We've got a lot of stuff. Not valuable stuff, mind you, but a whole lot of junk... tiki mugs, books, CDs, records, tapes, Pez dispensers, clothes... not to mention a stunning array of second- or third-hand kitchen gadgets and pots. We love thrift stores and flea markets (a.k.a. tag sales, garage sales, yard sales, or "boot sales" for our British readers), and we tend to accumulate a lot of things when things only cost 25¢ each. Buying a new house and moving all that stuff was quite daunting... but the packing part comes later. First we had to sell the old house.
Selling the old house seemed like a simple affair until we actually tried to do it. The circa-1914 Philadelphia rowhome we had been living in was a great house because it was within walking distance of many things that made life easy, such as public transportation, a park, a library, doctor's offices, and shopping, not to mention a thrift store. Unfortunately, it didn't have a driveway and it only had two small bedrooms. Selling it was a challenge.
Once you sign the contract, however, they don't really like to return your phone calls very much.
Selling a house is a really strange thing. First, you find an agent who makes you think they will sell your house quickly and attend to your every need. Once you sign the contract, however, they don't really like to return your phone calls very much. Then when someone wants to look at your house, your realtor (or another realtor) suddenly calls and tells you that they're coming in two hours. For those two hours, you run around cleaning to make it look like nobody actually lives in the place, with toothbrushes stashed away in medicine cabinets, dirty clothes hidden in dressers and not a trace of dirty dishes. Immediately before they're supposed to get there, you turn on all the lights (to make the house seem bright) and air conditioners (in summertime) and leave. While you're gone, a group of total strangers roams around your house, peering into closets, commenting on your choice of literature and examining your appliances. If you're lucky, there will be some trace that the people have actually come and looked at the house; otherwise, you sit around for several hours unable to take your shoes off or remove things from their hiding places for fear that the doorbell will ring at any moment (this happened more than a few times). Also, you must keep the place in a constant state of semi-cleanliness for fear that people could come to look at the house without any warning while you're at work (this is inevitably the day you were running late and left dirty clothes all over the hallway and dishes in the sink).
And finally, after over a year of cleaning, showing the house, and cleaning again, after we had pretty much resigned ourselves to living in that house forever, we finally got the call that someone wanted to buy the house. When we signed the contract and saw that we had a mere six weeks to find a new place and move, we panicked and asked our realtor to push back the settlement date a few weeks. He complied and the buyer agreed to the later date, and we went looking for a house.
We had been optimistically looking for a new place when we first put our house up for sale, and had seen several nice ones in our price range. Once we were ready to actually buy a place, however, there were only four houses showing up in the listings. The first two were overpriced and bizarre, but the third house was exactly what we were looking for. It was in great condition, it had enough room for all of our junk, and it had the most beautiful view of the woods and a small stream out back. We decided at once that this was the house we wanted to buy.
If we thought selling a house was hard, that was nothing compared to the nerve-wracking adventure that was buying the new place. First we had to place a bid on the house, which involved figuring out if we could afford the mortgage, then figuring out what we could afford to put down on the house, then signing a bunch of forms we didn't understand. There was a frustrating series of bids, waiting, and insulting replies from the selling agent, as well as a number of miscommunications due to our realtor's thick accent and the selling agent's tendency to lie to the sellers. Finally they accepted our bid and we signed the agreement of sale.
Unfortunately, we would have to make settlement on our old house in order to get the mortgage for the new house, so by pushing the settlement date back for the house we were selling, we were only hurting ourselves. We tried to have the first settlement date moved up to when it originally was, which was an impossible ordeal because the buyer for our house was now working with a lawyer so getting an answer to any question took a full week to filter from us, to our realtor, to his realtor, then to him, and then to his lawyer, where it turned around and came back down the line to us. When there are only a few weeks left, one week is an awful long time to wait.
At no point during the whole 6-week period was it even definite that we would be able to buy the house we wanted because if the guy buying our house backed out for some reason (i.e., he couldn't get a mortgage, our house inspection didn't go well) we wouldn't get the mortgage on the new place. In fact, since we had to settle on the old house first, both settlements and moving would have to be on the same day. In the meantime, we had to have all the utilities switched to the new buyer, send out a thousand change of address forms, and pack.
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Here's
where all of our stuff comes in. Packing was much worse than
I had thought it would be. As I said before, we have an
awful lot of stuff. The first problem was finding boxes to
put all that stuff into. Mary and I both got moving boxes
from work which were approximately the same dimensions,
which made things easier. Packing all that stuff became a
full-time job, especially finding combinations of things
that were not too heavy or too fragile. We started out
stacking boxes in the dining room. Soon we had to move all
the dining room furniture out to make room for all the
boxes. When all the junk was in all the boxes, there were
130 boxes, not to mention all our furniture (all
hand-me-downs) and many large, delicate oil paintings.
It was these paintings that made me use movers when I moved into the rowhouse, and we decided to use the same movers for the move into the new house. We would move out of the old house in the morning, settle on the old house at 1:00, settle on the new house at 4, and then move into the new house the next day (because the movers wouldn't work after 6:00 PM).
In the meantime, the buyer for our house was supposed to have the house inspected, both for structural integrity and for termites. He was late in scheduling both inspections. The structural inspection went without any problems despite my concerns about the age of the house. Then the termite inspector came only a week before settlement and looked around our basement. He was almost finished when he stopped and said, "uh oh."
