Five Weeks After The Move…

Well five weeks have come and gone. I have been calling all kinds of people to do all the work we need done. My husband is a saint, but the scope of his handy skills are limited to changing an occasional light bulb. Thank God he earns a good living to pay others to do what we can’t. The first thing I did was to make a list for my electrician, Frank, to take care of. There were a couple of carpentry items he said he wouldn’t do because he wasn’t comfortable. That’s fine. I had plenty of electrical work on the list and he is a wiz at all that. I have five light fixtures changed, some outlets added and switches too.

Then I called a roofer/brick guy, Mik, who specializes in waterproofing to check the front and back of the house. He found some cracks, but more importantly, he said the lintels over four of the windows in front needed to be replaced. The engineer who inspected the house already told me this, so I knew it was true. He also said it would cost $800 to $900 a window. I hadn’t planned on doing this, but as both men explained, the lintels are holding up all the bricks that make up the front of the house. When they break down the bricks will crack and crumble. Mik told me he would replace 4 lintels, repair the cracks in the stucco and paint it, power wash the slate roof and repair/replace missing and broken slates and do some pointing on brinks that needed it front and back, plus caulk all the windows. We hired him to do it all which saved me from calling a few other people to take care of these jobs. It was expensive, but when he showed me how rotted away the old lentils were I knew it was a wise decision.

Once that work was done I needed a handy man, I called Marco. The kitchen cabinets are a nice cherry wood and not very old, but the damn hidden European hinges on three of them need adjustments. If you don’t know what kind of hinges these are, you are very lucky. If you ever get new kitchen cabinets, avoid them at all costs! Anyway, I wanted the handyman to adjust three of the cabinet doors that were not properly aligned and driving me crazy. The ones in the corner were the worst and I would not use them they way they were, and they had plenty of storage space that I needed too. I also needed the copper roof over my front door sanded and painted. He came yesterday and did both jobs. Two more things checked off the list!

I have been having ongoing conversations with the painter. The whole house needs to be painted on the inside. I don’t want to think about painting again for a few years. After coming and finally giving me an estimate, it took some back and forth texting and emailing to get him to bring the color charts and set a date to begin work. He tells me he will start day after Labor day, I can only pray that’s true. I haven’t been unpacking a lot of stuff so as to keep the clutter to a minimum and make it easier to paint all the rooms. I have not been buying furniture or curtains or rugs either, for the same reason. So this is holding me back a little, but based on his reputation for neatness, I was willing to wait. I had a very sloppy painter in the old house and that was a disaster! The mess he made was ridiculous. In the mean time, I let him know we picked our colors out and he plans to come back soon to iron out the final details.  So hopefully I will be reporting that the painter has started work next week.

Next job on the list is the front yard/patio. I called a neighborhood construction guy who seems to do most of the concrete, brick and paving work in the area. Of course he is also expensive. His name is Anthony and he is Italian. The both of us talking together sounded like a scene from The Sopranos. He had the nerve to make fun of my accent, when his is just as bad. Brooklyn accents are very distinctive! Besides that, I had him laughing because of my bluntness. He tells me that pavers for the front yard/patio wouldn’t cost much more than concrete and I know this is BS because I did my research. In the end the whole job is more expensive that I guesstimated, but my husband and I agree to hire him. It’s not worth shopping around for a cheaper price and then not have this big job done the right way. Anthony tells us to go to his office with a deposit and to pick out the pavers. We get there a little early. His secretary has us look at the various color pavers. After a few minutes Anthony comes out and he says, “Let me show you something,” as he grabs one of the books. I say, “So now you are going to show me what you want me to pick?” He breaks out laughing. As it turns out, I had already decided to go with the same pavers he was going to “suggest.” He promises to have the job completed by September 21st, one month after we sign the contract, unless we get a lot of rain and he falls behind. We agree no one can fight the weather.

So all my ducks are in a row, so it seems. I am hoping that everything I planned to do for now will be done by September 21st. Then I can focus on unpacking and buying what I need to finish all the rooms. I am tired just thinking about it.

