When Friday dawned we still had a bit of packing to do and we still didn’t have a definite time for the closing on the new house because our new mortgage was still in underwriting. Things I have learned about the post-bubble real estate market at the end of this decade: it is a great time to buy because prices are low; it is a bad time to sell but not that bad a time to rent out (rental prices won’t cover pre-bubble mortgage payments, but ah well); it is a mind-bogglingly crappy time to expect mortgages to get underwritten in timely fashion because all the banks are being ultra-cautious to write only good loans (at least as far as everyday anonymous citizen homebuyers go). However, we were optimistic that the closing would happen before the end of the day Friday since we had to move on Saturday. (Had to = tenant of townhouse with signed lease with move-in date of Tuesday, and a couple days needed to fix up and clean up the townhouse, plus truck rented for Saturday and friends lined up to help.) So we forged ahead with our only working roadmap: my wife Mayflower would go to work for the noon-to-8 shift, and my son Ryder would spend a full day at daycare, all while I continued packing and waited for word about the closing.
This whole tale is one of near-disasters and semi-debacles, but there were a few bright spots along the way. The first one came Friday morning when U-Haul called to confirm my Saturday truck rental. The U-Haul location manager actually went far beyond confirming my rental: given the impending winter weather, he offered me an extra day FOR FREE if I wanted to pick up the truck that day. I, of course, said “I’ll be right there” and Mayflower dropped me off at the truck lot on her way to work. I got the truck back to the townhouse and set to some more packing, figuring it would be nice to be able to start the loading and heavy lifting as early as possible Saturday morning instead of waiting for U-Haul to open.
The middle part of the day was pretty tough and I will admit something right here: I probably could have done a lot more to get us physically ready to move out than I did, but it was psychologically impossible because I still had no definite commitment from the mortgage bank that we would be able to close that day. We had already missed the window for our Plan A, which was to close at 9 a.m. on Friday with both me and Mayflower present. Plan B was that we would close later on Friday, and I would have power of attorney for Mayflower and sign both our lives away on my own. Plan C was that we wouldn’t close at all, but we would begin renting the new house from the seller’s until the sale was settled and closed some time the following week. On the face of it, all three of those options involved us moving on Saturday and therefore the uncertainty in no way justified not getting ready to move. But it still managed to sap my motivation all the same.
Simultaneously, the storm clouds were gathering, literally. Several of my friends called me and expressed concern that they wouldn’t be able to come help on Saturday if the snow was bad, but also offered to help on Friday night. By the third time I had gotten that exact offer, since I did in fact already have the truck, I decided to take everyone up on it.
My mortgage broker e-mailed me at 2:25 p.m. to say the underwriting paperwork was finally finished, which put us back on track for Plan B, closing at 4 p.m. Our realtor drove to Mayflower’s vet clinic to pick up a signed, notarized document giving me POA, and when she called me to tell me she had it in hand I asked her what amount of funds I needed to bring via cashier’s check to closing. (Of course, once I got to the bank I had to call her again and ask to whom the check should be payable – it’s been a while since I did this last and I totally thought that “cashier’s check” meant “payable to CASH” – whoops.)
I made it to the title company offices just a few minutes early and met the associate who was working our closing and he told me that the funds required were several thousand dollars more than my realtor had told me. Because somehow the good faith deposit we had made with our contract on the new house had “never been verified” and therefore wasn’t being counted as part of our down payment. At that point all I wanted was a key to the new house and I would have emptied every bank account in my name to get it, but fortunately my cooler-headed realtor was there to point out that losing the good faith deposit was completely unacceptable. Also fortunately I had brought with me all the paperwork in my “to fax to the mortgage broker” folder which included bank statements showing, at the very least, that the deposit check had been cashed weeks ago. The title company managed to track it down eventually, but basically what should have been a one hour closing took two hours. So at 6 p.m. with house key in hand I raced over to daycare to pick up Ryder, then headed home to feed him and put him to bed.
My buddies showed up around 8:30, which coincidentally was exactly when the snow started to fall. The snow immediately began to stick so we loaded the truck as fast as we could with large sealed boxes and heavy pieces of furniture. One of my buddies brought a snow shovel and a bag of rock salt, which was TOTALLY CLUTCH. (Hereafter I will refer to him as “Clutch”.) By about 11 p.m. the truck was almost full and we decided to head to the new house to unload. At this point it may occur to you, as it did to me, that not everything would have fit on the truck in one load if we had gone the originally planned route of doing the entire move on Saturday. So in a sense the snow was lucky for us there.
