Category Archives: Moving

mid-week update

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Sorry to leave the barf story at the top for so long, I hope nobody was too grossed out. I’ve been trying to think of something to blog about, so here’s the latest on What We’re Doing:

House Stuff:
1. I think I mentioned that my realtor’s husband might be a teensy bit unreliable when it comes to helping us with our home improvements? Well, he gave me at least five different dates for when he expected he would be done with everything, and not only did he miss every single deadline (self-imposed deadlines, I might add! It wasn’t me asking him to have it done by X date, he was the one making empty promises!), but 90% of the time, he never even showed up. So whatever, we’re done with him. I still like Renee (our realtor) and I know that she’s been mortified by all of this because she’s been in the hospital having her spleen removed (stupid horse with its giant powerful stupid hooves) and she hasn’t been able to keep up with what’s going on with us. So I called our contractor guy to come give us an estimate to finish up the job that Scott didn’t do, and we’ll consider this a lesson learned about mixing friends and business. This is also why you shouldn’t pay people for work in advance. (Don’t ask. Just don’t.)

[Oh, have I ever told y’all that our contractor guy’s name is Paul Newman? He spells his last name slightly differently, but it cracks me up. The first time he called me and said “hi, this is Paul Newman,” I thought it was a prank call. (I knew his name was Paul, I didn’t know his last name.) I always have the urge to ask him what it was like to work with Robert Redford, or how the salad dressing is coming along, or something completely stupid like that. But my guess is that he’s been hearing those jokes for the last 30+ years, so I try to leave it alone.]

2. I also talked with a guy who owns a power-washing company about getting the deck and siding power-washed, so the house will look all shiny and spiffy. He’s working on an estimate for us too. We actually rented a power-washer from Home Depot, got it here, then figured out that it was waaaay too big a job for Dave and me to tackle on our own. So we’re calling in the pro’s.

Work Stuff:
My current project is turning into a huge pain in the butt, but it’s fine. I’m going to end up with a whole lot of billable hours, and I really can’t complain about that.

Baby Stuff:
Nothing really to report, just that she’s awesome and hilarious and we’re having so much fun right now. Oh, and this:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VlKeGWpUOqw

(The camera adds ten pounds, shut up.)

Other Stuff:
Dave and I will be celebrating our three-year anniversary a week from tomorrow (the 15th). I’ve made that our target date for listing the house on the market, so we’ll see how that works out.

And a week after our anniversary, the new Indiana Jones movie comes out. I’ve already talked to Patsy about baby-sitting (she sometimes does after-hours stuff for extra money) so Dave and I can have our anniversary date night then. I can’t wait.

oh allergens, how I loathe thee

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For a few days there, I was really kicking butt with the house stuff, and making so much progress. I spent more time in the garage than I have since I moved into this house. And now, it’s caught up with me. All the dust in the garage that I stirred up (and inadvertently inhaled) brought on a killer allergy attack, which has now transformed into a full-blown cold. Ugh.

And you know, it’s really hard to get much work done when you’re all loopy on over-the-counter cold medications.

To be fair, though, I have done a lot. All of the boxes that I’ve packed have been moved to the garage and stacked neatly in one corner. It’s just that the house is still so cluttered, and there’s still so much that needs to be packed up and moved out.

You might notice that I keep saying “I” and not “we”? Well, Dave was a huge help with cleaning out the garage over the weekend, but his work schedule is insane right now, so he doesn’t really have time to do any house stuff during the week. The poor guy is working on his laptop all the time. He stops for meals and to sleep, but that’s about it. I, on the other hand, have all the time in the world, since Cate is at daycare and I’m still waiting for my next work project to start. I thought it was supposed to start Monday, but apparently there was some miscommunication about that. No big deal, and I’m fine with having the free time, I just wish I was feeling better so I could really take advantage of it. I’m still trying, it just feels like I’m moving in slow-motion.

In other news: Sally had a baby yesterday! Or maybe she’s having it today, but god, I hope for her sake that she’s not still in labor. Can’t wait to meet Baby Spike!

who knew gravel was so much fun?

