mortgage company did, and some other terms were better through them as well. Either way, the mortgage will get sold to someone else before long...

For two hours, we filled out forms until our fingers bled. (Our fingers didn’t actually bleed, but we did sign forms for two hours.) We signed our names nearly a hundred times each, and initialed even more than that. Had I been by myself, it would have taken much longer. Despite my typing speed, I cannot read as fast as my wife. Over four years of marriage, I have learned to trust that she has read and comprehended a document while I have only scanned it. She has proven this to me on many occasions.

In the end, we had a huge stack of copies. Perhaps the most exciting part was the form that said we were now authorized to pick up the keys for our house.

We drove back to Killeen, ate quickly, then drove out to our neighborhood and obtained our keys. The house was ours.

(Technically, of course, the house belongs to a mortgage company. It’s ours only because we’ve promised to pay them a bunch of money every month for 30 years.)

But for the first time, my wife and I own a home. It’s a brand new home, as you know if you’ve been following my blog. No one has lived here before us. That’s a very unique feeling.

Then we got to work again.

My wife drove to the city’s water office to wait in line for an hour, while I went to Lowes. I bought grass seed, a rake, a longer water hose, a sprinkler, fertilizer, and a few other things I can’t remember now, and then returned to the house. (Oh yeah, I also bought grout sealant.)

For the rest of the evening, I alternated between applying coats of grout sealant and working outside. I put two coats on every inch of grout in the house by the time the evening was over. I also watered the sod around our house and seeded about a tenth of the back yard. It’s tough soil, and will need all the fertilizer and water I can provide for grass to grow there. But once it catches, it’ll be fine.

Once my wife scheduled our water switchover, she went to the post office to get keys to our new NBU (neighborhood box unit). They don’t put up mailboxes in front of each house anymore. You have to walk to the end of the street to the collection of boxes (much like apartment dwellers).

Then she brought me a change of clothes and some bath necessities. I was soaked in sweat and dirty from head to toe. I showered in our new house while she went to the apartment to pack some food items (spices, etc.) and her clothes.

Though I was tired from two solid days of work, I really couldn’t sleep well. The movers were coming in the morning.

On Wednesday (18th) morning (“this morning” as I type this, but “yesterday” by the time I post this), we awoke early and picked up our UHaul truck. We’d hired two moving helpers through UHaul’s website, since my wife is six months pregnant and can’t do what she did this time last year.

(Last year, we moved ourselves from Seminole, Okla., to Killeen, Texas. I did most of the packing, and almost all the loading. At this end, my wife and I unloaded our entire truck in less than three hours.)

While we waited for the movers to arrive, we dashed around finding more odds and ends to pack or hold back. Darren and Larry arrived at about 9:45 a.m. (scheduled for 9 a.m.) At first, we thought it was a bad omen that they’d arrived nearly an hour late. We were soon disabused of that notion; we had nothing to worry about.

Within five minutes, we’d shown them everything that was going and everything that wasn’t. Darren walked into the empty truck and thought for a moment. He later explained, “I do Tetris in my head.” By this, he meant that he was visualizing how our furniture would fit best in the space, with no empty holes.

Then he and Larry went to work. They never stopped except when we offered them water. Before noon, the truck was loaded. Completely. Everything. (Edit: Everything that was meant to be on the truck.)

My wife went to McDonald’s and bought lunch for all four of us. (Darren and Larry said they usually don’t get breaks, even in the middle of long jobs like ours, and they’d certainly never had customers buy them lunch.)

We drove over to the new house, and Darren backed the truck into the driveway for me — I didn’t want to risk it. By 2:15 p.m., the truck was empty, and everything was in our new home. Wow again.

We tipped them, even though they said it’s not customary, and we paid them for the full eight hours we’d booked them (the job took less than five). I’ve done a lot of hard, manual labor in my life, and I think they did eight hours worth of work. And when they left our house, they were off to another job.

Immediately after they left, we spotted a representative of a commonly recognized home security company. My wife flagged him down and we signed up for that service. (Like many of you, I recognize that what we’re really paying for is the sign in front of our house, but... my wife didn’t want to be the only residents in the neighborhood without that sign.)

We went to Lowes and bought a lawnmower ($179.10), cordless electric trimmer/edger ($89.97), gas can ($8.07), 25-foot soaker hose ($8.08), shower caddy ($26.98), fire extinguisher ($17.07), welcome mats for the front door and garage door ($18.84 / 2), dryer electrical cord ($16.62), shovel ($17.98), and a one-year coverage plan for the lawnmower ($19.97). (All prices here reflect a 10% discount because we used a card they’d sent us.)

Ate supper at Bush’s Chicken, then returned to the house.

It didn’t take long to assemble the trimmer, but the batteries have to charge for eight hours. Then I put the lawnmower together.

We showered and dropped into bed. (I stayed up a little later to type this...)

EDIT

Added Thursday (19th), while my wife's at work:

Thursday morning, the Sears delivery truck called me to ask how to get to our house. “Your address isn’t in my GPS”, the guy said. Heck, it’s not even on Google Maps yet. I gave them precise directions to the neighborhood, and then flagged them down by hand when they got within sight. (With no houses around us on any side, I can stand on my back porch and see the entrance to the neighborhood half a mile away.)

Just after they finished installing the brand new refrigerator, the home security guy showed up and I filled out the necessary forms.

For the fifth time, the Culligan salesman tried to sell us a water softening system. I told him that we’d been serious the other times we said we weren’t interested, and that his car had better be moved by the time I backed out of my driveway (he parked to block the driveway). And I started backing out. He moved and left quickly. Hopefully this time he got the message.

I ate lunch at McDonald’s and returned to the apartment to start picking up odds and ends that we’d left behind for one reason or another.

(Computer was left behind because internet is still only on at the apartment & we didn’t want movers putting it in the truck anyway. Food was left behind because the ‘fridge didn’t come till today.)