So Let's Discuss the Things That Fell Apart

You guys.

Our house KNOWS.

I'm just saying that in the week before and after we put it up for sale, a multitude of things went wrong. Some were our fault, some just happened, some I feel like is The Luck of Kat (it's a thing - google it). Karl knows. Whenever he walks into a restaurant alone, there's always a table, never a line and the service is always perfect and timely.  Walk in with me? YOU'RE DOOMED to the longest, wrongly ordered meal ever! I can't help it. I am that person who ALWAYS (without fail) picks the wrong line at the grocery store or the bank - you know the one that looks just like the one next to it but takes FOUR hours longer.

Anyway.

First of all, let's talk doors.

Mine is orange. 

(Side note: My PRECIOUS neighbor, who we purchased our house from eight years ago - they then moved next door, has a husband that is a painter and she wanted us to express to the new owners that "no offense" BUT her husband was available to repaint their front door if they needed it.  Ummmm.... tell me how you REALLY FEEL about my door because I am pretty sure when we bought the house from you the front door was HOLLOW and Nora Kate could have kicked through it and the screen door was installed not only inside out but also upside down so you had to pull up awkwardly on the handle and swing the door a strange direction just to OPEN it.  (Wow, this post is getting super-venty! Sorry! Moving is stressful.) 

Anyway, the first day our realtor came by to put the sign up in our front yard, he was all "I'm going to need your front door key" (logically) and Karl and I looked at each other in blind panic.  Yea.... no idea where that is. We use the carport keys the aforementioned neighbors gave us 8 years ago; half our neighbors have copies. I'm pretty sure the folks that installed the front door when we had it replaced (from aforementioned hollow door) made us a key, but, yea, WHERE IS IT?!? We searched for hours and hours and found approximately (no lie) 30 keys, none of which went to our front door.

Sigh. Call in the locksmith. $50 later, we have front door keys!   


Secondly, like a week after our house went up, we noticed one of our toilets was constantly running and running. Sigh. Call in the plumber. $75 and full-on replacement tank parts and we have SILENCE! (And, yes, maybe I could have tried to fix this myself but, just, no.)  The running water also caused a little issue with our bathtub (gotta love old houses!) that we also fixed.

Also, LIGHT BULBS EVERYWHERE were like, oh, you're moving? Let's burn out.  Two said lightbulbs were "2 year bulbs" which we put in waaaay less than 2 years ago. I think. $A kajilion dollars in light bulbs later, we have LIGHT.

And, finally, literally like at 8pm the night before the inspector was coming to perform the home inspection, our dear, dear Arlo dog snapped a wooden picket from the back gate. He has become quite the escape artist in his old age; we regularly pile things against the (usually broken) fence and Karl had JUST fixed it the weekend before; I thought his head might pop off in rage when we heard that picket crack. I'm pretty sure our home would have passed inspection with the one picket missing but we didn't even want it to be on the list of things to fix. $8.50 at Home Depot at 9 p.m. on a Tuesday night, we have a fixed fence!


It's been a comedy, for sure. I had GRAND ideas of writing the new owners a sweet love note with cookies (or beer?) and glowing descriptions of all the neighbors (even the we'll-paint-your-door ones!). But now, after the haggling - normal negotiations I am sure but in the end we were, um, negotiating over $100. Really? It felt a little ridiculous but I'm sure it could have been worse. And, honestly, now I don't care if it was them or their realtor but all my glowy feelings are now gone, gone, gone and they will get a professionally cleaned and completely empty house. 

All this to say, I'm ready now. 

(Please pray all the windows don't spontaneously shatter.)

 LET'S DO THIS. 

One week until close date.

On Moving...So...Yea, About That...

So, right, we sold our house.  

CUE THE TEARS.

Well, it’s under contract. We won’t go into the details or my ANXIETY LEVEL about things like inspections or appraisals.  Just. Don’t. Ask.

Literally, we put it on the market last Tuesday – it went up at like 12 and that afternoon I got this text:

And, though you can't tell by those three little Y-E-S letters in that little green bubble, I really did burst into tears. SOME PEOPLE might say I have an unhealthy emotional attachment to my house. SOME PEOPLE might be correct. (And SOME PEOPLE can shush their filthy mouths – I love my house!)

The first people to look at it put an offer on it the next day. 

(WHAT THE WHAT RIGHT?!?  Because keeping it clean with two kids and two dogs for two showings was hard enough work so I can NOT express how grateful I am it went quickly.) 

Some of you know that we have been tentatively looking for, oh, like a year.  We want the seemingly impossible to find (and I have been less than easy to convince a move is necessary!) – to move no further outward and stay in the city, to have four bedrooms AND to do little to no renovations.  Oh, and to, you know, not make us house poor! (As I am typing now it does seem like a ridiculously lofty list.) Our Sunday ritual for (seriously) the last year – Karl gets up, reviews listings on Zillow and then we go to several open houses in the afternoon. Friends, I have seen some REALLY bad décor and A WHOLE LOT OF WOOD PANELING.  The kids think looking at houses is a hilarious game and Nate often pretends to show me our own house. (“And this is where your baby can sleep…” while pointing to Nora’s crib.)