Time froze for me at that instant as he got out his screwdriver and poked at the riser under our stairs where there were some lines in the wood. The screwdriver made the wood fall away like sawdust. Those little lines in the wood meant that we would have to get a $600 termite treatment, assuming that the buyer still wanted the house. We set up the termite treatment for the day before settlement. It was the only day it could possibly be done. In the meantime we kept hearing about Hurricane Floyd which was making its way across the Carribean and was set to arrive on the day we were supposed to move.
Hurricane Floyd was a massive storm which caused unbelievably heavy rains and flooding in North Carolina, with some rivers not cresting until the storm had been gone for four days. Our worst fears were that it would come on the day of the move, because since our house had no garage, it offered no shelter at all and the drenching rain would surely damage some of our boxes.
Floyd arrived in Philadelphia the same day as our termite treatment and the day before our move. Flooding was widespread, dozens of roads were closed and thousands of people were left without power. I work in New Jersey, and the governor there declared a state of emergency because of severe flooding, but the exterminator still showed up and treated the house. This was especially amazing because the termite treatment involves drilling holes for the termite poison around the back of the house. He did it all, though, and left us a container full of concrete to fill in the row of small holes. I was worried that water would come into our house and create problems with the settlement, but fortunately it didn't happen.
The next day, Friday, was the big settlement and moving day. The day everything comes together and we suddenly have a new address. The movers were supposed to arrive at 8:00, so we woke up early and finished up all the last minute packing. Then we sat on the porch and saved parking spaces for the moving truck. Mary had run out several times in the rain the day before and managed to save two key spots in front of our house, and since it was a weekday, it wasn't hard to get two more needed for the truck. Then we waited.
When 9:00 came, we called the moving company to find out where they were. The woman there said that they were running late. She said she had tried to call us, but there was a message which said that the line was disconnected. This would explain why we weren't getting several of the calls we had been waiting for, including the one which was supposed to let us know how much the "big check" we would need at settlement was supposed to be. We called the mortgage company and told them why they couldn't get in touch with us. In the meantime, we sat on the porch and waited for the movers.
After 10:00, we were starting to wonder if they were going to show up or not. A man from the gas company came to read our gas meter and informed us that Ridge Avenue, which was the only way to get to our street, was not moving because numerous roads were closed in the area. People were also coming to see Manayunk, a neighboring part of the city which was under six feet of water from the heavy rains. A call to the moving company revealed that the truck was a mere two blocks away, but stuck in heavy traffic.
By 10:30, we were starting to get pretty nervous. We needed about two or three hours to move out of the house, and then we had to clean it up for the buyer's "walk through" which was supposed to be at 12:30.
I asked him if he would be able to get everything inside, he said, "it's gonna be tight."
The truck finally arrived at 11:00, with the surly driver who didn't even acknowledge being three hours late, and quickly hinted that his workers were hungry and would like some breakfast. His truck was somewhat smaller than we had expected, and when I asked him if he would be able to get everything inside, he said, "it's gonna be tight." he went on to explain that due to the hurricane, his partner took the larger truck to save his mother's belongings from rising flood waters.
They started unloading our stuff, and we started cleaning the floors in the rooms they were finished with. They were moving slowly, trying to use every inch of space in the truck, but finally after 12:00 they admitted that they would need to bring in another van for the rest of our stuff. "How long is that going to take?" Mary asked, as settlement was only one hour away. He just looked at us and shrugged.
Around 12:30, the buyer showed up for the walk-through, and fortunately he wasn't upset that we still hadn't moved all the stuff out yet. His realtor showed up and explained to him that in cases where there is bad weather, sometimes things like this happen. They went through the house as I was vacuuming and were ready to leave. Since my name wasn't on the deed for this house, I stayed behind with the movers while Mary went to the first settlement.
Eventually, everything was finally moved out and I took the rest of the frozen food out of our refrigerator and locked up the house for the last time. We were going to really miss this place.
I went to the real estate office where the first settlement was taking place, and was amused by all the signing of documents which was taking place, and I was also pleasantly surprised that the buyer's lawyer was a really funny guy who kept making fun of the realtors every time they would leave the room.
That done, we headed to the second settlement on the new house. We arrived late, but for this settlement, everyone would wait for us. Everything went well until about thirty minutes into the proceedings and then the power abruptly went out. It came back on briefly, but went out again for good. The realtors scrambled for flashlights and candles and we continued signing the barrage of forms placed in front of us. Suddenly, we owned a house. Everyone said goodbye and we headed for our new home.
We went to our new house and tried the new key to find that it didn't work at all... fortunately the realtor told us the combination to the lock box which was still on the door, and after fumbling with that for a few minutes, we managed to get it open, and thus get into our new house. We headed for the basement to make sure there wasn't a foot of water down there after Hurricane Floyd, but everything was fine. The sump pump was actually broken, so we thought it was a pretty good sign that the basement didn't have water in it. We started cleaning the place a little, but since we didn't have a bed to sleep on, we slept at Mary's mom's house that night.
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The
next morning, we headed to our new house to meet the movers.
When we arrived at the new house, Mary thought she saw a
duck in the stream behind our house. I went into the kitchen
to look at it, and to my surprise a great blue heron flew by
the window. I knew this was a good sign.
The movers arrived on time and unloaded all of our stuff rather uneventfully. In order to make the move quicker, we told them to put the boxes wherever they could and we would decide where to take them later, which cut down the moving in time significantly. We paid them and they left.
Now we had to unpack 130 boxes of junk. Not bad considering that now we had more room for all the junk, so it was a bit easier. Slowly, boxes of junk were replaced by piles of junk, and soon shelves full of junk. Now most of our junk is out of boxes and we can see how much of it we really have. And we're thinking that we had better have a yard sale to get rid of some of this junk.