One buddy was feeling under the weather and parted ways with us to head home, while another buddy drove his own car so he could head directly home from the new house. Clutch rode shotgun with me in the U-Haul. The snow was coming down fast but there were already plows roaming the highways so we figured as long as we took it easy we should be all right. There was a moment of panic when all traffic came to a stop near where Route 28 meets I-66, but it turned out to be momentary and due to some mysterious police activity in the middle of the highway, probably an accident. We got to 66 and from there to the new house, despite the fact that I barely remembered how to get there myself, and the total trip time was probably double what it would take in temperate weather. I backed the U-Haul halfway down the driveway and we pulled out the loading ramp, but it iced up pretty quickly even with the rock salt, so we did most of the unloading with one person stationed on the truck and two men in the driveway carrying things. At first we carried things into the house and to their proper room, then we just took things into the den, then we just dumped things in the garage. When the truck was empty we took off, I dropped Clutch off at his car and said see you tomorrow … maybe?
I got back to the townhouse around 3 a.m. We had already moved most of the big furniture but not Ryder’s crib or our bed, and I climbed under the covers … right about when Ryder started having a screaming fit, probably due to teething. Mayflower had been up late packing while my buddies and I hauled furniture, but she threw every trick in the book at the baby and tried to let me get a few hours of sleep. At various points I was tossing and turning, too wired to sleep, and she was lying asleep on the floor with the baby in the crook of her arm. We were up by 8 a.m. Perhaps this rough night explains some of our impaired judgment later.
Yet another buddy who lives in the next development over from the townhouse walked over Saturday morning to help load the beds on the U-Haul. (He was the only one who could rightly countenance getting there in the midst of the blizzard.) By the time that was done we were deeply into the most hellish part of any move, where you start finding more and more random crap in various corners of the house, none of which presents a logical way to pack itself, and you’re running out of boxes anyway, and you fight the urge to throw everything in garbage bags and sort it out later. And the snow, meanwhile, had not stopped since the night before and was piling high all around us. Near noon, Mayflower announced that we were cutting our losses and moving what we had on the truck at that point. My walking-distance buddy offered to come to the new house to help unload but I refused and sent him home, figuring it was easier for him to walk home at that point than for us to try to figure out how to get him back hours later through that much more snow. I drove the U-Haul alone, while Mayflower drove Ryder in her car.
You may be familiar with the cramped feeling you get in your hands when you spend a day or so moving, lifting heavy boxes and whatnot. You may also know a similar clenching pain you get from white-knuckle driving in bad weather with a deathgrip on the steering wheel.
Multiply those together and that was me by the time we got through the weekend. The drive on Saturday was by far the worst. The plows had been out all day and the night before, but they couldn’t keep up with the volume of snow. Mayflower and I passed many, many cars and trucks that had spun out off the road and into ditches and otherwise made a mess. It freaked us out and made us wonder what those drivers had done wrong that we could avoid doing, but all we could do was press forward with grim determination since we were already committed. It almost worked, too, but the cul-de-sac where our new house sits was covered in nearly a foot-deep snowdrift by midday Saturday. Mayflower’s car got stuck and she walked the final leg to the house, baby in arms. She called me to warn me, and I told her the truck was much heavier than her car and could probably clear the snow – then I proceeded to get stuck in the same drift about ten feet closer to the house.
With no real choice but to dig some tire-width tracks up the street to our driveway, I got down to doing just that. Amazingly enough, one of our new neighbors came out armed with his own snowshovel to help me. I am humbled and grateful for all the help I got from friends this weekend, but then again, that’s what friends are for. Getting an unsolicited assist from essentially a stranger who lives a couple doors down from the house I just bought unequivocally wins Human Decency Moment of the Year. We got some further help from the husband of one of Mayflower’s co-workers, as they live within walking distance of the new house and walked over to lend a hand. Once I got the truck pulled up to the driveway, we went back to dig out Mayflower’s car. Originally we had planned to dig tire-tracks again, connecting her car to the path we had just cleared for the truck. But that path was already filling up again with snow so we opted to simply cut over to the curb so she could at least pull over from the middle of the road. We made a parking space and Mayflower got behind the wheel … to find the battery had been drained by her hazards. So we pushed her car into the space.
