Our New House!

We finally found a house in Daphne, Alabama. Daphne is across the bay from Mobile, where we used to live before we moved to Germany. For those who know the area, we are right off I-10, across the street from the Eastern Shore Centre mall (great for me!), a perfect place to stop and visit when you are on your way to the beach! We are just minutes from Mobile Bay and all the good seafood restaurants along the causeway. We are about 30-45 minutes from the beaches in Gulf Shores (and the outlet shopping in Foley!). It is a great area and we are really happy to be here! Our neighborhood also has a golf course, so Todd is very excited about that, if he just had some spare time!

By the way, if you are looking us up it may also say that we live in Spanish Fort, Alabama. Both Daphne and Spanish Fort are correct and either one will work if you are mailing something to us. We are on the border between the two and it just depends on who you ask where we live. According to official word from the post office, we are in Daphne with a Spanish Fort ZIP code, and according to tax records we live in Daphne, but like I said, the mail gets here either way. Everyone always asks this too so I'll go on ahead and tell you. Todd is about 50 minutes from work. We are about 30 minutes from his parents in Satsuma, and about 2 1/2 hours from my parents in Montgomery. Dave and Joanna are a little over 3 hours away in Auburn, and Lauren and Richard are about 6 1/2 hours away in Athens. And, unfortunately, we are about an 11-hour plane ride from our friends in Germany.



Here are a few pictures of the house, to prove that we are really unpacked and settled in! We really love our house. It is probably two or three times the size of our house in Germany (which is not saying much - if you were there you know what I am talking about) We were totally cramped in that house. And this house is all one-story, which is great since I have a toddler who likes to climb - stairs are nothing but a hassle these days!

Our new house

Living room, looking towards the front door


Living room, looking towards the kitchen


Dining room

If you went to our house in Germany I'm sure you can tell that we got new living room furniture, and since we did not have a dining room set we also bought that. And if you went to our house in Germany, I'm sure you knew that we definitely needed new furniture! I'm not even sure how long Todd had that old stuff but it was not in good shape. We gave it to the movers - we didn't even want to see it come off the truck.

Kitchen

Breakfast room

Our room (it has improved since this picture)

Our bathroom

Meredith's bathroom

Meredith's bedroom

The playroom

Guest bedroom (ready for company!)

Guest bathroom

I wasn't going to call you out, Lauren, but I will after the yard child comment. 2 weeks after moving in, we had all the boxes unpacked and the garage cleared out and were able to get both cars in the garage, and here is the proof. A year and a half after moving in to her house, Lauren can only get one car in their garage.

By the way, yes we bought a minivan and we love it, and we don't care if it makes us seem old! It is great because both the middle and back rows fold flat into the floor - great for hauling stuff.

And yes, it is red - all you Auburn fans don't give us too much grief - the price was right and we couldn't pass it up. And I personally love driving the red car.

We are happy to finally be getting settled and adjusted to life here again. I know a lot of people pass through this way going to see family and friends around Christmastime, so please stop by and see us, or stay and visit if you can. We would love to see you all!

Our yard needed some landscape work and I didn't want to take a lot of pictures of the outside until we took care of that. It looks tons better now, so I will work on putting some pictures of the outside on too.

Since this is an open, public forum, for obvious reasons I am not going to post all our contact information on the blog. I sent out address cards last week and I tried to remember everyone, but if I did not or you did not receive yours, then please let me know and I will e-mail you our information. I apologize for not getting back to you if you have e-mailed me - our internet connection has been sporadic at best (as in, I might be able to read the e-mail but before I could hit "reply" I would be kicked off the internet, and to re-connect would require restarting the computer, powering down the modem, etc. or any combination of a lot of things, and still it didn't always work even then - extremely frustrating). It boiled down to a problem with our DSL hardware (but not before we blamed it on everything from our old computer to our wireless router - so we wasted a lot of time trying to fix things that weren't wrong) and we have been waiting on a new modem to come in, and then I spent what spare time I had this week on the phone with AT&T, or with an AT&T technician here at the house. I know I devoted at least 2 hours a day (and some days more) to getting this problem fixed. It appears to be working now, so hopefully we have it under control.

The move to our new house went just so-so, and in terms of problems, ranks right up there behind moving into our house in Germany when the movers got into a fistfight with each other. The main problem was that there was a lot of damage - all minor, but there was so much of it. Almost every piece of wooden furniture was damaged in some way, mostly scratches on the top. Our kitchen table had a huge gouge out of the side. We had a broken glass, several broken decorative things, some broken Christmas ornaments, and then some broken plastic containers and a file cabinet was very dented in on the top. Our computer, which already was not in good shape, was damaged - the monitor looked the worst. And about half, or maybe even more (hundreds) of our boxes were crushed in on the sides, smushed on the top, ripped open, and some were really badly damaged - one whole stack of them from the garage were almost completely flattened. Most of Meredith's furniture was in good shape, but everything in our bedroom was damaged. It seems that it was a combination of things that allowed it all to get so messed up. The movers in Germany who packed us were very nice and hard-working, but not very consistent with their packing. I guess it just depended on who packed each box - over the course of three days we had 5 different people packing our stuff. There was this extremely well packed item, wrapped and wrapped in paper, stuffed with paper, and when we finally got it open it was a plastic cup that we use to measure dog food, and we got it FREE from the pet store; however, my good china had hardly any packing material around it, and some of our souvenir-type things from Germany had NO paper around them - just clanking together in the box. Luckily nothing too expensive or hard to replace/repair was damaged, and Ciba/the moving company/and whoever else involved has agreed to cover the cost of repairing the wooden furniture. But even more than the fact that quality control on the packing was not very good, our things were really mishandled on this end of it. After coming off a month on a ship, they went through customs in Savannah, Georgia, then came 5 days by truck to Mobile, where they were unloaded from the container and put into a warehouse since we didn't have a house yet, and then reloaded into a truck and delivered here. So our stuff changed hands several times before we saw it again, and when you aren't there to supervise who knows what happens? We watched them unloading and they did a pitiful job. Our computer monitor box, for example, rolled off the truck and onto the street (which explains why it looked the way it did). They ran their hand trucks into the walls of the house while they were bringing boxes in. Todd finally had to forbid them rolling any more hand trucks down the halls. They were just very careless, which is a shame since we had such a good moving experience when we left here to go over to Germany (I can't say the same when we arrived in Germany, referring to the aforementioned fistfight - but at least nothing was damaged). At least I know which company not to use if we ever need to move again!

I am always working on more pictures and I do have a lot to catch up on. We did buy a new computer and now with a (hopefully) fully functional DSL modem I don't have as much of an excuse. Up next - Halloween pictures!