A "fond" look back at moving week

Monday Sept. 29th-The day before we close on selling our condo and buying our new to us house: It finally seems real that we're going to move out of the condo where we've lived for the past 10 years. We're both excited to be leaving that nest of craziness with it's compliment of nosy religious right wing neighbors and to be out from under the do nothing condo management company that did nothing for us. It hits me as I pack my truck for the last time that I won't ever have to see any of those people again unless I run into them in the grocery store or something.

Later that evening as we watched the news reports about the first attempt to get the House to bail out the rich I can tell Sparky is getting antsy. I don't let her see that I'm concerned that something might go wrong the next day because of all the instability in the financial markets. I do my best to calm her down and to reassure her that we're doing the right thing.

I got about three hours sleep before the alarm went off at 6 AM.

Tuesday Sept. 30th-Closing and moving day:
We get up at the butt crack of dawn and we begin the final assault on getting ready to move. I break down the bed, after a quick trip to the hated Wal-Mart for a pair of pliers, and then Sparky gets ready to go close on selling our condo.

The movers show up at 8:30 and they tell me since they are one man short they're going to knock ten bucks an hour off their rate. I nod and show them what they've got ahead of them. They seem non plussed and they dive right in to work.

I get a call from Sparky after she closes on selling our condo and she tells me it went well. The relief that we sold our place washes over me as I watch the movers packing all the boxes we spent the last few weeks packing up. Sparky tells me our realtor is leaving the key to the new house in the mailbox so when we finish loading we can take it straight over and start to unload.

At 10 AM my friend Keith and his son Cameron show up and we load all our electronics and my "art" in his van. Being the generous guy I am I offer them bananas and bottled water for their hard work. Only Keith takes a banana, both have some water.

At 11:15ish I get a call from Sparky and she tells me the closing on buying our new place went smoothly. A tidal wave of relief hit me. The movers get the last box in the truck and I give them directions to our new house and they take off. Keith and Cameron and I then set out for it as well.

At 11:30ish we arrive and the movers do so as well. For the next two hours we unload all the trucks, vans, and other vehicles. Sparky shows up and I can tell she's excited to be finally moving in. Happy day!

After Keith and Cameron leave to go home at 1PM the movers get everything off the truck by about 1:30. I pay them and since I didn't have to lift one stick of heavy furniture or too many boxes I gladly write them a check and thank them for their hard work.

The next few hours we start unpacking and setting up the new place.

Our friend Snad shows up about 6 PM and she starts raving about the new place. It turns out it's her birthday as well as our moving day and she invites us to have dinner with her, her husband, her brother, and his kids at a local chain restaurant in about an hour. Despite having eaten out for the past four days in a row, we had packed all our kitchen stuff, we agreed because we were bone tired and we had yet to unpack our kitchen stuff.

Dinner was, despite being at a chain restaurant, very good. And the company was amusing and delightful, especially Sand's nephews. When we get home I hook up the TV and the DVD player and we watch an episode and a half of the Vicar of Dibley before we pass out from exhaustion and from eating too much pasta and salad.

Wednesday October 1-Unpacking and setting up:
I got up around 9:30 and I stumble down stairs. I took one look at the mountain of boxes left to unpack and I shriek like a school girl. It looked like they had multiplied overnight.

We spend all day unpacking, hauling broken down boxes and the newspaper we packed fragile stuff in to the recycling bins, and muttering to ourselves about how much shit we own. Sometime during the day I remember breaking out and going to the grocery store and getting food. I also vaguely remember cooking supper for the first time in days, it was quite a treat to eat food that wasn't laden with too much salt and fat again. I also remember sucking down a few beers. Mmmm, beers.

Thursday October 2-More unpacking and setting up:
The mountain of boxes seemed a little smaller and we dove right in and unpacked them when we got up. We also set up a few more rooms as the day wore on and the feeling that the house was really ours sunk further in as the day wore on.

We worked about 12 hours unpacking and setting up. As the sun began to set we finally remembered to shower and have some supper.

Friday October 3-Unpacked and cable ready:
I hauled off the fifth or sixth load of boxes and newspaper first thing yesterday morning and Sparky began going about doing more setting up and furniture arranging.

The cable guy got here around 1PM and when I told him what I wanted. him and his partner got to work. For the next three hours they worked to install our cable, our high speed internet, and our phone service. When they got done we had digital cable again, but sadly no more free HBO, phone service, and my beloved internet was back.

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The past few days have flown by and I'm sure I left out some great blog worthy stories but to be honest my brain is mush right now. I'm tired from all the days of non stop packing, unpacking, and setting things up.

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We're very grateful to the movers, to our friends Keith and Cameron for all their help, and to Sand for coing by and making sure we were still alive and taking us out for dinner on her birthday last Tuesday. We're also grateful for your kind words, well wishes, and comments on here. We've got more work to do to make our house a home but we've got the rest of our lives to work on it.

Packed and ready

We've spent the entire weekend, just about, finishing up the final packing and we only have a few more things to go. It's down to the wire on getting out of our condo and into our new place.

