Things are progressing. We didn't close on my old house last week, which I'm really miffed about. But it's finally all in place - I have the check for the sale amount in my paws, I just have to drop it off at the title attorney's office Monday morning. Due to the holiday (grumble, grumble), he can't do anything with it till Tuesday, so I'll probably get my final settlement statement on Thursday.
I can't close on the new house till I get that final settlement statement on the old house. It remains to be seen whether or not I'll get to close on the new house Thursday as well, thereby getting the keys on Friday and moving next Saturday as planned ... or whether they'll make me wait to schedule closing until I have the settlement statement, which means we won't close till Friday or the following Monday and I will have to delay moving by a week.
On the one hand, I really don't want to do that ... and on the other hand, it wouldn't be the end of the world, as I'd have another weekend to pack and try to get things ready here.
Packing. Oi. It's kind of icky. We have a lot packed. A lot of what's left can't really be packed (large items that don't lend themselves well to boxes, like large wall decor, bows and arrows, etc.) or can't really be packed now (the entire kitchen, our clothes). The place still looks like a complete disaster area, and I'm concerned ... and probably rightly so. I suspect this upcoming week is going to be a royal pain in the hindparts, trying to frenziedly finish the packing up ... just in case we do get to move this coming weekend.
A piece of good news ... the sellers finally finalized what they were doing with the issue with the water in the front closet. They had two contractors out to look at it, neither of whom could find anything wrong. Sorta good news - I mean, obviously something happened there, but at least it's not some blatant horrible repair, like a big hole in something. Both recommended some ice shield be put in the area, and - the really good news - the sellers pre-paid to have that done, and as soon as the weather's a little better, a contractor will come out and do that for us. So that's nice - the problem should be fixed, at no cost to us. Can't complain about that.
You know, I go through phases of being sad about moving out of my house, and then cycling around to thinking, "Who are you kidding? You hate this place." I ran onto a photo the other day of the place some years ago, when my dad was still coming over here doing things all the time, and it looked so nice - it was a picture of the front of the house, when the dogwood was still alive and all the shrubs were trimmed up nicely. It reminded me of how the whole place looked in years past, when I had it fixed up fairly decently inside and out ... the rooms not overjunked with stuff (this was back before I joined the SCA, and before I started knitting - yeah, back when it didn't take an entire apartment to house my hobby stuff), the place basically neat and well-kept all the time.
I sometimes wonder if my slack-assed housekeeping and yard maintenance attitudes that have developed over the last 8 or 9 years are just going to carry over to the new house, and I'll junk it up as badly as this one.
But really, I don't think so ... I can't explain it, but I lost all interest in maintaining this place at some point, I just didn't care anymore. It was like, no matter what I do to it, there were still so many issues I couldn't fix that it just seemed a drop in the bucket, and not really worthwhile. Maybe that was the wrong attitude to have, but ... there it is. I mean, for one example - the place was so small, and we have so much stuff because of our various hobbies, that it got to the point where there just wasn't anyplace to put things anymore. When I would stack something else onto a side table or the kitchen table, and think "there I go again, adding to the clutter and mess" - it wasn't pure laziness, it was in part that there simply wasn't any place else to put it.
But with the new place, I don't see that happening. I'm starting out with a clean slate, and one all of our stuff should fit tidily into without it being such a mess. There will actually be places for everything. Starting out that way makes me want to keep it that way, inside and out.
Even the yard, and my 'gardens' - my back yard at the old house was pretty much a 'clean slate' and you'd think that would have encouraged me to do something, but it never really did. I'd look at the dull rectangle that was mostly in shade, and just couldn't figure out what I wanted to do with it. Even when I tried fixing up the pond area, it never really went well (it was too small to effectively do much with, at least with my limited skills), and I never could figure any good way to tie it in with the rest of the yard. It was just it's own stand-alone half-finished corner garden.
Ironically, at the new house, I plan to do something different with my hoped-for gardens. I'm not focusing on the back yard. I'm letting the back yard just be, the big rectangle of a yard dedictated to the kids' play area and whatever the Dread Reverend wants to do with it. I'm focusing my efforts on the front yard (curb appeal!) and the little side yard, which is the area dedicated to becoming my private garden. And since these areas have different shapes, and the front already has a base of basic landscaping (the ubiquitous evergreen shrubbery), plus interesting areas to work with (two trees, a lamp post, a front walk, a front porch for goodness' sake!), I'm much more excited about fixing them up.
I don't know. Maybe I really did just get tired of the old house, and lost interest in trying to fix it up. But one thing does occur to me ... I always had the feeling that no matter how much I did to this house, it was always going to be a cookie cutter house in a cookie cutter neighborhood of nearly identical houses, all lined up like base housing or something. It was never going to look 'really great.' I could do tons of work and spend tons of money, and it was always just going to be so-so. There were two houses on my street where the owners obviously took pride in their homes, and had their front yards nicely landscaped and pretty, and I always enjoyed seeing them. But ... nice as the little yards looked, these places pretty much just looked like every other place on the street. It's kind of like having a condo, or a trailer in a trailer park, and you can do all the fixing up you want, it's just going to look like you took a row of graham crackers and put some Redi-Whip on one of them in the middle of the row. It's still a graham cracker.
The new house has character, that's what it is. It doesn't look like the other houses on the street, and with a little sprucing up, it'll have it's own beautiful, unique look to it.
I don't know ... maybe the 'cookie cutter' theory is a lousy excuse for doing nothing. I don't know, but it is what it is, and my feeling on it is: (a) it's too late now, I'm certainly not canceling the home buying just to stay here and try to force myself to make this place something it's not, and (b) it'll be whatever it is at the new house. If I maintain my interest in wanting to fix the place up nice, then happy happy joy joy. And if I don't, I'll at least have the bare minimum of required decent-looking shrubbery out front, and I'll grumble about trimming it and mowing the lawn, and we'll still have a house that's three times bigger than this one. With an Imaginarium. And a pub. I think it'll all work out.
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