So I was planning to spend some time during last weekend making a few blog posts here and there with short updates to the status of the move to the new house, but that didn’t happen.
So here’s a recap:
Friday started at 8:30am, when we met our realtor at the house to do a quick walk-through. The first thing we noticed was that the sellers didn’t really clean up much. While they didn’t leave any trash in the house, they left it pretty dirty. I don’t think it’s really out-of-the-ordinary for people to move out of their house without mopping floors and cleaning walls, but I couldn’t in good conscience leave without doing a more thorough job. Cary and I made sure to vacuum our apartment and clean all of the kitchen and bathroom surfaces. I’d be embarrassed to leave a house in such condition, but that’s just me.
After the walk-through, we spent a couple of hours running errands (including renewing my driver’s license which had expired the day before), then headed to the attorney’s office for the closing.
We spent thirty minutes on Friday closing on the house. Apparently, getting a home loan through the State Employees Credit Union makes the closing soooo much easier. We signed our name maybe 10 times — and 7 of those signatures were for 7 copies of the same document — and initialed a few more places, handed a gigantic check to the attourney, and we were done. The sellers weren’t present at the closing, which is not really out of the ordinary, but what was odd was that their realtor wasn’t even there; another realtor from the same office showed up to sign documents for them. The strange part was that this particular realtor seemed to have very little information about the whole thing. He knew only what paperwork he was supposed to give to the attorney and take to his office. He mentioned that he had been told to show up only that morning. At any rate, we were done by 11:30am.
After closing, we took a trip to Home Depot to pick up a few things, had some lunch, then met with Cary’s Mom and Patty — they brought tons of paint supplies for us to use — at the house to start painting. Our plan was to paint the kitchen, master bedroom and master bathroom, and if we had time, to also paint the living and dining rooms. We worked until around 10:00pm prepping the rooms for painting. Cary’s sister and her boyfriend also helped us on Friday and Saturday. Over the course of three days, we managed to paint the walls, doors, trim, ceilings and closets in the master bedroom and master bathroom. We also painted the ceiling, walls and trim in the kitchen, and repainted the kitchen cabinets. Once the kitchen was finished, we had just enough time to tackle the living room and dining room, but didn’t paint the trim.
After all of that was complete on Sunday night, Cary and I drove back to the apartment at about 10:30pm, and worked to finish packing in preparation for the movers arriving on Monday monring. We worked until 1:00am, then took a 2 hour nap, got up at 3:00am and kept going. We loaded up both cars with delicate stuff we didn’t want the movers to take and made a couple of car trips to the house to unload.
The movers arrived at around 8:45am, loaded up our stuff and unloaded at the new house by around 3:30pm. The movers did a good job, but we did find that one of our dining room chairs was broken. Luckily, we got them from Cary’s uncle, so a replacement is on its way.
It’s Thursday, and we’re slowly but surely getting the boxes cleared away. The house looks more like a house, and less like a house with a child’s impromptu but elaborate box-fort inside it.
We still have some painting to do, mainly the trip in the living room and dining room, and the walls and trip in the hallways, but those can wait until our sore muscles have healed — and until the day arrives when we no longer feel a wave of exhaustion overtake us when we just look at a paintbrush. One of the priorities is to clean the window blinds, which were covered in a layer of dirt and dust. It became apparent during our first inspection of the house back in April that the owners never cleaned the vent filters. It’s a wonder that their kids weren’t constantly sick.