Beautiful weekend

You know, I'm enjoying living in Oklahoma more than I thought I would. I knew that I'd find happiness here because that's what I DO. I find happiness where I go... But I'm actually enjoying it, not just making the best of it. I knew I'd struggle with the lack of mountains and water, but save for a few nights of falling deep into self-pity, it's been a non-issue so far. It'll likely pop up here and there, but it's not this heavy burden that I thought it would be.

First off, there is so much to DO here. Just over this past weekend and the weekends coming up are: Car races at the local racetracks, home and garden show, an oddities and curiosities expo, an in-person (fake) murder mystery where you work in teams and run all around Tulsa for clues, America's biggest gun show, and a billion other things I've not even discovered. 

And now, back to the scenery. I've lived most my life where mountains and/or water dominated the landscape. Now, wide open spaces have allowed for a new star to take center stage: The sky. The sky has always been just a thing in the background, but here, it's the focal point. There's no such thing as an ugly sunset in Tulsa. I've been so impressed with how beautiful the sunsets are! Now that storm season is just around the corner, I'm told the skies are going to be even more magnificent and that excites me. Apparently, the sky takes on crazy dramatic looks after a storm rolls out.

We're also slowly poking around at touristy things such as the blue whale on Route 66. This iconic Route 66 stop is about 5 minutes from our house. He's so cool!

Weekly Update: March 29 edition

Lots of new things happened this week! For starters, we have a furnace in the attic now! They've also started drilling around the plumbing lines and the bathtub and surrounds are now installed. Natural gas is also piped into the walls of the house now. I'm excited to have a natural gas stove again. I love cooking with gas!

This week's updates, March 22 edition.

WHAT IS NEW THIS WEEK?

We have a driveway now!

We have a driveway! So exciting!  

We also have verbal estimates that we may have the keys as early as the end of May. We've been expecting a June completion date so this is a nice little surprise. Of course, May is still a ways off, but that's okay!

We hopped into the model home yesterday and they have appliances in there and things are moving along really nicely. This is the same floor plan as our house, but in reverse. The entire floorplan is mirrored from ours. The other difference is that our cabinets (both in the the kitchen and bathrooms) will be white, not gray. I'm excited to see how it'll look in white because I think it'll really pop with the granite countertops!

The following pictures are from the model home. Ours will look incredibly similar with the changes I mentioned above.

Guest Bathroom

Bedroom in the front of the house. This will be my craft room.

Laundry room! I'll probably put up a cabinet or two in place of the shelving.

Master Bath with double vanity and oversized shower.

Kitchen and pantry! The empty spot to the right of the pantry will be the fridge.

Our first tornado experience

 Spoiler alert: There was no tornado.

Yesterday afternoon, the weather was sunny in some parts of the sky while gloomy in others. The air and atmosphere felt completely normal. Liam and I were just sort of relaxing at home after finishing up our lessons for the day (subtracting fractions, the Louisiana Purchase, and The Reformation).  At 2 pm, I got an alert on my phone: Tornado Watch until Wed, Mar 17 at 8:00pm.

WHAT.

This is what the skies looked like when the tornado warning was issued.

We played musical cars and got them to fit into the garage in case there was damaging hail. Cory schooled me on the storm radar and what we might see on the radar (an app on my phone) that could produce a tornado. Overall, the sky was still clear and calm so it felt a little confusing to me! Liam was on "medium alert" as, like me, he'd never experienced this before. He was a little nervous, but he said later that Cory and Kristen's calm attitude made him realize he didn't need to panic. 

Before too long, the skies in downtown Tulsa darkened and clouds began to form. Blake was watching this all unfold from his work site downtown. Hail started falling, a little bigger than your average BB sized hail. Fellow workers were holding their hard hats out the window trying to gather a nice collection of hail. Everyone was in good spirits and not very concerned. They just laughed, caught hail, and watched the storm. It's going to take me a while to get used to the nonchalant attitude Oklahomans have about tornados! I must say, it is a little refreshing after living in Washington where everyone made a very big deal about wind storms, even though they were such a frequent occurrance!

Blake's view of the storm.

There were actually several storms that formed all around this area of the country and some did produce tornadoes, or so I read. No tornadoes formed in Oklahoma, however, things got pretty exciting by our house (the one we are building). Our house sits in Verdigris which, as you can see in the photo below, is under the purple part of the radar which indicates possible tornado formation areas. The sirens went off in our neighborhood (I later read this on Facebook... I didn't actually hear any) and presumably, our soon-to-be neighbors took cover. 

