The house, that is – the house that we’ve been going bonkers over for the past six months is finally ours. We made it through the final walk through, the repairs from that walk through, the check on the final walk through list, and the closing, which I thought should have taken days for the hassle that the loan was, right up to the very end. They handed us the keys and we almost ran from the building in case they decided to ask us for one more piece of documentation or some of our DNA to confirm our credit scores. All of that happened a week ago, and I sit here typing this on my brand new couch in my brand new family room, watching the rain fall outside through the seven windows that show me the glorious back yard of our home. It is starting to sink in that this is real, and I get to live here.

I thought that this move would be glorious, and that every box that was unpacked would be accompanied by the sounds of angels singing from up high. Or hell, that the boxes would unpack themselves. We postponed our actual move for two days after closing so that we could get some stuff done around the house before the furniture arrived; pendant lights installed in the kitchen, a ceiling fan on the back patio, and a ton of other small things that have to be configured and messed with when it is just easier to do it with nothing in the way. Sunday arrived, bright and shiny, and after a friend popped over to the house to watch the kids (Christina, I owe you BIG TIME), I took off back to our old apartment to box up the odds and ends.

Did I mention that I had the flu the entire week before we moved? Not the SWINE FLU! but the normal flu? 103 fever? No energy? Yeah. We literally had nothing in boxes on Sunday morning because of that damn flu. Mike and I flew around boxing things up as quickly as we could before the movers showed up, and we still had a ton of stuff in closets and cabinets when they moved our furniture out that we had to come back and get on our own. Let me be a PSA for the lot of you and tell you , right now: GO GET A FLU SHOT. If you can save yourself TEN DAYS of fevers, exhaustion, and all the other joys of being sick, then GO DO IT. I have never been as sick as I was the week before we moved, and it did not completely clear up until Tuesday after we were in the house. You don’t want to jack with this, folks. Trust me on this.

We’ve had something delivered or adjusted or painted or connected every damn day since we moved in; strange people flitter in and out of here like a train station. Painters turned my dining room into a shade of delicate, soft blue and our media room into a deep slate blue; furniture delivery men dropped off new couches and punctured a hole in the door to the same media room with a couch. (I kid you not – I thought Mike was going to explode in a shower of fury when he saw it, but he managed to stay calm long enough to tell the delivery folks that he would not be signing the “no damage” sheet when they offered it to him. I probably would have punched him in the nuts for even suggesting it.) Rooms are starting to take shape, slowly but surely. And we’re getting to know the staff at IKEA rather well, as their furniture graces many of the rooms of our home.

I’m going to get pictures next week, when everything is more organized, but for now I’m just glad to be here. In my own home, on my couch, watching the rain.