We bought a HOME!

After being separated for 8 months after getting married, moving all of our belongings over 6,000 miles, and living in a cheap hotel in Honolulu for 2 months, we are FINALLY settled in our HOME!  Most everything is unpacked, the decorating is pretty much done and we have had 2 successful visits from family members that gave us a thumbs up :)

Let's start from the very beginning:

Michael began our home search before I got to Hawaii.  He found a realtor for us and also got pre approved for a VA Loan all before I got here (major husband points)!

To be completely honest, finding our perfect home (it truly IS perfect for us) was easy. We got really lucky and found it the first and only day of house hunting and it was actually the 2nd home that we toured. The hard part of the home buying process was all of the paperwork, technicalities, and waiting that we had to do before we could actually get KEYS! All I remember was having to meet with the realtor and the loan guy (both of whom are really good friends of ours now!), having the house inspected and appraised, and waiting for 45 days for everything to come together. Michael would be the one to know about all of the details of what went on (more husband points!).

The out come? We are home owners! And before we moved anything into the house, we had a contractor come in and do some work including placing laminate floors, new base boards, shelving units, all new ceiling fans (no AC in Kailua!), some kitchen demolition, cabinet refacing, recess lighting, and all new light fixtures in the dining room/kitchen... whew- I think that's it!  And here are some before and afters:

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After (a bomb went off!!)

So there is our house! It's a 3 bedroom 2 bathroom one story home in Kailua, Hawaii. It will forever be the first home that we own and live in as husband and wife. I couldn't be happier with the location or the experience that we had while buying our home. It was well worth the wait :) 

Welcome back...

Wow, I guess I needed that 2 month break to get acclimated to my work commute or something!  I'm definitely going back to my goal of posting at least 2 times per month now that we're settled!  Let's play some catch up now...

My last post detailed my love of snorkeling in Hawaii, but I am proud to announce that I have a new favorite hobby: DIVING! Michael and I both got our SCUBA certification:

Us with our instructor and our class mates right after we passed our open water dive at electric beach.

It was an intense class and VERY time consuming! For a whole week, we had to go to class after work from 6-10pm. There were three days of class room instruction and two days pool instruction doing skills. Then, on Saturday and Sunday, we had to do an open water ocean swim and assessment from 7am-12pm both days. It was exhausting! But in the end, we had so much fun and Michael and I were glad that we completed the whole thing.

We ended up going diving with our relator and his friend the next weekend! Here are some pictures of diving at Sharks Cove (sharks cove was awesome by the way because there are lots of underwater caves to explore)!

It was WAY fun! And it just amplified my love of the water and exploring! We can't wait to go again... now we just have to commit and invest in our own gear :)

The cove of sharks

Wow, waaaayyyy overdue for an update!  I'm really trying to keep up with this blog, not only for people I share it with, but for myself!  I want to remember all of the cool things we do.

So here's another one for the books :)

I've fallen in love with snorkeling... Michael has always loved it, but it's really all new to me.  I'm not a great diver or swimmer, but I've taken to it and now there is no turning back!  We go snorkeling at least once every weekend and I've gotten so much better--I owe it all to Michael though.  He's really awesome in the water and I'm grateful that he was especially patient with me (so out of character! haha) while I was learning!  Needless to say, we invested some money into buying nice gear (notice all of mine is pink and Michael's is gamecock colors hehe) for our excursions.  We also splurged (happy birthday to me) on a nice underwater camera-- TOTALLY worth it!

Anyways, Shark's cove is the BEST place to snorkel (well, that we've found so far)!  It's located on the north shore near Wiamea Bay:

We've also gone to Hanauma Bay, Electric Beach, Lanakai, Three Tables and Chun's Beach to snorkel-- but I'll have to write another post about those :)

We were very lucky when we went to sharks cove on this particular day because we got to swim with a Hawaiian Monk Seal!  There are only 1,400 of them in the whole world!  We saw lots of cool fish and sea turtles too.

I'm pretty sure we did this all during Memorial Day weekend because I had time to make this little video... check it out:

shark's cove snorkeling

So, there is a little update of some stuff we've been doing lately... more to come soon!

We found a HOME!

Hey everyone!

It's back to work for this nurse... for those of you that don't know, I'm going from working in a NICU at Bethesda Naval, to being a clinic nurse at Pearl Harbor.  Big Huge CHANGE.  So, I haven't posted for a while because I've been balancing learning my job during the week and enjoying the island on the weekend!  5 day work weeks are new to me :)

More importantly, our home search has ended (we hope at least-- barring nothing goes terribly wrong)!  We actively went house hunting one day a few weeks ago with our realtor.  It was fairly easy for us since we had been researching and already picked the area where we wanted to live.  We saw a total of 4 houses and I was completely sold on the second one we saw!!

The house is in Kailua, which is an awesome location for both of us in relation to our work commutes.  This is very important to us since Michael and I will be working on opposite sides of the island and both despise traffic (I think Michael develops mild rage disorder when he gets stuck on the H1-- Hawaii's rush hour can compare to I-95 South traffic for all of you east coasters).  Also, the house is in a BEAUTIFUL location.  It's close to the most beautiful beaches on the windward side of the island.  It's also only a few blocks away from amazing restaurants and cute little boutiques.  Oh, and did I mention that there is a WHOLE FOODS just 5 min down the road... and a frozen yogurt bar!?!

So, long story short, we put an offer on the house of our dreams, and the sellers ACCEPTED!  Now, we are in escrow and it's just a lot of paper work and emails until settlement.  It's a waiting game and I'm so anxious to move out of this HOTEL (around the first week of June *cross fingers*)!  30+ days in a small hotel room is not ideal for our first dabble with cohabitation.  But, we are still incredibly happy and feeling blessed everyday that we are here :)

Here are some pictures of the house... I can't wait to start decorating!!

Ooops, the pictures loaded in the wrong order!  Oh well, you guys get the idea.  So that's the house!  It's 3BR and 2BATH.... once we get settled, we're expecting visits!

Aloha!