Jodi and I finally got possession of our townhouse yesterday. We closed on the place on March 25th and the tenant moved out yesterday. She was suppose to be out by noon yesterday, but when we should up at 1pm the door was unlocked and there were a few small things in the house including cleaning supplies and a fish tank. We assumed that she wasn’t done yet and must have just been at her new place, or else we had just inherited a fish. We left and went to Home Depot and bought some painting tools as well as some other misc stuff. While at Home Depot I called my dad to get some painting advice, he was very helpful and gave me some good tips and suggestions on things that we would need and how to use them. We then went to Sonic to get some lunch. After these errands we went back to our new home and this time the door was open and a truck was in front, so she must have been inside finishing up. We left again and drove around a little to check out what places were around our new house. When we got back the third time around 3pm she was gone so the place was finally ours!

For our first day I had planned to install the garage door opener that we purchased a couple of weeks ago. We bought a Craftsman 1/2 hp Garage Door Opener, Belt Drive and decided that I could just do the install myself instead of paying the $99 to have it installed. I pulled everything out of the box and began going through the instructions, we made sure we had all the parts we were suppose to have and then I discovered that since our garage is finished, we needed to purchase a couple of support pieces to mount the garage door opener on the ceiling. We also needed to purchase a support for the garage door. We drove over the Sears in Jordan Landing and looked around. We tried to explain our problem to an employee there since we were not seeing the parts that we needed and he was not much help, told us to go over to the Parts and Service department, they were just as helpful. So then we went over to Lowes across the street and the guy there at least knew how garage door openers worked, but they don’t sell the brand of opener or the brand of door that we have, so he was not able to get us the parts. So we drove back over to Sears and found the ceiling mount, then we went looking for the bolts that we would need. We could not find them so we found another employee and she was not helpful at all. I was very frustrated and decided maybe it would be better to just pay someone to install it for us, maybe then they would have all the extra parts. The employee we were talking to wasn’t sure if they would have the parts or if we would need to furnish them, so I wasn’t sure what to do. Luckily Jodi noticed that the screws and bolts that we had been looking for were actually packaged with the ceiling mount that we had found. So I decided to go back and see what I could do.

We went back home and I got the garage door opener assembled and mounted to the ceiling. There wasn’t much clearance above the door so I had to mount the header bracket and everything to the ceiling, hopefully it will work like it is suppose to! I still haven’t found the support mount for the garage door, hopefully tomorrow I can track that down so that I can actually attach the opener to the door.

We also discovered that the previous person who had been in our house was not very clean. The carpets are disgusting, which we knew and is why we are having new carpets put in next week, as well as some of the walls and the kitchen. The kitchen was filthy, I think she swept, but that was about it. Jodi spent all afternoon cleaning all the appliances, counter tops and the sink. I think she is mostly finished. Tomorrow we hope to finish getting the garage door opener put together and clean some more. We are also planning to fill in some small cracks with some spackle and start painting Wednesday (we have other plans Tuesday so we won’t be working on the place that evening).