We moved in!

The house wasn't too bad. You could probably move in, if you wanted.

But we knew there were things we'd like to do, and it's always better to do them before moving in because, who knows, you might never do them.

To make a looooooong story short, we revamped the house we moved into in Cypress, Calif., and made it a show-stopping masterpiece. We redid all the floors, painted every room, put in a new kitchen, a new bathroom, modified two bathrooms, got the electric up-to-date, painted the front door and backyard trellis and got new hardware here and there to make this place a show house.

Did we overdo it? Probably. Was it worth it? I hope so.

We have finally moved in!

It is an odd situation to buy a house in one's 40s. You've lived and learned. You're wiser. But egads, I hadn't learned yet that you always go double! It takes double the time and double the budget to do what you set out to do. We doubled down, and we're feeling good — but, oh yeah, we forgot about something called furniture.

We'll get to that. But in the meantime, it is nice to have a five bedroom, three bath home. I love the space. It's wild to actually have space in a California home. It took major hard work to 1) simply buy a house like this, and 2) renovate it as we did.

It was perversely fun to talk to three or four contractors a day, stay on top of all of them and be constantly ordering items necessary for the remodel.

We assembled a ragtag Ocean's Eleven type of crew for this project, and in my power rankings of how good of a job they did, this is them:

1) Sergio the Floor Guy, 2) Captain Nemo the Tile Man, 3) Pedro the Painter, 4) Elias the Detail Specialist, 5) Bob/Rory the Plumbers (but, man, they're too overbooked!), 6) Scott the Electrician, 7) Josh the Tile Point Man, 8) Andre the Kitchen Planner, 9) Sam the Cabinet Guy and 10) Ed the Shower Man. ... We actually had a handful of other people involved, too, but the list is getting ridiculously long, and few guys we didn't feel that great about their work and/or price.

For a lot of this ride, I felt like the Ray Liotta in the sky-is-falling scene from "Goodfellas."