Imported From Livejournal

“When you want to reach new readers who aren’t your mother, however, usability becomes important.” — Jakob Nielsen

We moved the rest of our stuff, and ourselves, in on Saturday.

We are now living in our own house.

My dad managed to get most signatures we needed for the occupancy permit today. (I don’t know how people with a normal job ever manage to get anything done at the Town Hall.) The only thing left is the final building inspection, which is scheduled for a week from tomorrow. So, assuming that goes well (and there’s no reason to think that it won’t), we’ll be moving the rest of our things and ourselves that weekend (the 15th).

So, I just sat down with Microsoft Money, and it says that the government is going to give us a really big refund come the end of the year. Apparently, while becoming a homeowner is expensive, the government tries to make things easier for you by not taxing you on money spent on property taxes or mortgage interest. So, I just filled out another W-4 and intend to give it to our Personnel department tomorrow.

Every law should have an expiration date no more than 100 years in the future.

So, our house is basically done. We could live in it. The only things not done are the hookup to Charter, the microwave isn’t installed, and there’s some touchup painting in places.

So now, we need to wait for several town offices to sign a piece of paper saying that we can live there. I’m not quite sure what “occupying” it means. Certainly, people occupied it to build it. We moved most of our stuff in there. We’ve even played games there on several occasions. So, I don’t know whether we need to wait for them in order to sleep there at night or not. Or maybe we’ve already broken the definition of “occupying” and just nobody really cares.

I spent yesterday evening networking my house. I now have pretty network jacks on my walls, and a patch panel in the basement. They all work. Happy happy.

Our water smells and tastes fine now, although we’re still wary that our problems with it might come back.

It looks like all that’s left is finishing getting the occupancy permit.

Apparently, our electrician doesn’t know an RJ-45 jack from a hole in the wall, and networking the whole house wasn’t really in the original contract, so apparently we’re going to be on our own for the final networking. The cables are all there; we just need to hook it all into jacks.

Anybody want to come to a networking party? We’ll feed you! I’ll even pay you if you know what you’re doing.

I am contemplating the possibility of signing up to get a credit card for use in emergencies. Does anyone have any good/bad experiences/advice/suggestions?

So, now that I’m kinda grown up and got a mortgage and such, I’ve been spending time putting together a budget to make sure everything works out, especially now that I have some concrete numbers for the mortgage. When doing the budget in Microsoft Money, it helpfully gives a pie graph of where our expenses are going. I noticed that a very large chunk of it was going toward our mortgage interest. It was about 20% of our monthly expenses. (Especially near the beginning of the loan, the vast majority of the payment is just paying off interest.)