Everything is just about complete and there is not much left to do. Honestly, we are starting to go a little stir crazy waiting for the move. At least tomorrow we have our real estate agent and good friend Rick coming over to say goodbye, run into Richmond to do some document signing with the real estate lawyer. Today, we have nothing and are going stir crazy.
Moving day is almost here. Only the essentials we need to survive over the next couple of days are already in boxes, we have donated most of the stuff we have wanted to donate and thrown away more stuff than I imagined we even had. It boggles my mind that we trucked all that junk around for, literally, decades. Well, it is gone now and we are grateful for that. Today is the day we clean out the garage refrigerator, give a few more things to the neighbors, and make what I am sure will not be the last trip to the dump. We plan to tear down the computers and set aside other important things we plan to take in the cars on Wednesday. The house will be loaded on Thursday morning. We have one day to clean up and pack the cars on Friday. Christian is scheduled to arrive at about noon on Saturday. We plan to pick him up at the airport and head straight to Trump Winery in the afternoon and then head up the road for a few more hours to find a place to spend the night. We are not sure when we will get to Texas, but we are going to take our time and enjoy the ride.
We have most of everything packed and ready to load on the truck, the donation service will arrive to remove some big stuff we have decided to downsize, the final service call for the house sale is scheduled for later this morning, Lorena is taking the Acura down to get a checkup, oil change, and tire rotation to be ready for the trip, the services have all been scheduled for shutdown or transfer to the new owner, and the apartment and storage are all lined up in Texas. We have on more unscheduled event, signing documents for the house sale in front of a notary, and we think we will have complete other than that and a little bit of packing of stuff we need to use up until the moment we move. Now we are just in waiting mode.
This really has been the least painful move we have ever made. We both wish we would have downsized a bunch a few years earlier. Only God knows what He has planned, but this may be our last big move ever. We kind of hope so. We are in wait mode now. We have planned so much better than we have in the past that our hope is the actual move itself will be anticlimactic.
I have talked to two banks (the one that currently holds our mortgage and the one we hope will give us our next mortgage), four insurance companies, our builder, and sundry others. Lorena called the gas company, AAA, and a service to help haul of a bunch of “stuff” we do not want to take with us. Moving money around to make ends meet is always a challenge at times like this. I am more grateful than ever that Lorena can handle a lot of these kinds of things with me now. What a gift is a capable wife.
We are rapidly moving toward the end of our stay in Virginia. We have been finding housing, insurance, a house building loan, and all the other stuff we need at the Texas end of our move at the same time we are signing documents for the sale of the house. We the inspection and appraisal behind us, we think the only things we have left are the termite inspection and sewer pumping. The picture with this post shows the last box of documents we plan to sort through, after which there is mostly just big stuff like beds to deal with.
My buddy, John, successfully defended his doctoral dissertation yesterday afternoon and it was a glorious event. We are two old guys who did late career PhD’s with much joy. Honestly, I think John beat me badly in the quality of his doctoral studies and research. It is not that I did badly–I am wildly happy with what I did, but John is a force of nature. Congrats to a very dear friend.
This picture was taken from our front porch. This is all our property here in Virginia and we feel blessed to have lived here. There is lots of wildlife, forested areas, beautiful agricultural crop fields, rivers, and everything that makes Virginia such a beautiful place. It is not Oregon or Washington, but it is as close as it gets to that, as far as we can tell, on the East coast. We will not have that in Texas, but it truly is time to downsize and move into town, not that I want to admit that.
In the middle of our move while Lorena was sorting through stuff to throw away and stuff to pack, she found this old picture of my brother, Doug, and I. We really did have a wonderful childhood. It got a little rougher as we moved into Jr. High School and High School, but the older I get, the more I realize how important it was that we had parents who loved us and were trying in every way they knew to do well by us. There were some things that could have gone better, especially in terms of how much time they spent with us, but they were scrapping and working hard just to get by. I am truly astounded by how much better we had it than the majority that surrounded us–not talking in terms of money or creature comforts, but in parents that loved us and instilled values in us that still persist.
I had a long discussion with Brad, our friend and the builder of our new house last night. We have been through the plans so many times, there were not really a lot of decisions to make. The only thing missing from the cost estimate is the price of the rainwater cistern. From what I have investigated, it might be a good bit more expensive than what we can manage, but hope springs eternal in the hearts of men. Still, we have enough information to start things rolling at the bank, so I will spend some time on the phone talking to bankers today. I put reminders in my calendar to start turning off services for our house here in Virginia and turning them on at our apartment in Granbury.
Today the house appraiser for our house buyer’s bank came by. As he was leaving, he said there was going to be no problem with the appraisal. The inspection is complete and we have a sense for what it will cost us to get all two items fixed which is not much. So today, Lorena got storage worked out, I canceled the lawn service after one more mowing and scheduled the truck to come get our stuff. We have found an apartment where we want to stay and I hope to apply for that tomorrow morning. Things are coming at us fast now with much to do, not the smallest of which is the downsizing of our household a bunch more. In the meantime, we are enjoying our visitors like this deer that we almost certainly will not see after we move into town.
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