On a good note, I was feeling around the outside of the huge bathroom mirror this morning, don’t ask me why. I have been grumbling for weeks about how there is no medicine cabinet in such a huge bathroom. Well guess what? There is a very big cabinet behind that mirror! I love it! This was one of the good things I discovered. Most of the others were problems that had to be addressed. So I will be fully utilizing the space behind that mirror shortly! I also found six bottles of expensive perfume and aftershave that the previous owner said I could keep. One bottle I know is $100 because I also have it!

I miss writing my blogs damn it! Can’t wait to get back to them full time.

Last Week Before "The Move"...

To be honest, I have never liked change. I like stability and consistency. It makes me feel secure. Most people find moving to a new place stressful, but for me it’s stress to the max. I have been living with chaos the past couple of months. Boxes everywhere. Every weekend we go to BJ’s and pick up another dozen boxes and then I spend the rest of the week filling them up. Who knows if I will find everything after I move? I try to label the boxes, but there are so many of them. We probably have at least 100 boxes full of stuff. I haven’t had to go back to look for anything, and I haven’t missed any of the things that are packed. I came to the conclusion that maybe I should have thrown it all out. That would have made everything easier.

Tomorrow we close on both houses. There are times I can barely breathe from the anxiety. I hate change, but this is necessary and long overdue. Just the last minute things are left to pack. The floor guys are going to the new house on Thursday to do the hardwood floors. The move is set for July 24th. If I could just shut off my brain from thinking about all the "what if's" I might be able to sleep. I took a pill last night, and still got up at 4 am.

The buyers of my house have been very anxious to move in sooner than later. They even wanted to close at the end of June so they could start working on the basement while I am still living here. I told that that was out of the question. For one thing, I have so many boxes in the basement and no where to put them. Second of all, I am buying a house in “move-in” condition so as not to deal with construction. The last thing I need while packing is workers going in and out and making noise all day. Our contract says we will close not before July 15th. I needed the time to find a house and luckily I did, because there weren’t many on the market. I think I got the last one in the category and price range I was looking for. I saw it Mother’s Day weekend and made an offer right away. It’s only two months later and I am packed to go, but it’s not fast enough to suit them.

The sellers of the house I am moving into are a young family with two children around 3 and 5 years old. The woman’s father has Alzheimer’s and has been in and out of the hospital. She is stressed to the max herself trying to pack up a house while staying with her parents and going back and forth from the hospital. Her father isn’t doing well at the moment. It’s difficult for me to put additional pressure on her to move faster so I can get in because my buyers are impatient. I wanted to give them enough time to pack up their house. They said they could close July 8th and so at the end of June I called my lawyer to get the ball rolling because everyone was ready.

You are going to love this…when I tell my lawyer we want to close on July 15th because everyone is ready, he tells me we aren’t ready. He sent for a survey on the house and it hasn’t come yet. I told him to arrange everything anyway, I doubt the survey will be an issue. He tells me, for the first time, that he will be away the first two weeks of July! I nearly have a stroke! How the hell are we going to close July 15th when he is away and will be getting back July 11th?  He tells me his assistant will make the arrangements. I call her the next day to make sure we are on the same page. We need to close on both houses on July 15th. She is already aware and says she will send out emails and make phone calls as soon as she gets off the phone with me. A week goes by. Finally she calls me back and says July 15th didn’t work, but everything is a go for the 17th. I say great.

Now in my contract we put that I have 7 days to move out after closing, because I wanted to do the hardwood floors first. The sellers of the new house have 5 days to move out in their contract, but moved everything sooner so the house would be empty on closing for me. That brings us to my moving date of the 24th.

Last night my Realtor gets a call regarding the walk through of my house and he is asked if he knew we were staying an extra week after the closing. He says yes, it’s in the contract and was agreed to. They were under the impression that because they had to wait to close that we would be out on the day of closing. They seem to have no concept of the fact that I need to move into an empty house and not one that is still occupied by the previous owners. They don’t know the terms of my contract with the other people. It’s a chain reaction. They are lucky things moved as fast as they did. The sellers of the new house put their things in storage because they are moving in with her parents. If they had to find a house and wait for other people to move, this could have dragged on another month. I may have to explain some of this to them so they know I have not been dragging my feet. I would love to be out of here, the sooner the better. Yesterday morning there was more music blaring outside my window, a constant reminder of why I set all this in motion.

