plans

I’m not sure if this should count as a whole step or a half step, but it’s definitely some kind of step in the right direction.  We signed a lease today!  We officially have an apartment, and we are going to officially start moving this weekend.  We also officially have a storage unit, so this weekend will be more about moving stuff in there, but I’m sure we’ll put something in the apartment.  Symbolism.  Plus we have to do the initial inspection and write down every scuff mark.  The future is almost here!

It’s official (again).  Our house is on the market (again).  The difference this time?

We’re doing it ourselves.  We did the bathroom remodel (floor, vanity, sink, paint), and we’ve gotten rid of more stuff (last weekend included a garage clean-out, more donations, and a trip to the landfill), we’ve rearranged the house (again – the dining room table is back in the dining room and the family room is back to being largely empty), and we’ve CLEANED.  Today, we put an ad on craigslist and bought the sign (and replaced the rear struts in the car, cleaned the house, and mowed the lawn).  Tomorrow, we have an open house.

I hope people come.

Our plans have been made public.  In the neighborhood, anyway.  There’s a For Sale* sign in our yard, with our real estate agent’s picture on it (I wonder how many pictures she had to take before settling on that one?), so now all the world can see what we’re up to.  And now it’s real. It was always going to be real, of course, and it was never a secret, but as long as only a small number of people knew about it, it wasn’t scary.  Now…it’s a little scary.  The guy put the sign up Friday afternoon – he just appeared, and I didn’t even notice until he was done (Riley didn’t notice the stranger hammering a giant sign into our front yard, either – good guard dog), but seeing it put butterflies in my stomach.  I didn’t expect that.  They’ve mostly gone away, but I imagine they’ll be back.

*Actually, it says Coming Soon – we won’t be officially listed for a few more days.

 

The house is in turmoil.  We turn rooms upside down and inside out, box things up and stash the boxes or makes piles of things to get rid of, and then we do our best to put the rooms back in some sort of order so we can get through each day without feeling like we’re living inside a hurricane.  The dining room that turned into a library has been turned back into the dining room.  The family room that turned into the dining room has been mostly turned back into living space, although it’s also doubling as the dog’s room for now.  And it’s kind of empty.  We’re not moving the couch and TV back in there (they’re staying in the family room that used to be the formal living room), so we only have two cabinets in there, the two ugly green chairs, that big-ish desk we could never find space for, Riley’s food and water, and his crate.  Sounds kind of a like a lot, now that I’ve listed it all out, but it’s a big space.  Lots of open area left that won’t get filled.  The house looks weird.

We still have a couple of projects we’ll probably try to start once we get the house on the market.  We want to get the rest of our CD collection converted to mp3, and we want to scan all of the pictures we’ve developed and accumulated.  Both are time-consuming and mind-numbingly boring, but we should be able to do them while doing other things.  And that will leave us with portable backups.  Should have done that a long time ago.

We’re clearly a little obsessed.  House and dog, dog and house.  My dance classes started back up, but we have too much stuff to do in the house, so I haven’t gone back.  I had to miss zumba the last two weeks because I had to work late, and I’m planning to miss it tonight because there’s too much to do in the house.  I haven’t been to yoga in months (first dance class, then house stuff).  We’ve done the big obvious things (pack up the books, stash the bookshelves, switch the rooms), and now it’s getting a little harder to focus.  Lots of little things need to be done.  Like, hey – we haven’t gone through the coat closet to see what we can get rid of.  I know I have at least one coat in there that needs to go.  I want to box up the rest of the fiction (what’s left on that one shelf next to the TV – we’re keeping those shelves up through showing the house – we’ll just have other stuff on them), but that’s only going to fill one box.  I can make another pass through my dressers and closet for stuff to get rid of, and failing that, I can certainly box up the summer stuff and possibly even separate it into clothes that I’ll keep with me and clothes that I’ll store.  And THAT decision may (really should) prompt me to get rid of the clothes I would store.  If our plan really works out, anything that gets stored will be stored for at least a couple of years, possibly longer, and will I really wear those clothes then?  Well, maybe – I have (and wear) clothes that I’ve had for that long and longer, but still.  I should probably not plan to store a lot of clothes.  Seems silly.

Well, this has been helpful.  I think I have tonight’s to-do list all ready.  Thanks, guys!

People, our plan is in motion.  It’s still fairly nebulous, but that’s okay.  We have steps to take, and then steps to take after that, and at each point, we can (and will) revisit our decisions and change our direction, and yeah, okay, we’ll probably be flying by the seat of our pants a little bit, sometimes, but that’s okay, right?

Step 1: Get the house ready to go on the market.

There is SO much to do for this step.  We met with our real estate agent, she brought over a stager who made a ton of notes for us to follow to make our house look as perfect to prospective buyers as possible, and then we spent last weekend getting of SO MUCH STUFF.  The Salvation Army truck came by Saturday morning to pick up that extra dryer we’ve had in the basement since we moved in and about 30 boxes of books.  We did a sweep of the entire first floor and filled up my car with stuff for a trip to the Salvation Army Donation Center near us, and when we got back, we made a sweep of the entire second floor and repeated the trip.  Sunday, John worked on his car (because it needs to be able to go with us), and I started packing up OUR books for long-term storage.  We finished that project last night and moved all of the books that were in our dining room AND all of the shelves into the basement.  Tonight (or possibly this weekend), we’ll do the same thing with the library (the room that used to be the dining room).  The stager says we should switch those rooms back, and losing the bookshelves will make the rooms look bigger, so okay.  It’s possible that we would have ignored that advice, but those things will need to packed up in the near future anyway to go in storage (they can’t come with us!), so it helps us to get them packed up now.  We’re going to use that crib we never managed to get to Erik and Margaret (sorry, guys!) in our guest bedroom to make it look like a nursery, so we need to get the full bed that’s in there down into the basement, and once we’ve finished moving furniture around, we can call the painters and have them fix and paint the ceiling by the stairs and paint the walls and ceilings in the upstairs hallway and the stairs.  Oh, we need to paint the outside of the front door, and we need to get the guy in to paint the railings of our deck.  Those are the big things, I think.

Step 2: Put the house on the market.

We’re aiming for mid-October.  Might make it.  Once it’s listed, we just have to keep it clean.  We’re going to have to figure out what to do with Riley, though.  Maybe we run home and take him for a long walk?  Maybe he’s fine in the backyard?  He’ll make a ton of noise, though.  I don’t really want to have to crate him in the basement every day, but that might be the easiest thing to do.  We’ll talk about it.

Step 3: Find a place to live.

Once the house sells, we’ll need a place to go.  We’re planning to find an apartment or some sort of rental in the area, near enough to commute to our jobs.  Rent has to be less than our mortgage (shouldn’t be difficult), the lease needs to be short-term, and they have to allow dogs, of course.  I’ve done some preliminary searches – those places exist not far from us.

Step 4: Find portable jobs.

We’re not going to stay in the area (that is NOT the plan) long term, and we’re not ready to settle in any one area right now, so we need to have jobs that will let us work remotely 100% of the time.  Once we find those jobs (John’s current job might let him do that.  Mine will definitely not.), we can leave the area.  The job search can start any time, but will certainly start in earnest once the house has sold.

Step 5: Decide where we’re going next.

The sky’s the limit.  We have some ideas, and it will depend on our timing, but we can go anywhere.

I’m sure there are other steps, and I’m sure there will be other steps, but I think those are the main ones.  We’re doing all of this even though Riley just had his leg amputated, and even while he’s going through chemotherapy.  Dogs are portable, too, and he just wants to be with us.  It doesn’t matter where.  We’ve run out of reasons to delay – we are ready to go.