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This past weekend was crazy. First of all, it snowed off & on all weekend long. Snow! In late April! WTF?? I am so over winter, will someone please bring on the spring?

In spite of the crummy weather, Dave and I (taking shifts with Cate) worked like dogs and managed to finish cleaning out the garage. Yay! The dumpster is chock full of garbage, it’s kind of horrifying to see how much junk we’ve accumulated over time. And in spite of a few soul-wrenching, “but wait, what if I need [item] someday?” moments, it felt really good to purge ourselves of all the junk. I won’t lie, though; I threw away some shoes, and boy, that stung. Nevermind that I hadn’t worn them since the mid-90’s, I was still sad to let them go.

Oh, and people: how do you keep a garage clean? Because the spider webs in ours are out of control, and the only way I could think of to remove them was to use the hose attachment on the Dyson. This accomplished two things: 1) It got those spider webs out of there, FAST (zip-zam-zoom, bye-bye, dead bugs!); and 2) it kept me at a nice safe distance from said spider webs so I didn’t have to touch anything remotely cobwebby. But I spent a good couple of hours vacuuming the walls of the garage, and it still doesn’t look clean to me in there. Any other ideas?

The one really fun part of the weekend was yesterday afternoon. It finally stopped snowing and the sun came out for a couple of hours, so we brought Catie outside and let her play in the driveway for a while. She had a BLAST. She had a little plastic tub and she picked up individual gravel rocks to put in her little container and then she’d shake them around. If Dave or I picked up a rock and handed it to her, she’d put it in the tub, then peer in and study it, then remove the rock and hand it back to us. Like, “no thanks, this one doesn’t meet my selection criteria.”

Between playing with the rocks, walking around everywhere, and shrieking with glee at the horse next door, she had a fantastic time. Which, of course, meant that she was in total meltdown mode by the time we went back inside and promptly sacked out for a nap. I usually try to keep her on the one-nap-per-day schedule, but sometimes you gotta bend the routine a little.

Unrelated: today I chased off a coyote for the third time this year. I. Want. To. Move.

channeling my inner Yosemite Sam

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Moving status:
1. There is a dumpster in the driveway, waiting for us to clean out the garage. As soon as that task has been accomplished (no easy feat, believe me), we can start moving all of the boxes I’ve packed into the garage and make the rest of the house look de-cluttered.

2. Our contractor guy is coming to install our new kitchen cabinet doors tonight and tomorrow night (he has a day job, so evenings and weekends are kind of his thing). It’s looking like most of the interior work that needs to be done on the house will be finished by Sunday. I almost can’t believe that. I have a feeling we’re going to find at least a half-dozen other projects as soon as he’s finished.

More motivation to move:
1. Yesterday, it was raining on & off, and the cats were driving me insane wanting to either go outside or come back in, depending on the weather. I finally gave up and left the door open for them. Mistake! Beaumont came running in with a still-alive, mostly-disemboweled mouse, and dropped it in the front hall. No one else was home but me. Lucky, lucky me. I won’t get into the details of how I dealt with it, just in case any of y’all are eating while you read this. But my stomach still knots up every time I think about it. And seriously, the whole incident put me in such a foul mood that for a couple of minutes there I would’ve been happy to load up all four cats and drop them off at the nearest shelter.

2. This morning, as soon as I got home from dropping Cate off at Patsy’s house, I had to run into the backyard to chase off a coyote. Again.

When I first moved out here, I wondered if I would know a coyote on sight, or if I would just think it was an exotic-looking dog. You know how a lot of people cross-breed their Siberian Huskies with wolves or whatever? I wondered if it would be something like that, and I’d be all “oooh, hello puppy,” and then get my face bitten off. Well, let me reassure you, if you ever see this in your backyard:

Coyote

You’ll know without a doubt in your mind that that is a f’ing coyote. And if you’re anything like me, you will wig the hell out. I don’t know how bright it is of me to go running toward the coyote screaming at it to go away, but I guess the whole cat-owner instinct takes precedence over common sense sometimes.