I just can’t wait to be settled and organized. The next two or three weeks are going to be very stressful to say the least. This weekend I have to get two bedroom sets for the girls and have them delivered after the move. Down the road I need to find a living room set and entertainment center. Somehow I can’t see having the time to do that, but I suppose I will find it. I want something I really like and that will last a long time to come. I know people will say, take one day at a time, relax, drink wine, forget your troubles, everything will work out in the end. I know all that, but it’s the meantime that’s killing me.

P.S. sorry for the lack of blogs. I miss writing so much and hope to get back to it on a regular basis once I am settled in.

Our Thirtieth Wedding Anniversary…

Tomorrow it will be thirty years since my husband and I exchanged wedding vows. He took off a few days in case I wanted to celebrate, but honestly in the middle of packing, I can’t think about taking a little trip away. I am too overwhelmed and it’s a sin really, because 30 years is a long time and deserves to be celebrated right. Instead of packing clothes to go away, we are packing boxes and throwing out as many things as I can part with.

One of those things I was prepared to add to the trash was my wedding gown. After we got back from our honeymoon, I took my wedding gown to the dry cleaners to have it cleaned and preserved in a special keepsake box. I forgot about the keepsake box because they had put it inside another regular box. The box has been sitting in my basement for 25 years, on top of a wardrobe closet, collecting dust. I was not looking forward to taking it down and disposing of it. But, this morning I bit the bullet and had my husband bring it down for me. I cleaned of the dust off the outer box and then looked inside to find the gown carefully laid out in a gold keepsake box. Maybe I had never seen it before or saw it just the one time when I picked it up. So I told my husband I would save it and get rid of the outer box.

Now for some reason unbeknownst to me, my older daughter has been trying to subtly tell me I should keep my wedding dress. For the past couple of weeks or longer, I have been talking about dumping it and she suggested I have it “framed.” I looked at some pictures online of framed wedding dresses and they are huge. Where would I ever put something like that anyway? I told myself I will never be wearing this dress again. My daughters certainly won’t be wearing it. What is the point of holding on to this 30 year old dress? The only thing I envisioned was that one day my girls would be going through my things to dispose of them and then they would have to agonize about what to do with this dress. The dress would be an albatross around their necks. When I had gotten it preserved, I don’t know what I was thinking. Maybe I thought if I had a daughter she might want to wear it? Maybe she would want to open the box and see it up close? That was then, this is now. So because it was so nicely packaged, and because my daughter seemed more concerned about parting with it than I was, I decided to hold on to it and told her so. I asked her why she wanted me to keep it, but she doesn’t know. Then she says, maybe we can find a more “compact” way of keeping it. I had to laugh to myself wondering why my wedding gown seem so important to her. Maybe in time she will figure out why.

My husband was totally understanding about my feelings. My nerves are on edge and I am tired. I am not in a celebrating state of mind, body or spirit, in spite of the huge milestone we are about to hit. So he suggested that we go to dinner tomorrow and celebrate in the fall after we are all settled in our new home. That sounds a lot more appealing to me. For now we will focus on this move that I have been putting on hold until the girls graduated college and my husband was able to retire. I have waited a long time for this and it’s long overdue. I feel like this is my time and our time to do the things we have put off because other things took priority. I hope it all turns out the way we envision it will.

A Progress Report on Moving...

I’ve spent the passed few weeks packing all the things we do not use on a daily basis, throwing out things we “might need,” but never did, and ordering a lot of new things for the house. I have ordered new dinnerware, cookware, comforter sets and bedding, stainless steel garbage can, toaster, can opener and a million other things. This will save me from running around to different stores when I should be home unpacking. There is still a lot more packing to do and with every box I seal I get closer to getting out of here.

