One Year Frenzy-versary Part 4: Blink! The Title Is Ours

Yup, that's right. No joke. On Black Friday of last year, the 28th of November, we settled on the house. Somehow, in the last two weeks of November, we managed to scoot the original early December settlement date up and close before the end of the month - decreasing our interest pre-paid out of pocket at the outset. It definitely helped that the sellers had not been living in the house for the last six months, so they didn't need time to pack and move their things out. Very handy :)

My sister and her husband watched the children for us while we went to settlement and then headed over to the DMV to have our driver's licenses changed. The sellers were out of town for Thanksgiving, so we just signed our end of the papers and that was it. The agreement was that we would receive the keys on December 8th, after they returned. December 8th. Do you remember that we first saw the house on November 9th???

They had our signatures. They had our money. We had just bought the house.

Ready for the funny part? We still didn't have our current house on the market, yet. We had to pack everything up, move it, paint a number of rooms in the "previous" house, finish staining a deck (did I mention it was December?), do some exterior painting, finish a half-done landscaping project, interview a few realtors, and then put the house up for sale.

Ha.

So, you could pretty much say that the next two weeks (at least) were pure adrenaline. Well, okay, you're right - 90% adrenaline and 10% insanity. God is very, very gracious.

After we picked the children up from my sister's house, we went right home and got crackin'. Little Dude went down for a nap, and we went to work on our rather alarming list of things to do in order to get the house "show ready". These photos were taken on November 28th of last year.



Sam decided that a high of around 50 degrees was good enough for some staining (and it actually took fairly well, although dried slowly).



The girls and I headed down to the basement to try to sort through the junk down there. What to keep and take with us? What to give away? What to donate? What to pitch?



Then, I lugged the "what to keep and take with us" pile up the basement stairs, moved the living room furniture out of the way, and started using that front room as the official space for our packed-and-ready-to-go stuff.

The packing and moving plan was as follows: we had already been packing since our contract had been accepted (around November 19th), and we had ten more days to pack before we got the keys to the new house. So, we'd pack, get the keys on the 8th, clean the new house, gradually move smaller things over to the new house between the 10th and 13th, rent a moving van on the 13th and move most of our larger furniture; however, we did decide to leave some of our better pieces so the house would not have to show completely empty. Then, Sam would have to paint at the previous house while I focused on unpacking at the new house. We'd be at around a 2 week countdown for Christmas - and Sam's Mom & Dad were coming to stay with us for a few days.

I'm cracking up as I'm typing this. Did we actually do all of this?

That was the plan. And, can you believe it, that's what we actually did.


Frenzy.