It’s funny how my southern redneck heritage comes out during moments like this, though, because I swear that I actually screamed, “GO ON! GIT!!” Which, dude. I’m pretty sure that’s the first time that’s ever come out of my mouth. At least I didn’t call him a varmint or say dagnabbit or anything like that. I’ll save that for the next coyote.

another reason to dislike farm animals

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I know I’ve mentioned before that our realtor and her husband have been helping us out with a lot of our home improvements. Mostly the yardwork – Renee and I made a couple of trips to our local hardware store together and bought all sorts of plants, and she made a very pretty little flower bed in front of our house. (For those of you who’ve seen my house: you know the place where the weeds used to be? There are actual, real plants there now! They’re going to have pretty little flowers on them and everything! I know!) Anyway, it’s been a tremendous help and they’ve just been awesome.

Last week, Renee and I emailed each other a couple of times, and she said they were going to come over on Saturday to work on the yard. Then Friday night, Scott (Renee’s husband) called and said that Renee was in the hospital. She works with horses a lot, and while she was at the stables on Friday afternoon, her friend’s horse kicked her. So she has a few broken ribs, a punctured lung, and her spleen was bleeding. Um, holy crap?!

Scott wanted to let me know that he’d still be over to work on the yard on Saturday, but it’d just be him, not Renee. Which, dude! Priorities! I told him that if he needed to hang out with his wife in the hospital, of course that was fine, but Renee is pretty hardcore and I’m guessing she told him to get his butt over here and get some yardwork done. (Scott is a bit… hmm, how to say it nicely? He sometimes tends to be a little unmotivated.)

Yesterday, I left Cate with Dave at home and I went to visit Renee in the hospital. She seemed to be doing pretty well, and they’re probably going to let her go home in a couple of days. She was really lucky, because the horse could’ve gotten her in the spine or the kidneys, and things would’ve been much worse. Still, it just kind of reinforced why we only have cats. There’s only so much damage a 12-pound animal can do, you know?

And not that it’s a huge issue when your friend is hurt, but obviously this is going to put another crimp in our moving plans. Renee is going to be immobile for a while, so I don’t think she’s going to be able to do any more yardwork for us. Looks like we’re going to have to call in an actual landscaper, which is fine. I kind of figured we’d have to do that at some point anyway. (The blackberry bushes around the perimeter of our house are going to need some professionals to cut them back; those thorns will slice you to ribbons if you’re not careful.) I just hope Renee will be up for her basic realtor stuff soon, because I really want her to get the commission for our house, rather than a stranger.

house preparations and stress

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Ok, I know that most people out there have moved at least once in their life. And some of you, if you have kids, might’ve even moved with children. For those people, I ask: HOW?!?!

Admittedly, this is the first time I’ve ever had to deal with selling a house. Everywhere I’ve lived before now, I let my landlord know when I was leaving, and then I moved out by that date. End of story. No keeping the place in tip-top shape for potential residents to check it out, no worry about how long it was going to take, nothing. Also, every other time I’ve moved (and I’ve moved a lot), it’s been a one-bedroom apartment, plus me and Teenie. This time, it’s a four-bedroom house, four cats, two adults and one baby. Holy hell, what am I getting myself into?

It’s not even the moving part that’s hanging me up, it’s the getting-ready-for-the-move. Or more specifically, getting ready to put the house on the market. I’m going room by room, trying to tidy up and declutter, and I feel like I’ve made zero progress. Sure, the closet in our master bedroom is now organized and pretty, and Cate’s room will take less than five minutes to be in perfect showing condition. But the rest of the house? Wow. I thought that going room by room would keep me from feeling overwhelmed, and really? Um, no, not so much.

Earlier tonight, I was talking with Dave about how stressed I am, and how I wanted to take Cate to the Tulip Festival like we did last year, because I thought it’d be cool to do sort of a side-by-side comparison of how much she’s grown. (Plus, the chance to get pictures of her walking in the tulips? Priceless!) But now, if I think about taking the day off for a silly festival, it feels like a waste of a Saturday when we should be working on house stuff.

