Seven Things on Week One In a New House

 There are a lot of things that happen when you move into a new house-these are the most interesting:

1. WALKING IN THE NEIGHBORHOOD: One of our first walks around the neighborhood gave us several views of the mountains including this picture at sunset.  The mountains do not look real.  Breathtaking is the only word to describe this. About half the neighborhood is still being built so we are around a lot of construction, but those mountains!

2. SPRINKLER SYSTEM: We have never had one and so I was amazed at how it worked.  I didn't really know how it worked, but I saw the water come on and completely cover the front lawn.  It's not a big lawn, but there may be 13 little sprinklers.  I started to count them, but I was getting wet.  On our second full day in the house it went on about 5 pm and it didn't shut off 25 minutes later, or two hours later.  We couldn't shut it off. The next morning my wife found a water shut off valve on the side of the house. Meanwhile the front lawn was soaked. This is in an area where they have water restrictions.  Here is the exciting action below:

3. LIGHT SWITCHES: I noticed this the first time we were in the house. THERE ARE A LOT OF LIGHT SWITCHES! In the kitchen, living room, and hallway there are 13 switches.  I'm going to have to be trained to learn which ones turn on what.  I've already gone to one group of switches and turned on the wrong lights, but this may take months.

4. MY OFFICE: My room is at the front of the house and looking out the window I can see several houses being built, but I was very surprised to see mountains in the distance. They will probably disappear when the houses are finished, but I have a mountain view right now.

5. OUR FRONT DOOR: Yes, it is orange on the outside, but even more unusual is the inside of the door.  Several times I looked at the picture below and I finally figured out what was bothering me.  There are no windows on the side and nothing above the door.  I can't see if the light is on or if it's light or dark.  I don't think we've ever had a door that blocked everything out.  I have to look at the switch on the wall to see if I turned on the light outside. Luckily, there's only two switches near the door.

6. MY BATHROOM: We have two bathrooms and since I'm always getting up early in the morning I have regularly used the second bathroom and let my wife have almost all the space in the main bathroom. I don't need a lot of space and usually my things are squeezed into a corner as you can see below.  However, the main bathroom has two sinks and the second bathroom doesn't, but it has a lot of extra space that my wife doesn't have.  I'm going to shower in the second bathroom and give her the entire bathroom, but how how am I going to use all the extra space?  I have some ideas for another blog.

7. POD DELIVERY: If you have never seen one of these things delivered, it's worth watching.  The pod comes on a big truck and an area inside the truck comes off with the the pod and it's manually/electronically moved from the street to your driveway by the driver.  Below are some pictures of how they do it, it's really impressive.