December 27, 2005 | Moving
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Archive for the 'Moving' Category
December 5, 2005 | Moving
We had an open house yesterday. Gabe took the cats and Goon Squad over to my parents house. Gabe estimates that the twins trashed my parents house in about a minute. When I showed up about two hours later (I stayed back and vacuumed and made the beds hid toys and cleaned everything up) my Mom’s tupperware cabinet had been emptied all over the kitchen, all of the toys were on the living room floor (and my Mom has A LOT of toys) all of the VHS tapes were off of the shelf and the kids were asleep. Apparently Ian has mastered pocket doors and now he can go play my parents piano whenever he feels like it. Gabe said that Ian also pulled the world atlas off of the bookshelf. That thing has to weigh almost as much as he does.
The open house started at 1:00 and by 12:45 there were people standing out in front of my house. My house felt very popular. We’ve already gotten a bid on the house (albeit too low) and we’re expecting more bids in the next couple of days. I’m getting excited, because if someone buys this thing I won’t have to be so clean all the time.
Someone asked my realtor yesterday if they could come look at the house at 9:00 tonight. We’ve just this week managed to keep the kids up until 7:00. They still wake up at 5:30 in the morning. Who goes house shopping that late at night? You wouldn’t even really get to see the outside of the house. Can he come look at the house at 9:00 pm? Sure, just don’t wake me up.
December 2, 2005 | Moving
Part A - Selling Your House
Anyone who has ever had to sell the place where they are currently living knows that selling your house sucks. Here are just a few of the reasons.
1) To get your house ready to show to strangers, you have to do all the things you have been meaning to do since you moved in. In our case this involved painting the living room, painting the computer room, replacing the toilet flush kits, scraping all of the concrete off of our windows (from when they poured the concrete from our new porch) and a whole bunch of other minor things. Now our house looks beautiful, but we’re not going to live here anymore.
2) Dirty laundry. Where am I supposed to keep all of this dirty laundry that is piling up that I don’t have time to do because people keep coming over to look at my house? I can’t just be folding underpants when people come over. Can I? I mean, I have a load in the washer and a load in the dryer as I’m typing this, but two loads of laundry doesn’t begin to scratch the surface of what is happening in my garage.
3) Naptime. For those of you with more than one child, you can probably appreciate the beauty of all of your children sleeping at once. Anyone with even one child can appreciate the necessity of naptime for a one year old. Yesterday (twice) as soon as both kids fell asleep my realtor called and said that people wanted to see the house - now. Two guys came to look at the house yesterday afternoon, and I just told them to talk softly, and I let the kids sleep. Which beings me to my next point…
4) The only time The Goon Squad isn’t (aren’t?) busy trashing the house is when they are sleeping.
5) The peak time to show your house is after work. The Squad likes to eat dinner at 5:00 and they are usually in bed asleep by 6:30. For the past two days we’ve been hiding over at my parents hose at this time of day. Yesterday, I thought it would be nice to try to take them out to dinner - just the four of us, but Claudia made it abundantly clear that she could not be trusted to sit quietly in a restaurant at that time. Claudia actually made it clear that she couldn’t be trusted to stand quietly in our driveway while I put Ian in his car seat. I’m pretty sure that the neighbors think I beat the children because they spend so much time yelling on the porch and in the driveway. I think we are just loud people.
6) Liars. On Wednesday, my realtor called at 2:00 and said these people were coming to look at my house in one hour (these were the people I made look at the house quietly yesterday), so I took the kids out on the porch at about 1:55 so we would be out of the way and so they couldn’t dump all of the megablocks out in the living room or take every one of their books off of the shelf before the buyers came to see the place. At 4:14 I called my realtor to see what was going on. She had to call the other realtor and he said that the guys had to go back to work and they weren’t going to be able to make it. I spent an hour and 15 minutes out on the porch and another 20 minutes trying to keep Ian out of the fireplace before we realized that they weren’t coming and just hadn’t bothered to call and say so. These people don’t know this, but this house costs more for them than for other people. Bastards.
There are about 30 other reasons I can think of including, but not limited too: eating is messy, cheerios are messy, I’m tired, it is strange to turn on every light in the house and then leave, I’m pretty sure Sid is going to escape at some point and I hope he doesn’t get hit by a car because I seriously doubt if some random person is going to go into the bushes to drag him out, I’m scared people will see the snakes in the bushes, Claudia is messy, Ian is messy, I am messy, we can’t eat meals like regular people, I don’t get to bathe as often as I like to and when I go to my Mom’s house Ian keeps looking for Grandma, but she is in Atlanta this weekend and it is makes me sad when he runs around her house looking for her and waving and saying “Hi, Ma?”
