Yes, I already wrote a post warning you to expect the unexpected, but some other things happened and I didn’t think it was right to leave them out. So I bring you Part II:
The movers called the day before our move to tell us they were changing the date.
Yup, that’s right. The day before the big move we got a call saying our driver wasn’t going to make it to town in time. They told my husband they could still come and get the stuff that day and then store it over the weekend.
He was going to do that until I was like,
“Does that mean they have to load it, unload it and then load it again? Because if they do, that is not ok.”
He had to call back.
The answer was yes, they were going to bring a truck, load our stuff, drive it over to some warehouse, unload it and then load it all up when the driver who was actually going to take it across the country got there with his truck.
We said no thanks. He can just come on Monday. Then he showed up on Saturday to scope out the situation before bringing his big rig.
All our plans changed last minute.
My husband had to rearrange the hotel reservations. It was a hassle because he booked them with points and put a room under each of our names (don’t ask me why – he originally thought our 5 and 3 year old could have their own room). He spent a long time on the phone trying to work that out.
Since the movers were coming 4 days later than we expected, we also decided to leave the day of the move instead of the day after. This meant no spending the night at my sister’s, which I was really looking forward to.
We figured my husband would just be there to get the movers started and then leave after a few hours.
Wrong again.
He had to stay the whole time. Not only to finish packing up all the random bits and pieces but also because they couldn’t be responsible for locking up our house.
The fantasy of driving by myself while listening to podcasts?
Didn’t happen.
I drove the whole trip with the girls, tossing stuff to them in the back of the van when they needed a snack. I also spent the whole first evening with them because my husband didn’t arrive until after they were in bed.
Thankfully we had asked my parents, who have made the drive several times, where we should stop. They suggested a short first and last day with the longest day in the middle. So while I was with the girls all day and went out to dinner with them and then got them to bed, my husband was there to pass the older girls off to when the baby woke everyone up with her screaming.
The next night we got a swim in, which was great to wash the ink off of Ivy. She wrote all over herself with pen while I was unwittingly driving down the highway.
Day 3 we got near Chicago and had no cash for the tollway, so we had to stop at an ATM. I didn’t trust my instincts (or the signs), so we got turned around for a little bit but eventually made it back to the highway and through all the craziness around Chicago.
Then I made a terrible choice of exit to get off at for lunch and it took forever, but we made it to my mom’s house before dinner time (or supper time as they say here).
The movers strike again.
We didn’t have a specific date that the movers would arrive with the bulk of our belongings, but the estimate was a week to 10 days.
They arrived two days after we got here.
I don’t even know what we did the first day we were here. I think my husband worked while the girls and I tried to decompress from the trip. Then my husband got the call that they would be here the next morning.
I had noticed when we looked at the new house the second time that the fridge hadn’t even been cleaned. It pissed me off because I paid kind of a lot of money for professional cleaners to clean the house we’re trying to sell two separate times. So I had an idea that we were going to have to have someone come clean the new house too.
It would have been a good idea, but I didn’t have time to do it since the movers came the next day.
The house we moved into was built in 1990. Like a lot of houses in this area that were built in that period, it has a lot of oak. It has custom cabinets everywhere. I mean everywhere. The big kitchen, the laundry room, all the bathrooms. None of the cabinets or drawers had been cleaned.
We needed to clean everything before we could put stuff away.
What a pain.
But also the choice we made when we decided to move in right away and not wait to hire a cleaner to come clean the place before we started unpacking.
We didn’t sell our house in time to pay cash for the new house.
This was probably the biggest hurdle, and yet still one we didn’t stress about very much. We expected to use the proceeds of the sale of our old house to pay cash for the new house.
That is not how it worked out.
We did get 90 days to close and were allowed to move in and rent it before closing. But as we got closer to those last 30 days, we realized it was not going to happen in time. We still hadn’t received a single offer on our house yet.
We were really hoping to avoid interim financing, but it was not meant to be.
So, we went in and talked over our options but were told it would take longer than anticipated. We had to change plans again. We found a lender that could close in time and we managed to scrape together cash to put down 20%. We closed on the house on Monday. We just have a new mortgage that we weren’t anticipating.
There was a point where we thought we would have two mortgages and would likely have to rent out our old house or hold onto it and pay both mortgages for several months until it sold.
Then, lo and behold, we got two offers within a day of each other and our old house is now under contract.
The inspection was also this Monday and of course there was a fairly major finding, but even that is not as bad as we thought it would be. It’s not completely resolved, but we’re pretty confident that it will all be worked out by the end of the week.
It all worked out in the end.
I’m not going to say that we weren’t stressed at all. My husband especially was stressed about it, but every step of the way we were confident we could make it work and we’ve focused on what we can control.
We’ve had the support of our families (especially mine) both here and in Denver. We also made a lot of really good financial decisions in the past that allowed us to come up with the cash we needed and know that we could make things work no matter how it turned out.
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