I have a lot of good memories of living in this house for 25 years. I may have stayed here indefinitely and remodeled the whole thing. My main reason for leaving are the neighbors across the street. An absentee landlord has been renting his property to inconsiderate tenants over and over again. There were a couple of peaceful years, but they never lasted. One year it got so bad I went to a Realtor in tears and told him he had to sell my house and get me out of there. We even had an open house, but no one came. What’s wrong with these neighbors?  It’s not just the fact they are loud, or blast their car radios any time of the day or night for hours, or argue and scream, or start celebrating the fourth of July in May. It’s not just that they drive the wrong way down our one way street or ride their motorcycles on the sidewalk. It’s not just that they congregate in front of their house with all their “friends,” or that other cars are constantly pulling up and double parking outside their residence. It’s all of it and it’s constant. It never ends. And, you can’t talk or reason with them or they will curse you out or even threaten you. If you try to reason with them, then you have to be worried about retaliation. One year my husband said something and two of our tires were slashed. He ended up having to park blocks away every day so they couldn’t find our car. We tried reporting this to the police. They told us to keep a log of when things happen so they can send a car around. That accomplished nothing. We went to the community board, who took our issues to the police, and that accomplished nothing. Some neighbors actually got the number of the landlord and called him repeatedly in recent years. That got some results. He must have threatened to evict them just to stop getting phone calls. However, they are still not the ideal neighbors. And, this is why I want to leave the place I have called home for the last 25 years. I want to live in peace. I want to be able to hear my television. I want to be able to concentrate when  read and write. I cannot get out of here fast enough. And when I am packing and exhausted and feel like stopping, they just keep reminding me of how much I need to get out of here.

Now my mind is swimming with all the things I have to do. I haven’t moved in a very long time. It’s overwhelming. Beside all the unpacking, I need to get two bedroom sets for the girls and a new living room. We’ll be going to look at furniture this weekend. I have to change our address on everything, and hope the Post Office does it’s part in forwarding our mail to our new address. I have to figure out where to place the furniture. The layout of the rooms is very different. I need to contact a moving company and a junk removal company as soon as I get a closing date. Then, I have seven days to move out, but I need to have the wood floors redone in the new house. I am worried there will not be enough time for that. Once we move in I will need a painter for all the rooms. The outside of the house needs a lot of work that I want to have done this fall. Believe it or not, I am trying to take one thing at a time, but I can’t stop my brain from working overtime. I know it will all get done eventually, it’s just that I have never been a patient person.

So far it looks like both closings will be scheduled for the 15th of July, or there about. Seven days later I should be moving in. My younger daughter took a week vacation around that time to help me with everything. Hopefully we can get all the essential things in place so we can carry on our normal routines. My goal is to be settled in by Thanksgiving. If I can accomplish that, I will have a lot to be thankful for this year.

"Under Contract"

Right now I am “under” two contracts, one for the sale of my house and one for the purchase of our new house. I am also under pressure. The buyers of my house want us out as soon as possible. They have a commitment for June 17th. But, since I had no house at the time of their offer, we stipulated that we would close no sooner than July 15th with 7 extra days to move. They came back with their contractor last week to look around and get estimates for the work they want to do. Once again they asked me if we could move out sooner. I said I would try. I told them I had just found a home and we agreed on the price, however we hadn’t seen the lawyers yet. I tried to explain that even if we were both ready to move, the people in the house we are buying may not be able to accommodate our time table.

At the new house, the sellers told me that they could work with me on the date because they are moving into her father’s house. Her father has been ill and she wants to be right there to help her mom care for him. I am hoping that they will move out before the closing and leave the house vacant so I can try to get the wood floors done. I also hope they will agree to the July 15th ballpark closing date. Right now their contract says August 1st, and that will make my buyers very anxious. The lawyers are working on the date issue right now. I don’t think I will push up the date for my buyers, from July 15th. I need the time to pack everything and so do my sellers on the new house. It would put extra pressure on us to try to move any earlier. I also have one more good reason not to accommodate them.

