102 Wild Flower Court - Our New Home

I promised I would write a post about the purchase of Josh and my home, so here it is. We live in Central Texas not far from Texas A&M University, even though we are die hard University of  Texas Longhorn fans.
We moved to this area when Josh graduated with his BBA last August, and he found a job here with an accounting firm. Neither of us had ever been to this area before let alone lived in this new area. We are both from a small town in East Texas, where both of our families live. So to say the move was hard is an understatement. Not to mention we had less than a week to find a place to rent, pack our things, and move before Josh's position started.
So we get here, we get moved into our steal of an apartment here in Aggie country. We found a 3 bedroom, 2 bathroom, 1,200 square feet apartment for $1000 a month. Which is crazy good in this market area. The only problem was that it was a condo, which meant that we shared both walls of our home with others. And you might be thinking that we are crazy for hating that we were so close to our neighbors. I know there are places in the world today that live closer to each other than that, but we were used to living on a couple of acres with almost no neighbors, so it was quite an adjustment.
At this point in time I was a new Real Estate Agent. I had spent the previous 6 months working on my classes and taking my tests to get my license (which is another post for another time). But because we were new to the area, and every one I knew in the area were college students that I graduated high school with I was not working very much. It put a strain on our relationship because we both wanted my career to take off and get started, but at the same time we really wanted the extra income.
About this same time, we decided to stop throwing our money away renting, and buy a home in the area to invest in something and create equity for ourselves. It took us two months to fi

nd our dream home, but it was worth it. Like our condo it too is a 3 bedroom, 2 bathroom, 1200 square feet home, but we are now investing in our future instead of throwing away money. Plus our mortgage is the same amount that we were paying in rent with taxes and insurance included.
We have now been in our new home for almost 6 months, and we love it. We have the whole domestic suburban life going on. And to tell you the truth, we love doing the house hold maintenance like mowing, weed eating, changing out air filters, bringing seasonal decorations up and down from the attic. A 24 year old, Josh, and a 21 year old, me, owning a home is almost unheard of in the day and age. We consider ourselves very blessed that God has helped us achieve all that we have.
If you have questions about the indepth home buying process, please comment below, and I will try to answer your questions as best as I can. If I don't know an answer then I will point you in the direction in which you can find it.
Thanks and God bless. 

Preparing for In-Laws to visit

Josh, my fiance, and I live about three hours away from our families, both of whom live in our home town in East TX. We have lived away from home for almost a year now, and still to this day it is overwhelming when my amazing soon to be in-laws come to visit.

I don't know about anyone else, but I was raised in East, TX where you drink lots of sweet tea, you cook dinner for your family, and you clean like hell when you have company coming over. It doesn't matter if the company is only stopping by for five minutes or if they are staying for a week, you always clean your home from top to bottom.

I am on lucky woman that my soon to be mother in law is quite literally the sweetest woman to have ever walked the earth. She is like a mother to me, and is always extremely helpful with anything we need. But, unfortunately, that does not change the fact that I must have our house spotless for when she arrives.

Their arrival date is a week away, and she is bringing my soon to be sister in law and my soon to be twin nephews as well. So we are going to have our house full (which I love). But that means I have to start cleaning like yesterday. This post is just to give you a little idea of what that week of cleaning in tells, so hopefully it will help you for when important company is coming over. And after reading this you are going to think I was preparing for the President or Chris Hemsworth himself (my favorite actor hehe).

They will come in on next Saturday, so starting today on Saturday, I will set up the guest room. We just moved in to our new home that we bought (my next post will be about the home buying process), and I have not had a reason to set up everything in our guest bedroom yet. So I will make the bed, hang pictures on the walls, organize the closet, and so on.

On Sunday, I will clean the entire guest bathroom. Wipe down the shower, wipe down the toilet, wipe down the mirror and counter, sweep and mop the floors, wash towels and wash clothes. And keep Josh out of there because that is the bathroom he uses when he is in his "man cave," or the extra room we have left.

On Monday, I will clean up Josh's "man cave." I will move the loveseat we have in there so that we can fit an air mattress on the floor for the twins to sleep on. I will vacuum the floors and dust the T.V. stand, and any extras that are left in that room. I will also have to keep Josh out of this room for the rest of the week, or he will suffer the consequences (re-cleaning the room himself).