This is the local tornado expert whose advice everyone listens to! Our house is being built in Verdigris.

Speaking of taking cover, we are still debating which type of shelter we want! There's the underground option in the garage or the above ground option that would go in our master closet. There are merits for both (maybe I'll go into that in a future blog post!), and I think we're leaning towards the above-ground type, but we haven't decided yet. We will use the next few weeks to do research in person and talk to experts to help us decide! 

For what it's worth, most people here don't even HAVE a shelter. It's so strange to me!

Our first walk in the neighborhood

 After a fun family weekend in Missouri, we decided to stop by the house to see how everything was looking. We were delighted to see that the two exterior doors have been installed and wiring has started. We can now see where all the overhead lights, exhaust fans, and electrical outlets are located. 

The rectangular framed out part will be for the electric fireplace. The TV will be mounted above it and we plan to buy a sectional for the living room.

Since the dogs had been in their kennel for several hours, we decided to try out the path around the pond in the neighborhood.  I just love this pond so much! There are actually two in the neighborhood. The larger of the two (this one) is across the street from our house. We can even see it from the front bedroom. The smaller pond has a playground which is also neat! 

As you can see, we enjoyed a walk on a beautiful evening and I look forward to this being our nightly thing after dinner. On our walk, we saw a turtle jump into the water and saw evidence of beavers. We also heard croaking frogs. 

The state of things

 The first time we saw our new home was Sunday, February 28. It had a foundation and the walls were framed. There was no roof yet. We bought the house the next morning, March 1. 

When we visited the house on Sunday March 7, we had a roof! Just the plywood, but what a nice start :)

This morning, Tuesday the 9th, we got word that the shingles should be done by the end of the day! Perfect timing as we're expecting a bit of wet weather here in a few days. After Blake gets home from work, we will go check it out. 

The Isaacsons are OK

 Get it? We're OK? We're Oklahoma. 

Hmm, not my best joke, I'll admit it. 

Now that we've started a new adventure, I figured it was time to dust off my blogging habits and properly document our lives here in Oklahoma! 

To sum up: We left Washington on February 3, 2021. We took a relatively leisurely drive and arrived in Tulsa one week later on February 10. We arrived during an ice storm which quickly turned into a snow storm, then we experienced over a week of subzero temperatures. It was wild! It put a damper on our house hunt for sure as the roads were too dangerous to drive on until we'd been here over a week.

We looked at 20+ houses until we finally found our future home. It's a new construction home built in Verdigris, a very small community on Route 66. It is located between the towns of Catoosa and Claremore, which are both more substantial towns where we will likely do most of our shopping. At first, we were looking for a house with land, outside of a neighborhood, but that was hard to come by! We slowly started to expand our search parameters which is when we came across this house. All three of us had that feeling of "THIS IS IT" when we walked in. No walls, no roof, no flooring, but it felt like home for all of us.

The house itself is 1800 square feet and has 4 bedrooms and 2 full bathrooms. It has an open concept living room/kitchen area, a covered patio, a super duper large master suite, a large kitchen island, and a nice backyard. Soon after we move in, it'll get fenced and an underground tornado shelter will be installed in the garage. Blake and Liam will have a great workshop area in the garage and I'm getting my first craft room! Well, I had a craft room in Alaska, but it was haunted and creepy so I pretty much never used it. I never felt alone there and often heard voices. But I digress...

The neighborhood boasts two large ponds which are stocked with bass and home to geese, swans, and ducks. There is a paved path around the ponds which will be great for evening family walks with the dogs. There are basketball hoops installed near our home, too. Every time we have visited, people have been incredibly friendly! People are out and about on walks, playing with their kids, and doing projects in their driveways. There are always tons of kids out playing in the roads. It's going to be so great for Liam to have friends in the neighborhood. 

The neighborhood also has 4 schools: Lower Elementary, Upper Elementary, Junior High, and High School. Enrollment is only about 1,000 students in the whole district (which is only 4 schools in total). The schools are highly rated and everyone we have talked to has spoken very positively about the schools, which is, of course, one of our priorities. Schools in Tulsa are very hit or miss, so being in a community with highly rated schools is a giant win in my book!

That's all for now. I'll be sure to follow up regularly with updates on our home building progress and all things worthy of mention! Stay tuned!