Buying Our House, Part V: Just Because You Have the Keys Doesn't Mean You Can Move In

This is the last part of my mini-series on buying our house.  Parts I, II, III, and IV can be found here.

When we last left, we had signed a bunch of papers at closing, comforted the old owner when she started crying, and got the keys to our house!

But the thing is, we didn't move in right away. We closed on June 9th*, had our apartment until the end of the month, and didn't hire movers until the 21st and 22nd.  That left with us a bit of time to get some stuff done around the house.  We didn't have as much time as it appears, however, because we were going back and forth to Iowa pretty regularly.

Here are things we had done before we moved in:

1) Locksmith to change the locks: Honestly the front door didn't even have a working lock on it, so we were a bit more concerned about this situation than the relatively low crime of the area suggested we be, but there you have it. We rekeyed the front, back, and garage doors for the price of $245.  We also had them install a deadbolt on the front door and this involved boring out a hole in a solid piece of wood that almost killed the locksmith's drill.

Note: No working deadbolt on the front door!

2) Handymen: We had appointments with three handymen (all men, no women) come out to give us an estimate on putting in a dishwasher. This was kind of a big job involving carpentry, plumbing, and electrical work. One guy didn't show up, one guy came to the appointment but never sent us an estimate despite three follow-up phone calls, and one guy came and told us he wouldn't be able to get to it until July and it would probably cost a couple thousand dollars.

3) Cleaning: We had housecleaners come in and do a thorough cleaning before we moved any stuff in. We had a crew of three who finished the whole house, top to bottom, in about three hours.  It was $250, but I gave each woman a $20 tip on top of that (honestly, I should have given them more of a tip, but I thought there were only going to be 2 people and I just didn't have more cash).  They did a good job and I would highly recommend that you do this if you have time when you're moving. The carpet cleaning (we only have carpet on the stairs) was worth it to me.

4) Electrician: We had the electrician come out to undo all the work he had previously done changing three-prong outlets into two-prong. We had him put in GFIs in several (3) different outlets. This cost us $125 (he was in the house for all of 15 minutes).

5) Pest control: This delightful man came and spread some stuff around the house to ward off bugs.  He also took down several wasp nests and walked with us through the house to look for bats and mice. He saw no evidence of vermin.  We paid him $75 and he told us that we should probably call him again in the fall.

6) Yard people: Our yard is...out of control. It actually is not too bad compared to some places in the neighborhood, but it stresses out both of us. We had two people come and give us estimates on helping with the yard. One guy quoted us $2000 to deal with the front yard and one of the beds on the side and another lady quoted us $50 an hour.  Dr. BB and I just looked at each other and shrugged. This was not our priority.

7) Internet: We had Spectrum come and install internet. There is literally no other choice in our area, so that was an easy decision to make.

8) Plumber: We had to use our home insurance (the sellers paid for home insurance for a year) on a plumber because when the cleaners were here, the upstairs toilet began leaking. We could never replicate this leak and we have a theory that it had been so long since it had been used that the plastic ring around the base was dry, but since it's not repeatable, the plumber charged us $100 and rolled his eyes at newbie homeowners.

Moving Day!  The kitchen is always unpacked first in our world.

And that was all we did before we moved in. We paid for movers (the trips to Iowa made moving ourselves seem like a waste of very precious time) and that was $1046.97 altogether (plus we gave each of the four movers a $25 tip). We did a fair amount of packing ourselves and we used boxes we had from previous moves, so that saved us a bit of money, but what really saved us money was that this job was done in a morning. Two guys packed us on a Tuesday, they came with two trucks on a Wednesday morning at 8 and were done by in time to go get lunch. I recommend movers if you can afford it since what took them four hours would have taken us days, plus we still would have had to pay for a truck. We estimated $450 for us to move ourselves, so this cost more than twice that, but was well worth it.

Then we were moved in. So ends this series on buying our house. Don't be sad, though. I'll keep writing about adventures in homeownership. Now it will be an occasional series called Things We Spent Money on For Our House to Prevent Divorce.

*Something I did not know, but would have been useful to know, is that we didn't actually pay our mortgage for the months of June OR July. Our first mortgage payment was due August 1 and that was actually a kind of nice thing with all the moving expenses we had.