  

Since we’ve been in our current house (HOME!!) 8 years I thought I would share some of the photos our realator’s company took prior to our first showing. (And THEN, after you shed your tears about my house, MAYBE I WILL TELL YOU ABOUT OUR HOPEFULLY-NEW-HOUSE!?)

Things I will miss - my bright orange front door that STILL makes me smile every time I pull up and this big, flat front yard on our quiet little cul de sac. How will the new owners know it is just perfect for many years of redneck, grown up slip and slides (slip and tarps!) that have only shot one or two grown men out into the street.  

How will they know that one time Karl, in a state of, ummmm, non-soberness, one time dropped me in the carport whilst trying to serenade me with some ridiculously horrible country song whilst the rain poured down outside.  

Or that Nate learned to walk by running across this very front yard or the HOURS AND HOURS of time I spent with him and his tricycle doing laps around the circle? 

Or how to cut the yard to Karl's OCD specificness? 

Or that we made a living room that looked like THIS into....

something that suited us a little better like this! Ripping up the carpet was a risk and we knew it but we did it anyway.



And how will they know that this room - oh this freaking room! - had this old school retro floors (see HERE) under carpet that literally made noise when you walked on them b/c the glue holding it down to the subfloor was so old that it was cracking.  CRUNCH CRUNCH CRUNCH.  And it had an old (teeny tiny) pass through from the kitchen to this room that we patched up.  It was Nate's room, it was our office, it was a guest room, it was even OUR room there for a little while (Read: I fought the move with every room configuration possible!). There was originally wood paneling we painted a hideous shade of yellow and then covered up with a texture paint to hide the panel and THEN painted blue AND THEN painted white. (For the record, I'm not happy with the white either and it was next on my list of things to paint if we stayed!!)



How will they know the MANY, MANY configurations of half-office, half-playroom, half actual-bedroom this room housed?

Or the many, many hours spent walking a baby around or dragging a toddler (now man-child) into bed with us.

Or how when we went to paint the closet we found a butt-print on the wall?  OH THE BUTT PRINT!! (That you will notice I had to photograph with a DISPOSABLE camera!)

Or how one time the old ceiling fan (that didn't work) emitted some weird sulfer smelling scent and we moved out of the house for a night in fear it might burn to the ground?  (And, how, eight years later, it's really nice to have a ceiling fan that works in the bedroom!)

And who will tell them that we completely gutted this kitchen when Nate was like a week old? (THANKS FOR COMING EARLY BUDDY! Our first insane lesson in kids disrupting the ease of everything!) The kitchen was supposed to be completely finished before he got here but he made a surprise arrival two weeks early which resulted in his first outing at like three days old to the Home Depot for a sink. Ha! And also in us imposing on our inlaws while learning how to parent and breastfeed and recover from Nate's birth drama all in the same week!  Good times, good times - NOT one of our more thought out plans!

And who will tell them about that one time I got so mad at Karl I threw a spatula as hard as I could at his head and he swatted it down (my anger aim is apparently not the best) and it landed in the appropriate drawer and he was all "DID YOU SEE THAT?" and I was all "THAT'S JUST PERFECT BECAUSE YOU'RE JUST, ahem, PERFECT AT EVERYTHING (add an explative or four in there where you see fit).  (Yea, the people buying our house are newlyweds so they probably don't want to know that!) 

Or how my parents thought I was bananas to move a couch (which quickly became the laundry receptacle as our washer and dryer are right off the kitchen) into the kitchen but helped me anyway.

(Original kitchen photo here - our dogs tore that crappy linoleum to SHIT - no amount of hands and knees scrubbing ever got it clean!)

And here is the kids room which used to be bright green and we one time used as a photo studio for a New Year's Eve party.  (You will note this is back in 2005 and 2006 before photo booth props became COOL.  We're trendy yall.)

I know Karl wants the kids to have their own rooms but I grew up sharing a room and loved it. I will be sad to see them apart.  Nora BEGS to sleep in Nate's bed every night.  

And this is the bathroom where Nate was born. On accident.

And this is the bathroom where Nora Kate was born. On purpose.

Actually, those two photos were strictly for my own trip down memory lane. New owners definitely don't want to hear that, right?  Like, you don't really want to know if someone died in a house you are purchasing so you don't really want to know people were born there either.  IT'S SO WEIRD.  ;)

AND who (who I ask you!?) will tell them to open all the windows and run the attic fan or to go out and talk to Ms. Diane and Ms. Doris when they come strolling down the street?  HOW WILL THEY KNOW WHERE THE MILK IS IN OUR KROGER?  There are things they need to know.

Cue the chorus of LET IT GO that keeps hitting me from every direction! 

And despite this post I am terribly excited to be moving and, honestly, it couldn't have worked out better. I feel like the couple who is buying our house is us 8 years ago and the couple we are buying our new house from is us 8 years from now. META.

I hope you enjoyed this little LONG post down memory lane. I don't know how I have never classified Karl or myself as project people before - we basically renovated the whole dang house. (Green bathroom - you were NEXT on the chopping block.  May your new owners rip you apart and make you pretty!)

Please keep us in your thoughts - if inspections and appraisals and financing for all parties goes well, we will ALL close on July 31st.  Which is in, what? 22 DAYS.  JAYSUS.  Better start packing, eh?