Finishing the House - Completing the Move In

On April 24th, over ten weeks since I left Australia, Julie arrived.  The house is very livable but I've had very little chance to move in much furniture or household goods.  I figured rather than doing much of that (the bedroom furniture and office furniture are in place), I'd get Julie's help as she's the primary decision maker on where things go in the house.  Just before she got here though, we finished one additional project that was high on her list - some nice, functional shutters on the outside windows.  In keeping with the French Country in Texas (what she calls French Tex), the shutters when painted the nice blue that we've used as the accent color so far.  Here's a couple of picture of the shutters - one when they first went up and the other after they've been painted:

One of the first things we did after the household goods arrived was to take the hot tub we had in Australia, wire it up, fill it and start using it.  Here's a couple pictures of some happy grandkids and us enjoying the hot tub out on the porch:

Mostly though, the combination of the household goods coupled with Julie's good eye for placement of art and other decorations are making a huge difference to the house:

 And as mentioned earlier, one of the projects we outsourced was the master closet (actually Julie's closet where she lets me hang a few things).  Here's a few view of the finished project:

Altogether, we're pretty happy with the results of the project.  It's now about 12 weeks after the beginning of the intense effort to finish the house.  We will now enjoy the house, settle in a bit and start working on the outside areas.  We need to quickly get a (very late) vegetable garden into the outside planters, get some fun projects going and let Julie settle into her new role within her company.  She has a challenging role, but one that will allow her to often work from the home office (when not out on the road).  We'll both enjoy that and we're now enjoying the home while recognizing that we still have much to do and also know that those projects will probably take the next two years (at a slower pace than before).  It's too hot here in the Texas summer to start things like bees and chickens.  We'll hopefully get chickens going in the Fall and bees next Spring.  In the meantime, we'll get the more permanent garden beds going for the Fall planting and enjoy what produce we get from our initial garden.