It’s not just the de-cluttering that’s holding us up. We have a contractor working on our kitchen, and a friend working on our deck, and progress on both of those projects seems to be at a standstill right now. We have new cabinet doors for the kitchen that are on order and won’t be here for at least another week, and the deck work is something that has to wait until the damn weather cooperates.

I guess I just want everything on my to-do list to be finished, so that whenever everyone else’s work is finished, we’ll be good to go and ready to list the house. It’s just that it feels like there are about a million items on my to-do list, and I still have 999,995 to go.

making headway

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Move-related things I have done so far:

  • The hall, foyer, and kitchen ceiling are all painted. However, the painter guy got a tiny bit of beige paint on the (otherwise white) ceiling in my living room. I’m going to have our realtor friend come check it out before I call him and demand that he come back to fix it. I spotted it about a half hour after he left, but Dave insists that he can’t see what I’m talking about. So I don’t know if I’m being obsessive, or if Dave is blind as a bat. I figure Renee can give an impartial tie-breaker vote.

  • I don’t know if I mentioned this, but during that nine-day power outage back in 2006? Yeah. At some point during my own personal hell, Dave put the generator just a weensy bit too close to the house. And part of the siding melted. I guess that’s what we get for having a plastic (well, vinyl) house. It wasn’t really his fault, most of the time when he went outside to mess with the generator, it was dark and he was working by flashlight. And God bless him for taking care of the generator so I didn’t have to. Anyway, the siding people came back and replaced the melty part, so it’s all pretty again.

  • I’ve gotten estimates from two different moving companies as to how much it’ll cost us to move to North Carolina. I have another guy coming out tomorrow to give me a third estimate.

  • We bought a new microwave and range, which were delivered yesterday. They’re both stainless steel, shiny, and oh-so-pretty. I don’t miss our old handle-less white appliances one bit.

  • I’ve gutted my closet of all the clothes that I’m going to give to charity. I’d like to do Dave’s side of the closet too, since I pretty well know all of the things that he never wears anymore, but he won’t let me. Hmph. (Btw, all of my maternity clothes have been boxed up and put in the guest room closet. I may need them again someday, so I’m not getting rid of them just yet.)

  • I met with a house cleaner, who specializes in move-out cleaning, to get an estimate for giving our house a very thorough scrub-down before we put it on the market. (Surprisingly cheaper than I thought it would be.)

  • I scheduled an appointment on Thursday afternoon for Dave and me to go see about getting new kitchen counters. That should be fun.

  • Our realtor friend and her husband are coming over this weekend to help us with some of our yard work. They have a power-washer, so they can scrub down the siding and the deck. And Renee volunteered to do our front flower bed for us. I’m guessing the real estate market must be really slow for her to be so desperate to help us sell our house, but I certainly won’t object to having the help.

    • So, those are the items on my “have-done” list. There are probably at least dozen things that are still on the “to-do” list, and I won’t bore you with them. The only one on the list that kind of bums me out is we’ve decided that we’re going to sell my car since the money will be a pretty significant chunk toward our moving costs, and it’s pretty expensive to move a car cross-country. It’s rare that Dave and I both need our cars at the same time, so we should be fine sharing, until we get settled and can buy a second car.

    It’s just that I’ll be really sad to let it go, since it was the first car that I ever bought new. And I bought it all by myself, I went to the dealership and haggled with the salesman all on my own. But, you know, time to move on. If Dave sticks to this idea he has in his head of us eventually having three kids, I’d have to get rid of it anyway, since it would be way too small. It just feels weird to sell it since my family historically does not sell cars that are still running. We drive them until the engines fall out. And there’s absolutely nothing wrong with this car, it’s been virtually perfect for the 6 1/2 years that I’ve had it.

    So hey, if you or anyone you know wants to buy a 2002 Subaru Outback Sport, drop me an email.