The Home Stretch

It’s been a while (it’s been a whiiiiiile) since I’ve posted something about the house and the move and the whole shebang. It turns out, moving cross-country to buy your first home really takes it out of you!

The good news is…  we’re in! And we’ve actually been in for a few weeks now, but we’ve also been settling into the new home and trying to take care of all of the things we need to take care of as homeowners. You know, the real fun stuff like getting utilities setup, figuring out what all of the light switches in the house do, scheduling a water softener installation with Lowe’s which has taken literally the entire time we’ve lived in the house, etc.

Then there’s the actual fun stuff like starting to decorate the house with new (sometimes new-old) furniture and overall just making the house feel like (get ready for it) a home.

We’re really loving it here thus far – it’s everything we could have hoped for in a home coupled with living in a city we absolutely love. We’ve been taking it a bit slow with taking advantage of all of the fun nightlife and activities Austin has to offer because, 1) we’re trying to play things safe financially until we get a couple of mortgage payments in to see how things shake out and 2) we’ve been pretty damn exhausted.

Not only did we have to travel roughly 1,700 miles in two days from Pennsylvania to Texas — but we also had to cram four cats into the car while we did it. The first day was, amazingly, pretty easy and almost went without any issues whatsoever. The one cat we predicted would have problems (Bosco) did – he wound up going to the bathroom in the carrier but, luckily, it was an easy cleanup and their travel space was large enough to fit a travel size litter box in with them.

The second day was a whole other story. Bosco and June both got super agitated as we loaded them into the carriers to the point that they were swiping and hissing at any other cat we attempted to crate with them. This meant a delay in our departure that morning of more than an hour as Jaimie ventured out to find a third carrier we could use.

So, day two started with Bosco, June, and Newt in their own separate carriers and Ripley (the Sphynx who basically lives in a blanket) curled up on my lap. After about an hour or so June had calmed down to the point where we could introduce Newt into her carrier and, eventually, we lowered the partition between their carrier and Bosco’s to let the three of them have a happy home together. Ripley was more than content hanging out alone in the new carrier.

If you plan to travel with pets, by the way, I would really recommend something like the One For Pets Portable Kennel. This is what we used and it was perfect. It essentially spans the length of the back seat of the car and can either be one long carrier to accommodate the little hair monsters together or zipped in half to make two separate carriers. They also completely detach, if needed, which is another bonus. It really made the trip a lot easier than trying to fumble with large plastic crates or, if we really felt like gambling, just letting the cats hang out freely in the car.

After those rough two days, though, we were finally in Austin.

The rest of the story is pretty tame. The closing went off without a hitch as scheduled and within a few hours we had the keys to our home! We popped in as soon as we could, let the cats run rampant and began planning our new lives in our new city.

I’m hoping to write more regularly as we get more settled in and explore more parts of the city we’ve yet to see (for instance, we live across the street from McKinney Falls State Park which I’ve yet to visit). Here’s to new adventures in life and, perhaps most importantly, new adventures in food!

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