Marisa and Dan’s Wedding Blog

Just a quick update — wanted to thank everyone for all of your generous bridal shower gifts! Rest assured that not one gift will go unused, and just to kick off that statement, I made Marisa breakfast in bed!

Breakfast in bed!

I made an omelet with 3 eggs, chili powder, fresh garlic (pressed with our new garlic press), and mozzarella cheese. Shown here: Coffee made with our new coffee maker, the omelet on our new “everyday china” (which, I might add, does wonders for food presentation), all on top of our new bamboo serving tray. I’ve been brushing up on my cooking for some time now, so I’ll try to start adding pics of my creations to the blog. I can’t wait to start using that pressure cooker — not having one has been holding me back from making some awesome chili.

Our living room looks like a disaster, but not as bad as it did last night. We’ve been finding a place for every single gift and so far we’re making some great headway. Here’s a pic of our living room as we left it last night (and I can assure you, this is significantly better than it was when we first unloaded):

Not pictured: The Krups Beertender which helped with the cleanup a lot more than you’d think.

Marisa will update with the pics from yesterday’s bridal shower as soon as we can organize the pics a bit more. Until then, thanks again everyone!

Using the Flip Mino camera given to us by Paul and Rayna (thanks again!), we decided to utilize the capabilities of Web 2.0 and create youtube videos for a video tour of our brand new house! Expect more to come as we decorate and redecorate and generally update the house over time. For now though, enjoy my amateur video-making skills as I make you all dizzy with how often I spin around in circles:

Sorry for the recent silence, oh loyal reader(s?). Between business trips and weeks of mortgage application hell, neither Dan nor I have found ourselves capable of mustering the energy to post much lately. Tonight, however, I feel refreshed and revitalized, ready to face the blog world once again. Why?

Because we’re now homeowners!

That’s right — at approximately 3:30 this afternoon, Dan and I officially closed on our beautiful split-level home in Commack, New York, where I grew up. Much money was exchanged and many (many, many) papers were signed, and then the previous owner forked over the keys.

Dan and I will spend the rest of this week packing up our apartment, and bright and early Saturday morning we’ll be moving all the big furniture over to our new digs (which are, luckily, only about 15 minutes away from where we’re currently living). We both took off days from work next week to continue the move and complete the cleaning out of our apartment, which we have until April 30.

Goodbye, landlord who doesn’t care if we live or die! Goodbye, property management company who decides it’s okay to dig up the entire sidewalk in front of our building without any prior notice, only to replace it with cement that looks far worse than the original! Goodbye, drunkard neighbor who receives frequent door-to-door deliveries from the local liquor store!

Hello, ability to do laundry without leaving the comfort of my own home! Hello, quarter-acre of property! Hello, debt! Hello, adulthood!

(Check our Photos section for pictures from the closing and afterward.)

Our new house!

We promised pictures, so here they are. Pics of our [pending] house!

Today Dan and I spent five hours in Bed Bath & Beyond, traversing every inch of the store with our amazingly patient and knowledgeable store adviser, Todd. The end result? We have a registry! We’ve got everything from “casual china” and crystal wine glasses to bedsheets for our yet-to-be-purchased king-size bed, a beer dispenser, and a mango cutter (yes, you read that correctly). Despite some sore legs now, we had a lot of fun!

So, if you’re visiting our website in the hopes of finding our registry, look no further. Just click here (or on the “Registry” link above). And thanks in advance for helping to furnish our new house!

What with all the planning/shopping/house hunting going on, it becomes very easy to gloss over things and assume that everyone is aware of everything going on, even though we have a website that we update for pretty much every step of the process. It becomes daunting to look back and realize that just a little over a month and a half ago, this domain name wasn’t even registered, I had never even heard of the Royalton, Marisa had no idea what was in store for her at the tree trimming party, and we were only browsing MLSLI.com for houses and pretending we were ready to start actively looking.

Well, with about a year of obsessively browsing house listings and narrowing down the type of house we wanted that we could actually afford, all it took was a couple of weeks with my Aunt Chrissie as our realtor to find the exact house we wanted. While keeping in the mindset of “not jinxing it,” I will refrain from posting pics or any other specific details of the new digs until the ground below us is a bit more stable. However, I did want to publicly thank Chrissie for helping us find the perfect house. While it’s not set entirely in stone yet, it’s pretty close and I think it’s worth it to mention that if anyone is looking for a house on Long Island, you should definitely call Chrissie Roach for all of your house hunting needs.

Continuing in the grand tradition of our lives moving very quickly, Dan and I made an offer on our “dream house” in Commack (where I grew up) this morning, and after a bit of haggling it was accepted a few hours later! We’re going to be homeowners!

We have tons of pictures that I’m aching to put online, but Dan and I are both more superstitious than we like to admit, and I’m afraid to share the photos or even say too much about the house until we go to contract. For now, suffice to say it’s an immaculate split-level in a beautiful neighborhood, with three bedrooms, two full bathrooms, a big-for-Long Island yard (.25 acres) complete with deck, and plenty of room to spread out and enjoy ourselves.

It’s funny — when I graduated from high school, I vowed I would never even come back to Long Island. Now, a bit short of nine years later, I’m not only back on Long Island to stay — I’m buying a house in the very town where I spent most of my childhood!

Regardless, we’re so very, very excited, and we can’t wait to be able to tell you more.

Yes, that’s right — Dan and I are officially house-hunting!

We were planning on sticking it out in our current one-bedroom apartment until after the wedding, but after many discussions with our various sets of parents, we came to the conclusion that the housing market is ripe for the picking RIGHT NOW, and it might not be to our advantage to wait almost a year before we begin looking. So we’ve enlisted the help of Dan’s mother’s realtor friend, Chrissie, and tomorrow we begin scouring Commack, Dix Hills, Deer Park, East Northport, and Smithtown (towns in western Suffolk County, Long Island, for the uninitiated) for The Perfect House. Who knows how quickly we’ll find anything, but we’re certainly going to give it our all. It’s hard to express just how excited we are at the prospect of owning property. Sure, we’ll be pretty broke for awhile, but we’ll know that our hard-earned cash is being invested in something that belongs to us, rather than going to a greedy landlord who can’t even be bothered to ensure that our building’s boiler is properly functioning on any sort of regular basis.

In other news, we’re in the process of piecing together our honeymoon with the help of my aunt Lesley’s travel agency, Syosset Travel (sorry, no website link!). We’ll be flying out to San Francisco a few days after the wedding (probably Tuesday or Wednesday, November 17 or 18), renting a car, and driving to Napa and Sonoma Valleys for a few days of West Coast winetasting — hurray! Then we’ll be driving or flying (yet to be determined) to Los Angeles and boarding the Sapphire Princess for a seven-night cruise down the Mexican Riviera (in a mini-suite with balcony, natch). While flying to Hawaii would have been wonderful, this trip makes a lot more sense financially — especially given the fact that we’re most likely going to be buying a house very soon. I, for one, am looking forward to the honeymoon with every ounce of my being!