April, 2017

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Shit Show

Sunday, April 30th, 2017

Holy.  Shit.  You guys, selling and buying a house totally sucks balls!!  I swear, there really needs to be a tv crew following us around filming this comedy/shit show.  So, lets just start at the beginning shall we.  

After our open house we had a great offer on our house that we accepted.  It was taking awhile to get their deposit in so our realtor finally got ahold of them, only to find out that one of them GOT DEPORTED!!  Like, seriously!!  How does that even happen?  I feel absolutely horrible for their family though.  I mean, I know things will work out with our house, but I can’t even imagine what they are going through.  So in the mean time, we had a trip to Colorado planned, since we were under contract and we would be able to find a house for us.  Well, right before the trip I found a house that we liked so we put in an offer, without seeing it.  We had already seen a house with the same floor plan, so we were pretty confident with the house.  We offered 10k over, plus no closing cost or anything like that but because our house fell out of escrow, it was a no go.  

Fast forward to our actual trip to Colorado. We got another offer on our house (Yay!), but they decided to withdraw the offer before we were able to get under contract again (Boo!)  We had put in an offer on another house we went to see, and they countered back basically saying that they need to see a contract for our current house.  Well shit.  Luckily our agent was able to talk to them and they gave us till the weekend to get under contract before they would officially accept our offer.  

We got lucky and ended up getting another offer on our house while we were in Colorado.  It wasn’t as good as the previous one, but at least it came in time for us to get under contract at the Colorado house.  Now we just need to hope that everything works out with both houses!!

The big problem was having with finding a house in Colorado is that there seems to be two types.  You get the really nice newer homes that need very little work done, but are sitting on tiny little lots or you have the older homes that need quite a bit of work done, but are sitting on the amazing lots that have natural yards, rather than manicured yards.  I wish I was able to just combine the two.  New house on an old lot.  The more houses I got see the more I realized that I will never be happy in one of the places with a tiny little lot.  As I have said before, I don’t want to settle.  

The house we ended up choosing has an amazing back yard and is in a really nice area full of trees and wildlife.  The inside needs A LOT of work and there are a few things that we had to compromise on, but in the end, it was the deck and yard that really won us over.  I can just picture myself sitting out there with my morning coffee or tea, or having friends over for a BBQ while our kids play on the play structure.  Even though we didn’t get everything we wanted, in the house, it will be awesome once we get it all fixed up and I plan on writing about all the “fun” projects!

Things are Moving

Friday, April 14th, 2017

Moving is nothing new to me.  During college I lived in 5 different places and then when I moved to San Diego I lived in two different apartments before we bought our house.  I alway had moving down to a pretty good system.  I was able to fit most of my stuff in the back of a truck.  Clothes went in trash bags and got stuffed wherever they would fit.  All my other stuff would go into file boxes.  Pretty simple.  Now that we have been living in our house for 10 years and have two kids, things are a little different!!  I have been slowly packing as much stuff as I can into moving boxes and putting them in the garage.  It’s amazing how much stuff you can amass in 10 years.  Now that a large portion of our stuff is nicely organized in the garage, thanks to me, it doesn’t seem to be as overwhelming.  We still have a lot to do, but every little bit I do gets us closer to Colorado.

Hey, Pat here. I can’t let Shae fill this post with lies. Nothing is “nicely organized in the garage.” There is a massive pile of boxes on one side of the garage, which used to be nicely stacked (by me), and then all kinds of random crap thrown out in the garage. I guess Shae got tired of actually putting things in boxes. Also, it’s a good thing that Shae and I haven’t had to move in the past 10 years or we may not have made it this long. Have you ever tried to pack things up with an ADHD spouse who wants to do anything other than pack? We were in the middle of trying to get the garage packed up when she said she had to take something inside. About 10-15 minutes later I wandered in to find out what was taking so long and she was cleaning out the drain in the sink. She will do pretty much anything to avoid packing. It’s the best! Okay, sorry for the interruption. Back to Shae’s rambling.

Another thing about moving that people don’t really think about is all the things we need to do to the house to get it ready to actually sell.  Painting, patching, carpet shampooing, etc.  There are also things that need to be done like some electrical work and plumbing work.  After spending 2 hours on a GFCI outlet, we finally said fuck it and decided there are just certain things that the new owners will have to do.  Hmmmm, I wonder how many “fuck it” moments the owners of the house we buy will have that we will have to fix?

It was actually more like three hours spent on the damn outlet before we put the old one back in and decided that’s a “next owner problem”. We moved on to replace a different outlet instead just so we could get a win on the books for the day. That outlet went much easier and we got it replaced in about 10 minutes. We were really proud of ourselves until we turned the patio light on at night and tripped the outlet. Yup, we even screwed up the easy one. Fuck it.

I have to say, I think Pat and I have been working really well together so far.  He goes on travel, and I pack shit up.  He comes home and says, “good job, Babe.”  Hopefully we continue working well together when he is actually home for more than a few days at a time.

This is pretty much accurate. In my defense, sometimes I text her while I’m on travel and “remind” her to do things while I’m gone.