Category: Projects Page 5 of 7

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.

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.

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.

There is a lot of packing we need to do to get ready for the move, but the temperature is in the low 100’s, the humidity is high and it is Independence Day weekend. It is hard not just to throw up our hands and take a nap. I got stuck doing a bunch of work for my day job that needs to be done before I take time off to do the move, but Lorena actually got a few things done. Today we will do more and need to dive into it hard next week. After our church meeting this morning, we hope to run down to Costco and Home Depot to pick up more packing materials so we can pack a few things this afternoon.

Lorena and I plan to spend most of the weekend packing and throwing away stuff to get ready for the move at the end of July. We have downsized an amount I never would have imagined possible already and have decided to do a ton more. The goal is to get all of our worldly goods into a 26 foot moving truck, the Honda CRV, and Christian’s Acura sedan. Granted, there is not much room in those last two vehicles, but every bit helps. We are donating all our beds and frames (who knows whether they will take the mattresses, but we will throw them away if they are not accepted), a bunch of end tables, all the patio furniture, table lamps, the sofa and recliner from the living room, and anything else we think we do not need or want for the new house. We are gifting a bunch of large planters and a metal garage rack to our neighbors. Hopefully, we will have most of the packing done by the end of next week.