The buyers of my house pulled a little “stunt” early on. After you agree on a price for the sale of a house, the buyer has an engineer inspection done to see if there are major problems. Instead of bringing an “engineer,” they brought their friend the contractor, who was going to do all the work they wanted. He pretended or presented himself to be an engineer and found dozens of things wrong with my house. It looked like the sale was dead. But, as it happens, the buyers still wanted it, they just wanted me to come down $35,000 on the price for all the work that needed to be done. My realtor told them no way that was happening. So they wanted us to drop it $25,000. My realtor said no. He asked them who was going to do the work? Their realtor said what does that matter? My realtor said well, if they are having friends do it, then the price is inflated. She agreed. Finally they proposed that we meet in the middle and drop the price $12,500. We agreed to that, however, we did not know at that time that the contractor was also the engineer, and had exaggerated all the problems to help them get the price reduced. So, my realtor was very shrewd in not giving in to their demands, even though it may have cost us the sale of the house. And, this is the main reason why I am not so sympathetic to their need to get in sooner rather than later. July 15th works out well for me and I hope my sellers too.

The next few weeks we are going to be packing and purging the whole house. I find it hard to throw things away. Yesterday, for example, I found all the little ceramics pieces my younger daughter painted at various birthday parties. It’s quite a collection. For years those works of art hung in her room. There will be no place for them at the new house, but it bothers me to dispose of them. I am too sentimental. There are memories attached to too many things. I suppose many of those things will have to go, like it or not.

Today we will go back to packing up the basement. This week I will try to do the dining room and the remaining things in the kitchen that we aren’t using. I am washing everything first, and packing them in plastic bags, so can just place them in right in the closets and drawers later. I’m trying to be organized, but my mind is all over the place.

One good thing about moving and packing is that it is an instant cure for insomnia. When my head hit’s the pillow I feel like someone has given me an anesthetic. I guess it will be like that for a few months, until everything is unpacked and we are settled.

Happy Memorial Day!

Taking Risks...

People, myself included, like to be comfortable and safe. Sometimes the need for security makes us avoid change or taking risks that could better our lives. Sometimes the only way we go outside our comfort zone is if we are forced to do so by life events. You know we are very clever creatures, human beings can talk themselves out of or into anything. We can rationalize and make up excuses by the dozens to make something more or less appealing, depending if we want to do it or not. 

There are many people, for example, who will stay at a job they hate, because they don’t want to risk working someplace else and trying something new. They might have the desire to do it, but they will talk themselves out of it. It’s the fear factor. Fear of failure, fear of humiliation, fear of having to start over. Instead of facing these fears and believing in themselves, they stay at a job they hate as the years come and go. There are people who are afraid of commitment so they just live together. If it doesn’t work out, they can always go their separate ways. That’s much easier than getting married and having to work at a relationship. No ring to buy, no marriage license to get, no ceremony to prepare. No fear of a marriage failing because there is no “marriage.” 

And for me, right now, I have finally taken the first step to selling this house. Something I have wanted to do for over 15 years. It was never a good time I told myself. When the kids were little, they were in special school programs and doing well, I didn’t want to disrupt that. Then my father was diagnosed with cancer and I didn’t want to move away from him and my aging mother, who was soon after diagnosed with Alzheimer’s. That was not a good time. A year before my mom passed away, I was diagnosed with cancer and that was not a good time to move for so many reasons. By the time I felt fairly confident that I was going to be okay, my older daughter started college and I had to pay tuition for my younger daughter’s private high school. Well, now that wasn’t the right time either, financially speaking. Of course, my younger daughter went on to college after high school and the tuition was pretty steep so we stayed put. And, here we stayed, comfortable and secure, in a home that was just okay, in a location I have hated for all these years. 

But, this week I called a realtor and had him come over to talk about selling this house. Now is the right time to make this a priority. The girls are done with school and my husband is taking an early retirement. I am trying to conquer the fear and anxiety of moving. It’s not going to be easy, we have accumulated a lot of stuff over the past 24 years. Plus, we will have to find another home, in a quiet place, and deal with a simultaneous buy and sell situation. I think that is what is causing me the most anxiety. People do it everyday, I know. And one way or another, I will do it too. 

Sometimes, you have to go outside your comfort zone and make some changes in your life if you want to be happy. I regret not trying to make an effort to move years ago. I could have improved the quality of my life, and my family’s a great deal. Yes, I’m afraid and overwhelmed at the thought of moving, but now is the time for change.