Finding the Right House - Part XII: The Wait

Then the waiting game began. Even as Thanksgiving had come and gone, we still didn't let anyone know we found a house. There were still just over 2 months of time that things could go wrong with these sellers. After all, they weren't the most stable people in the world. My philosophy was, whoever we told we'd also have to explain the how's and why's if it fell through. I didn't want to have to do that.

During our LONG wait Valerie and I made it a regular routine to drive up to the area after she got off of work. Once there, we'd drive around to familiarize ourselves with the neighborhood. That ended up being a very smart thing to do since we got used to where things were and where the best shortcuts are.

Fast forward a month...

Our file was submitted to the lender on 12/15/04. That would give them plenty of time to get it processed by our lender in order to receive the commitment letter by 12/20/04. The wait for the letter wasn't long because we got a copy of the commitment letter faxed to us two days later on Friday 12/17.

It wasn't till Christmas that we told everyone we were moving. We seemed to get a mixed reaction.

As the New Year approached we began to pack. There were a lot of things that I didn't want in regular boxes so I insisted that we buy some of those big plastic bins at Wal-Mart...


After getting about twelve of them at a rough cost of $140 total, I put all of my computer, home theater & office stuff into bins... They were a good purchase... hell I filled up two bins alone with just DVDs! And now we can use them to organize our Christmas, Halloween & Easter stuff.
Every week we'd do a little more and get the bins "staged" for the move.

The Movers Decision
We had expected to do the move ourselves. We already reserved the longest U-Haul they had and figured we'd be able to pack & unpack it ourselves. That was a good idea in theory, until after packing a while we realized how much shit we really had. A few weeks before the move, I decided to look into movers. I knew that U-Haul had been advertising the emove.com service and that was among the ones I researched. Because it was a local move I was able to use the same guys and have them "Load" it up and then "Unload" at the new house. I knew that it wouldn't be that difficult a job since we had no major furniture that we were moving. I booked 2 movers for 2 hours each location. That is the minimum the company will do per location. It was quite reasonably priced at $150 per location. Now that we knew we were having movers a lot of the stress for us would be removed especially since that moving day would be stressful enough without having to do it ourselves.

As the final weekend before the move grew closer more and more of our stuff was packed away. On our final late night Friday drive, we noticed that the sellers had moving trucks in their driveway. Then on Saturday night we drove to the house again and they were all moved out. The drapes in the living room were opened and the dining room light was on. Sunday was spent taking apart the last pieces of my desk and removing the TV from the entertainment center. I put the finishing touches on my "Master Plan" which detailed our schedule for the next two days. By Sunday night we were too tired to drive by again.

We packed both cars with cleaning supplies, tools, new locks, and other stuff that we didn't want to end up in the U-Haul.

We fell asleep knowing that tomorrow would be a long, exhausting day.

Back to Part XI --- On to Part XIII