Author Archives: momdude

The “adventure” continues.

We’re about 35 days into our 60 day escrow, with the goal of only needing about 45 of those 60 days. That goal is getting harder to hit every day. But there has been massive progress.

Aside from the weekend in Toronto, pretty much every waking moment of every weekend has been spent packing and moving stuff to storage. There’s also been a lot of stuff put into the trash – the bins are full to overflowing every Friday morning. And even more stuff has been schlepped off to Goodwill and various other charities that accept such donations.

At this point, probably 2/3 or more of what obviously needs to get to storage has gotten there. When this weekend is done, I hope that percentage is closer to 90%+.

We have a growing stack of defunct electronics and computers and monitors and televisions that will all get picked up by an e-waste recycling place here at some point. We have a growing list of furniture (shelves, an armoire, a bed, several desks, a couch) which will get donated to just about anyone who will pick them up. And at some point we’ll probably just have to get one of those big trash bins to fill.

Once all of that is done, there will be a relatively short list of things that will remain, with the hope that they’ll be going to “the next home.”

And there’s the rub at this point. We have absolutely zero clue where we’ll be moving to, even though that move will be in 26 days at the most, with 14 days or so being preferred.

Z-E-R-O.

Not that we’re not looking, mind you. But the options boil down to a classic “three-body” problem, trying to balance Location, Quality, and Price. You get two of the three. You can have something in this area with a reasonable commute to work and a low crime rate and you can have it reasonably priced, but it will be a piece of shit that’s falling apart and small. You can have a place that’s nice and decent sized while still being reasonably priced, but it will be 40 miles away with an hour (or longer) commute to work. Or you can have a place nearby that’s nice and decent sized, but you’ll pay about 50% more than we were hoping to.

It’s that final combo where push will probably come to shove.

We’re now finding there’s another factor – getting approved and accepted as the renter. We had found a house last weekend which really was ideal and we immediately filled out an application with high hopes that we would get it quickly and start to finalize the moving process. Today we got our hopes dashed when we got turned down for someone else.

So it’s back to scouring Zillow for listings, going to see three more this evening. The one with the decent price and decent size has multiple things in need of immediate repair despite their claim that it’s ready to move into. The one that’s a very good price is tiny, smaller than most two-bedroom apartments, and not in very good shape either. The one that’s really nice and actually only about two blocks from the current house is expensive – but we’ll grab it if we can. More calls in on more listings to see this weekend.

And it’s time to start thinking about apartments instead of houses. Lots more of them available and while really, REALLY  not my first choice, at this point reality is rearing it’s ugly head and reminding me that the other choice might be an “extended stay” hotel and moving twice, once into storage and then back out to a house a month (or two, or three) later after living in a freakin’ glorified Holiday Inn…

Now I know why I didn’t move in the last twenty-seven years!

We will prevail. I just reserve the right to be cranky while prevailing.