Well we have been in our new home a little over a week now, and it is an endless mountain of boxes. It all started out poor with our movers. We had hired a moving company to take all of our big furniture, as well as the majority of boxes we had packed. To make a long story short, it was a complete disaster and my furniture was damaged really bad (not by the movers though, which I will not get into that story). In addition, not a single box got moved. My wife kept the moving company updated before moving day and they kept insisting we only needed one truck. Both my wife and I knew better, and that did not even include our three storage units.

So we rented a U-Haul to empty out our three storage units, as well as take all of the boxes. My wife had carefully marked where each box went in the house. The problem is our families had helped us, which was much appreciated, but everyone just threw everything in the garage rather than putting them where they were marked. So it has been a monumental task sorting through all the boxes in the garage, and after a week, we still can not get a vehicle in the garage. Grr, exactly what I did not want. My goal this past weekend was to get a vehicle in the garage, but many other projects prevented me from doing so.

Our house is newer and had gone through a foreclosure. Therefore, even though the house was in immaculate condition, a lot needed to be done. The first major project I attempted was to switch out the locks on the front door. I initially had purchased the cheapest model of the Kwikset system, complete with SmartKeys. What a disaster! The complete deadbolt and handle set in bronze finish went for $89. After getting the entire system installed, the stupid SmartKey system failed, and I could not get them to reprogram. So back up to Lowes to purchase a non-SmartKey system. I ended up dropping like $130 on the set, but it was well worth the extra cost.

One of the big advantages of hanging onto our previous home and using it as rental income is that all of the premium upgrades we installed could be transferred over to the new house. This includes some higher end ceiling fans we had purchased a couple of years ago. I luckily had held onto some of the old fixtures at our old house, so it was easy to swap them out. Adding the ceiling fans to our new house not only saved us money from having to go out and buy new ones, but it also will help in air circulation in the new home and hopefully reduce heating and air conditioning costs.

Another major money saving idea is to purchase blinds and install them yourself. They are super easy to install. We received two estimates to install blinds in our entire house since there were absolutely none currently in the home. All of the 4 bedrooms had the same size windows (6 windows in total), and fortunately, Lowes carried in stock some cordless blinds that we desired. Total cost was $40 each window. The estimates we received to have them professionally installed varied from $88-190 each. After over a week of sleepless nights without blinds, we are finally now able to sleep in darkness, and I feel great knowing we 1) saved a substantial amount of money, and 2) I installed them myself. The rest of the house does have a tremendous amount of windows, and we might have to order custom blinds eventually, but at least the easy windows that mattered were knocked out in a couple of hours.

One last thing I have taken care of within the past week of new home ownership is swapping out as many light bulbs as possible with CFLs. We had done this at our previous home, and saved a substantial amount of money on our monthly utility bills. We will see how it works out on our bills over the next couple of months. We also understand though that we have been experiencing the heat bubble in the middle part of the country, and the air conditioning has been running non-stop, so our first bill might be higher than normal.

Overall the course of owning our new home, as well as the rental, we will continue to look for new ways to try and shave money off of our expenses, and will share new ideas in the future.