So far, this year is proving to be full of new experiences. Planning a wedding is definitely a once in a lifetime experience. At this point, I’ve completed all of the major preliminary wedding details. For you reference, bridal expos are an awesome way to find all kinds of vendors or your wedding. If they’re serious about their business, they’re going to take time to market their products and services at shows like these.
Picking the wedding date has been the easiest thing thus far.
Picking the ceremony location was somewhat easy as it’s simply the church that I attend. However, they have marriage classes that are required and it’s proved to be difficult for Dan and I to complete them with my school and his work schedules.
I’ve learned that I strongly dislike the floors in banquet halls. Almost all of them have carpet with obnoxious patterns and colors that clash with blue (my wedding color). I did manage to find one with an obnoxious blue pattern, so that’s only half as bad as the others. No, I did not pick my reception site based on their choice ground coverings. I did not go to as many banquet halls as I thought I would need to. I realized that the actual space doesn’t matter because you can dress it up however you want.
The photographer has been the easiest person to work with. She’s a good friend of mine, so I’m sure that has something to do with it 
.
Working with a florist is not what I expected at all. The initial meeting with a florist takes FOREVER. When I say forever, I mean about two hours. I guess I didn’t put a whole bunch of thought into what they would need to give an accurate quote. You need to know what kind of flowers you want, how many people are going to be wearing flowers, what the bouquets and centerpieces are going to look like, how many extra tables are going to need flowers, and the list goes on an on.
Finding a DJ was relatively easy, but once again the initial meeting took a long time. Most of them offer a lot of services other than playing music. First, they have to give you their whole speech about how they do business. Then they show you all of the equipment choices. Finally they demo on all of the equipment, and then we all talk about what we like and don’t like. I like to get straight to the point when I’m at a meeting. I don’t like to hear jokes, I don’t want to talk about my personal life, nor do I like to hear your personal stories. I guess that’s just the business part of me, but I feel that DJ meetings are unnecessarily long.
I’ll keep you posted as my wedding details continue.
Buying a house is a whole other adventure. I may be a junior in college, but no one has ever taught me how to look for houses, apply for a mortgage, find a lawyer, transfer all the utilities, or make home improvements.
Dan and I started looking online by ourselves for a couple weeks just to see what was available in the area. Initially, we wanted to live in a high rise condominium complex. I contacted an agent and went to view several condos with my older sister. Thankfully, she pointed out the parking situation. Most high rises have under ground parking garages. Because of all of the wonderful movies that Hollywood has introduced me to, I have a fear of parking garages and I am afraid of getting into elevators with strangers. Therefore, we decided that whatever house we bought needs to have a private garage and a private entrance. A single family home would be the most logical solution, but we could not find any decent ones in our price range. All single family homes that we looked at needed a lot of work. Naturally we had to find something in the middle, which is what led us to townhouses.
It only took one night of looking at townhouses for us to find the one we wanted, but we didn’t know it at first. We didn’t want to make any impulsive decisions so we were going to wait a week or two, go back to view the house again, and then make our decision. If only it were that easy. Townhouse associations do not accept all types of mortgage loans. Our agent contacted the association that this particular townhouse was in, and they would not accept our loan. As soon as the news got back to Dan and I, we were both completely upset. We had both already started to decorate the house in our heads and pictured started our life together there. At that point we realized how much we really loved that house. It had everything that we were looking for, but we were told we were going to have to walk away because of the loan we were approved for. That was not okay with me. I was on the phone with our lender immediately. We had to tweak a couple of things, but eventually, he was able to get us a loan for that specific property that the association would approve of. That’s when we knew we needed to make an offer.
I had no idea what to expect when making an offer. We went back to the property to take a second look, and that really confirmed our desire to buy the house. I told the agent that we were ready to make an offer and we did it right there in the kitchen. There were a lot of papers to go over and a lot of things to sign or initial. We had been advised by experienced home buyers to offer a price lower than the asking price. We went home that night very anxious to hear a response. Our agent called the next day saying the seller made a counteroffer, so we brought our offer up by a couple thousand. The seller had moved to Florida about a year ago and she really wanted to sell the property. That was lucky for us because she accepted our second offer! It was about 9:30 at night when our agent called with the news that we were going to be homeowners. It was only about two months after we decided to start looking for a house, which was a lot shorter than I anticipated.
Our offer was accepted on December 16th and our close date wasn’t until February 9th. The days in between were filled with excitement, anxiety, and anticipation. The actual closing was interesting. There were about six other professionals with their eyes fixed to their giant stacks of paper. Our lawyer had to go over all the paper work with us. Some of it I understood, some of it was confusing and all of it needed to be signed. Get ready to sign you life away people! It’s very intimidating, yet exciting. At the end, I was given an envelope with the garage door opener and all the keys. It was a lot less dramatic than what you see on the shows that are on TLC. Walking out of the lawyers office was surreal. My head kept screaming, “Oh my gosh you own a house now,” but I didn’t feel any different. I was excited, yes, but it’s such a unique thing to be excited about that I didn’t really know what to do.
We drove over to the house immediately after the closing. We walked around with huge smiles on our faces. We stopped in the middle of the empty living room and said, “Soooooooooo….what do we do now?” Neither of us have ever lived on our own, so we needed to get everything. However, there is no rush to move in right now, so we’re taking things slow. Thankfully, we received a letter from the association with all of the numbers to call to get the water, gas and electric transferred into our names. Then we called the village to ask about garbage collection, recycling and village stickers. We had everything set up for the house to function properly, but now we needed the stuff to put in it.
The first thing we thought of was paint. All of the rooms were painted the same, boring, off-white color, and that was not okay with us. If you know us at all, you’d know that we have very unique, bubbly personalities. We decided on gray and bright blue in the living room, caramel for the bedrooms and gray in the kitchen. In case you were wondering, paint and painting supplies are expensive. Even though it was only a few hundred dollars, I was not at all prepared to spend that much on paint. Part of the reason that we liked this house so much was because of the high ceilings in the living room. We did not think about how hard it would be paint those walls. We actually had to rent a scaffold from Home Depot to get the job done. Oh, and we had about 10 family members working from it at once. I love my family <3
We’ve moved in a couple of furniture items, but of the bigger things will be moved in this weekend.
I’ll post some pictures of the house and our painting later on.
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