On Tuesday, I will start to tackle our room. Now you may be wondering why I am worried about cleaning my own room and bathroom because surely they will not be going in there. True. But it makes you feel better when the whole house is clean, just in case something happens where you remembered you got new curtains and want to show them off. Happens to me all the time. So I start with the master bathroom and closet. I make sure all the clothes are actually on hangers, and the shoes are put up nice and neat. I then wipe everything in the bathroom down, and sweep and mop the floors.

On Wednesday, I clean our bedroom. I dust all the furniture. I vacuum the floors. I clean off side tables and dresser tops. Most importantly I make sure that my sheets are clean. (This is usually the easy day because we try to keep our room clean on a daily/weekly basis anyways.)

On Thursday, I clean the kitchen. I wipe down the inside and outside of the fridge. I organzie the pantry. I clean the oven and the microwave. I wipe down all the cabinets for fingerprints. And lastly I sweep and mop the floors.

On Friday, I clean the living room and breakfast nook. We have a puppy dog, Bevo, that sheds like it's his day job. So I will take off the blankets we keep on the couch and wash them . I will vacuum the couch seats, and vacuum the living room area rug. I will then dust the side tables and T.V. cabinet. Lastly I will sweep and mop. And try my best to keep Bevo off the furniture until after they get here, and then it is free game.

Finally, on the day they are supposed to arrive, I will wake up early and do last minute touch ups on the house, and then get ready myself. Josh tells me everytime his mom comes down that I am overreacting and that his mom doesn't care how the home looks. And logically I know this, but it does not change the fact that I have this is ingrained into my brain.

I hope this helps you when you have company coming over. Its not super crazy, but just a little bit that will go a long way.

Again I am new to this whole blog thing so please comment your constructive criticism. If you liked it then look forward to another post soon.

Looking for Extra Income Online

My quest to find extra income online has been a long and hard road. I did not go to college, but I have my Real Estate License and I have been an assistant for several years. So getting a good paying job online was not the easiest thing for me. 

I tried being a virtual assistant, but you need a website, a sole proprietorship, and a lot of experience being a virtual assistant. (I have never understood when jobs say that you need years worth of experience, but it is a position for someone who just graduated or is an entry level position. Like, where am I supposed to get this experience if no one will give me a chance to learn.) I never found a good source for where to go to get started, but I got the inspiration from other bloggers like myself and each one had a different suggestion. So I went on to the next recommended thing. 

I tried freelance writing. Now I am not the best writer in the world, I mean you know this just by reading this blog. I have good ideas, but putting them to paper and making them into something that makes sense is the part that I cannot do. Blogging is something I can do because I can just go off on a tangent and people will read it. (At least I hope they will.) If this something you excel at then here is a link for a great website to get started in your freelance writing career. They pay a couple of dollars per assignment you choose from, and the assignments are anywhere from 150 words to 1000 words. hirewriters.com So the freelance writing failed. 

The next thing I tried to do, I'm actually still trying to do this, is to become a search engine rater. Meaning that you go onto search engines and check to see how efficient their pages and answers are. Now to be able to qualify to do this you do not need any schooling, but you have to pass a series of three qualification tests. Now these aren't normal tests to see if you can just use the normal google search engine. These are tests to see if you know all the extreme technical terms and systems. (Which I do not because that is not something that interests me in my spare time to learn about.) If this is something that you like to do, here is a link for you to try it. I believe that this company was going to pay $13 an hour if you pass all the qualifications. leapforce.com I will let you know how my attempt at this method turns out. 

I also tried the survey system. I went to several different websites to try and get aid for taking surveys, and most of the ones I tried just gave you a point system for each survey you took and after you got to a certain amount of points then you could turn them in for a gift card to a certain place. But you had to complete a ridiculous amount of surveys to get to that magic number and then the gift card was only for like $10 and only to a couple of places. Here are a couple of links to the websites I tried if you are interested. vindale.com surveys.ipsosinteractive.com

So all in all I failed at the whole making an extra income online. Unless by some miracle my blog takes off. But because I am being so bluntly honest about everything I doubt it will take off. If you try any of these methods above please comment on whether they failed and if you succeeded where I did not. And maybe I can learn something from y'all that I am doing wrong. Not to mention I am new to this whole blogging thing so some encouragement or some constructive criticism would be welcome. (Notice I said constructive criticism.)