I dug one more trench through the snow, from the back of the U-Haul down the driveway to the garage door, and we unloaded the truck, while all our neighbors came out to shovel their driveways. I’m happy to report that all the neighbors are really nice and welcoming (I’m even willing to forgive the constant “Wow, you picked the wrong day to move!” commentary). We got the truck emptied by sunset, although again that was mostly in dump-everything-in-the-garage mode. We made some dinner and got the baby and ourselves to bed by 7 p.m. Since our bedframe and mattress were in the garage and we had no inclination to wrestle them upstairs, Mayflower and I slept on a futon mattress on the living room floor. (We could have slept on gravel and broken glass at that point.)
It stopped snowing, finally, around 1 a.m., but when we got up Sunday morning we still had much more snow to contend with. I had to dig out the truck, in order to make one more trip back to the townhouse and gather the last of our stuff and get it to the new house and then return the truck. Mayflower had to dig out her car so that it could get a jump from roadside assistance. We managed to get all that done by taking turns staying inside with Ryder, but then we prevailed upon Ryder’s godparents to watch the child while we did the final moving truck run. We were met at the townhouse by Clutch and his three daughters, and they helped us tremendously by digging out my car while Mayflower and I gathered up the last few things (well, all right, more than a few things, it was a really absurd nearly full truckload), all of which took basically the last remainder of Sunday’s daylight, which means if not for Clutch’s family’s help it would have taken us several hours into the night which would have sucked profoundly. It already sucked a great deal because the townhouse parking lot was not well-plowed and the two parking spaces for our townhouse were not shoveled at all, so the U-Haul had to be parked mid-lot, blocking other people in … just imagine the biggest mess you can and you will not be far off. At any rate we got it done and even managed to run the vacuum through the whole townhouse before leaving. By the time we headed to the new house again (me in the U-Haul, Mayflower in my car with a sidetrip to pick up the baby) it was too late to return the truck and I had resigned myself to calling out from work on Monday in order to take care of that last bit of business.
We thought we were done for the day once we unloaded the U-Haul at home, but then a city snowplow operator knocked on our front door and asked us to move the two cars and the truck in the cul-de-sac (driveway still not shoveled except for a moving trench, plus mostly blocked by a PODS unit that had been transported Friday – cannot even contemplate what would have happened if the PODS transfer had been scheduled for after the blizzard) and we obliged them by shuffling vehicles down to the cross street, then shuffling back when the plows were done. Kind of irritating but in the long run nice to know the city services are so diligent.
I set the alarm for ungodly early Monday morning but the magic radio people informed us that the federal government was closed for the day so I didn’t even need to call out. Loving the life of the contractor! Once the morning warmed up a bit we took a family outing to Sears because the sellers took their washer and dryer with them and we need some of our own. Please take a moment to let that sink in: we MOVED. During a BLIZZARD. With snowdrifts up to our KNEES that we trudged through all day. Into a house without a DRYER. The drying rack is still getting a lot of use in the foyer. (The new washer/dryer arrive tomorrow.) Then we split up, I went back to the townhouse one more time to grab our mail (forwarded as of yesterday), pick up the two propane tanks we hadn’t trusted in the back of the U-Haul on any of the three trips back and forth, and shovel at least one of our parking spaces for the new tenant. I also ran some errands in the area that should have been done before the move but inevitably weren’t. Mayflower meanwhile went to her clinic to bum some free internet access (we hope to have home service by January 4) and find out where exactly we were supposed to return the truck, which finally happened Monday evening.
Now all that remains is to empty our PODS unit and have it picked up, and unpack and put everything in its proper place, including our bed which is still garage-bound. We even reintegrated the pets into the household as of Monday (for the dog and normaler cat) and Tuesday (for the neurotic cat). Oh, and it would be nice to get a tree and decorate a bit for Christmas.
So, all in all, the move winded up embodying almost everything I hate about helping other people move – it was chaotic and disorganized and full of last-minute changes of plans and seemed like it would never end. I feel suitably mortified by that, though not as shamed as I feel about just getting on the road at all on Saturday under such foolhardy conditions. But, I remind myself, all’s well that ends well and however much I owe it to truly mad dumb luck, the move did come to an end and everyone did come out of it well.
And we’re never moving again.
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