In Transition

This photo is unrelated.

Life has been pretty crazy around these parts for the past few months. I have so much to catch you up on, I just have yet to make the time for it.

Up until Halloween, I spent the majority of my time DIYing and decorating for my combination 30th birthday and Halloween party. I called it Thirtyween. It was a lot of fun. Half the fun, honestly, was making all of the decorations. The house looked great. I really meant to post the photos here, but that all kind of fell by the wayside when we discovered another leak in our house. Not counting our house flood, this has been our third leak this year.

It was a pinhole leak in the living room, and in order to clean it up, the room had to be emptied and our brand new laminate flooring had to be torn out. Between that and a mandatory re-pipe of our condo, our living room has been out of commission for 18 days.

We've been considering getting out of our rental and buying a home since our flood back in April. This last leak was kind of the push that we needed to really get moving on the home hunt. Long story short, we bought a new home!

A home so new, it's still only bones.

It's a fantastic end-unit condo in a brand new master-planned community next to the one in which we currently reside. We won't be able to move in until March or April, but we do get to choose everything that goes in it. (So yes, I'm pinning away. Check out and follow my New Home board where you can also see photos of the model!)

We had our first appointment with the design center yesterday to confirm our first phase of options like lighting and appliances. In a month, we'll choose our counter tops and backsplash, so it was fun getting to look at samples to kind of put together some ideas and get some pricing.

Counters, backsplash, and flooring, oh my!

Well, it was fun for me. I think Jamie was only seeing the dollar signs, but we'll make it work. In the end, after our options and upgrades, we still project our final pricing to be about 40k less than the two homes that we almost purchased in our own community. I'd say that's a pretty good deal given that we're getting everything that we want out of it.

While we're mentioning money, I'm going to be earning more of it! My current position is only part time and the hours have been minimal and unsteady lately, so I went on the hunt.

After meeting with a recruiter that did nothing more than spam my references, I applied to two positions on my own. I heard back from one and scheduled a phone interview for the next morning, which was this past Thursday. The phone interview went well, so I went in that afternoon for a second interview. The manager whom I was supposed to meet with got stuck in a meeting, so I interviewed with the girl who would be my supervisor in the position. It seemed to go really well, but I was met with the always frustrating mention of other applicants and the "we'll be in touch". (I just had to hope really hard that the other applicants would bomb their interviews.)

Overall, I felt really good about my interviews and did my best to be patient. Normally one to ignore phone calls from unknown numbers, I did answer every call this weekend, but they were either other recruiters or people calling about the work going on in our house.

This afternoon, after rushing back home from acupuncture in anticipation of a house inspection for the repipe, I answered a call that I thought would be the inspector. It wasn't. It was the manager following up on the interview he missed out on. He asked a few questions, one or two being repeats from my second interview, explained a few things, then offered me the job! I start on Wednesday at an office with a really laid-back atmosphere where I can wear flip-flops and join in on lunch-time yoga a few times a week.

So yes, our life is in a major transition right now. With my new work schedule, I don't expect to be able to get back to any type of consistent or regular posting here, but I'll try when I can.