We're both mentally worn out. The stress of all this has nearly caused our heads, especially Sparky's since she has more brains inside hers, to explode. Physically we're also near the breaking point. We've been packing, staging boxes, cleaning, and other chores in preparation for the movers on Tuesday. We switched most all the services over to our new place, electricity, water, etc, with the exception of our cable which also mean our high speed internet. Due to some asinine cable company policies I can't get it transferred over yet so that means I'll be without cable, damn!, and my internet for a few days beginning on Tuesday. The cable services here are scheduled to be to on through until the 30th so that means they could cut it off at one second past midnight tonight. If they do, then they do and I'll see you kids again as soon as they hook us up. I'll miss you but what with unpacking and setting things up in our new place I'll have plenty to do.

Wish us luck, send us some of your spare energy (if you have any that is), and I'll see you later my peeps. Much love to you all.

What are you doing to help your country in this time of financial crisis?

I'll tell you what you're doing, unlike Sparky and I, you aren't doing a damn thing. We, on the other hand, are keeping all your sorry asses afloat by selling our condo and buying a house. And let me tell you people I'll be damn glad when it's all over with.

We've spent our entire summer either getting our place ready to sell, looking for a new place, and stressing out over doing both those things. We got tossed out of our place when prospective buyers came by to see our condo and we had many people tossed out of their homes when we went to look at their houses. Finally when we agreed to sell our place to our buyers we then had to worry about finding another house to buy after one that we made an offer on had major problems with it. Thankfully we found a great place and we move in on Tuesday.

While I will never put the address of our new homes on this blog and I also will never put a photo of the outside of the house on here, I will tell you that it's a great house. If someone would have told me that we'd end up buying this house when we started out all this months ago I would have told them they were crazy but here we are with a great house in a super neighborhood. We are both excited as anything to be moving out of the condo we currently have and into the new place, in fact we got so excited that we couldn't stand it yesterday afternoon so we drove by the new house and as we drove past it we noticed that one of our new next door neighbors had an Obama '08 yard sign in their yard. Sparky and I both squealed with delight when we saw it. I'm never going to tell on this blog how much we got our new house for because I know some smart ass will leave a comment that says something like, "You couldn't buy a show box for that price where I live." But I will say this, we got a good deal on what to us is a lot of house.

In just a few days we'll be out from under the condo association, take possession of our new place, and move in. And when we become masters of our own home destiny then all this stress, all the worry, all the bull shit, all the hard work we did getting ready to sell our condo, all the hard work we did packing up our stuff will have been worth it because we will be in the last house we'll ever buy, barring either of us winning the Powerball and or Mega Millions jackpots that is.

So that's what we're doing to help the economy, we're buying a house, paying movers, and buying some stuff to go in our new place. We're doing all we possibly can, now it's time for you slackers to do your share too.

Third time is the charm

The first offer we made on a new to us house was an offer that was contingent on us selling our condo and the offer had a 24 hour bump clause which said that if someone made a cash offer or an offer that was not contingent on them selling their house then we had 24 hours to match that offer or we'd lose the house. Wouldn't you know it, we lost that house because someone made an offer that was not contingent on them selling their place so we lost the first place we made an offer on about a month and a half ago.

The second place we made an offer on was the place with the nice hardwood floors and the French doors. I posted a bunch of pictures of it after we made the offer. We both really liked the house and the neighborhood but we had issues with the small galley style kitchen. So we planned to move the kitchen into another room and knock out a wall and make the living/dining room a lot bigger, but all that was predicated on whether the house would pass inspection or not. It turns out it didn't pass inspection. The house had some big cracks in the foundation and some other major problems that I won't go into, so we didn't buy the house.

We got that bad news over a week ago and since we have sold our condo and we are due to close on it the 30th of this month we had to get our asses in gear and find something or face the choice of putting most of our stuff into storage and renting a place while we looked further.

Thankfully our realtor kept plugging away and showing us house after house and finally she showed us one that Sparky had seen but had thought would be too expensive for us. It turns out that this house, which is in a great neighborhood which will always stay residential, had had it's price reduced. So we went and looked at it. We both loved it. It's got plenty of room for us, it's in a good section of town, and it was built in a time when craftsmanship meant something and when houses were built to last.

So we bit the bullet and made an offer. Then the owner countered our offer. We then countered her counter and she accepted. Of course we were happy but once again the offer was predicated on the house passing inspection. So we called the same guy who inspected the other house for us, we liked his honesty, and he set yesterday as the day for his inspection.

We waited all day long for him to finish. We were tense and jittery all day as we waited to hear from him. If it didn't pass then I'm sure my head would have exploded and Sparky's might have as well. But finally he called us, we met, and the long and short of it is that the house passed. There is nothing wrong with the roof, the foundation, or the heat pump. There a a few minor repairs we need to make but there is nothing earth shatteringly wrong with the house. So after tying up all of our summer with the selling of our condo and the buying of a house, it looks like we've found a new to us house. Yay!

Next up is closing on selling our condo and then closing on buying the new house and then we can move in and make it ours. Both of us feel a huge sense of relief, especially Sparky, and we're looking forward to moving in to our new place. Thank you to those of you who wished us well and for your words of encouragement when the last house didn't work out.

Oh yeah, D Cup, before you ask, there's plenty of room for the Spawn, and for you and Mathman as well, if you want to leave them at home and come up for a visit after we get settled in.