Welcome to the new BLOG!

Well, I thought I'd never be sucked into the world of BLOGs, but I thought it would be a good way for me to track the progress of the new home I am building.

A bit of background:

In Dec of 2002 I graduated from Rensselaer Polytechnic University with a dual major in Electrical and Computer Systems Engineering. Man was I happy to get the heck out of there!

In Feb 2003 I began working for Procter & Gamble as a manager of the electrical department for three of their production lines. In 2004 I was promoted to the Electrical Project Leader for the Tier 1 level of the plant.

I had purchased a home there shortly after beginning work at P&G, which is located in NorthEast PA. It was about 3500 sqft, 4 bedrooms, 3.5 baths. It needed a bit of remodeling and work done, but was a beautiful home.



The house also had a beautiful view of the spring fed lake (Harveys Lake). The lake was full of brown trout, some up to 11lbs... the biggest I ever caught was 6lbs though.





However, I had been dating a girl I met in college (Theresa) and she was not able to find a job in the area and took an offer in the Philadelphia area, where we would be close enough for a weekend commute.

Theresa was enjoying her job at Lockheed Martin and could not find much up by me. I liked the work I was doing, but the culture at P&G was getting out of hand. Through downsizing and understaffing, people were forced to do the work that used to take 2 to 3 people. I was working 6 days a week, sometimes more and between 80-90 hrs a week. I wasn't enjoying myself and it was becoming hard to spend time with Theresa.

So finally, I put in for a position at Lockheed Martin as a systems engineer and got the job!

I put the house up on the market for a ton higher than what I paid (including the cost of repairs, remodeling, etc) figuring that if no one bought it, we'd have a nice weekend home in the poconos to go to... I had two offers within the first two weeks and it was sold by the third week for the asking price, minus a couple of thousand for repairs I hadn't gotten to.

So I had to quit work earlier than expected (since I had no where to live) and since my new job at LM didn't start for a few weeks... I went up to Lake Ontario where I had my boat and went fishing for two weeks... oh darn!

For those of you who don't know, my hobby... more like obsession is fishing Lake Ontario.

Here I have a nice steelhead (basically a rainbow trout)

Here I have the main fish we go for, chinook salmon!

So back to the story, after fishing I moved in with Theresa in her apartment. It's a nice place, but only 700 sqft and costs $1000/mo! That doesn't include any of the utilities. So after donating as much of the stuff as I could from my old house, her garage is now stacked floor to ceiling with boxes, furniture, etc. The same goes for the spare bedroom and part of the living room.

Lockheed paid all of my moving costs and is willing to pay my closing costs on a new house if bought within a year. Well that's a no brainer! House prices down here are crazy though. Even though we're 45 mins outside of philly, a nice townhouse 3 bed/2.5 bath goes for $250k! So we've decided to build instead.