Moving Daze
September 7, 2010 6 Comments
If you are pregnant, or plan to get pregnant, and have any plans for moving at any point during your fertile years, I will give you this general warning now:
DON’T.
Thank me later.
My god. Moving while pregnant is pretty much the worst invention ever. It has been awful. My uterus is violently protesting my every movement. My ankles are telling me to just sit the eff down already. I wake up feeling drugged, I’m so tired.
But enough of my bitching.
The general house update is this:
In mid-July, we/the bank got a cash offer on our house, which we’ve had on the market as a short sale. The bank came back asking for more money. The buyer agreed. Everything seemed good, but I was secretly dreading the house inspection — and for good reason, it turns out. Our roof started leaking shortly before the inspection and got worse with every rain. During the inspection, the inspector told me that he suspected the roof was original to the house.
Our house was built in 1959. It is 2010. You do the math.
(Though you do have to hand it to good old-fashioned construction. A 51-year-old roof? Not bad.)
In addition to the roof situation, we found out our shower pan has been leaking for years — there was visible water damage that showed water has been seeping through the wall into our closet for a long time.
(Side note: With such major issues, we’re curious how the hell the house passed inspection five years ago when we bought it. The inspector was frank with me and said he feels we were really taken advantage of.)
Surprisingly, the buyer came back a couple of days later, still willing to buy the house cash if the bank would accept a slightly lower offer. Nearly one agonizing week later, the bank accepted the offer. Chris and I got the hell out of Dodge and signed a lease on a house.
Emotionally, it’s been a much more difficult adjustment than I expected. Going through all of our stuff at the old house stirred up a lot of memories — friends, parties, children, family. Moments of love and conflict. Gain and loss. All of the hopes and dreams we had when we bought the house five-and-a-half years ago, all being wrapped up in boxes and moved to another place that is not our own, a place we’re just borrowing. The reality of the financial and personal impact of a short sale and all it entails hit me too. It feels such like a failure, like we’ve lost something, like something was taken away from us. It’s a violent and humiliating feeling. A lot of emotions I didn’t think I had.
Of course, logically I realize that it’s not the end of the world, that we’re among millions of others in the same situation, that we’ll be fine and recover and life is all flowers and rainbows. The house was a huge weight on my shoulders that I can now let go of. I know all of this and, luckily, I think about the positive stuff more often than the shitty stuff.
I’ve heard that home has more to do with the people around you than with the walls you stare at. I guess, sure. But there is something to be said for the memories that walls hold.
There’s also something to be said for having all my Tupperware available for food storage rather than catching rain from a leaking roof, so…
6 comments
Not pregnant, but I know what you mean. We just (3 months ago) moved out of the place I moved into with the girls after I got divorced. It was a rental, kind of crappy, but it held all of my Independence Memories and the memories of the early days of the relationship with mr webbis…so even though the new place is far better than the old by about 200%, I still miss the old place.
I don't know how much more help you may still need but if you call the Jesus Christ of the Lader Day Saints (Mormons) and ask them for help, they will come and do whatever you ask. When we moved a year ago, a friend of mine who is Mormon called her church and the morning we needed them, four came out and packed our moving truck. The next day when we arrived at our 'new' house to unpack our truck, there was a car load of 5 waiting in front of our house to unpack stuff and help move us in.
At no point did they try to convert us to Mormons or even ask us our religious belies. They were just there to help. (We are Lutheran)
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Oh I absolutely understand that feeling. It is violent, and awful.
Having just moved twice with two youngin's, I can relate. I can also relate to the joy when there is a leak in the ceiling to calling maintenance and someone shows up within a day to fix it at NO cost to you. There are some advantages to renting and when you have young kids, you don't realize how much time and money you spent on the home that you don't have to worry about any more. Just pick up the phone.
As for the memories and the hopes and dreams we all had for our first home, I don't know what to tell you. Every time one of us talks about the old house fondly, the other one is quick to jump in to remind us of the slanted creaking floor, broken tile in the bathroom, strange odor when it rains that we never noticed when looking at the house, the fence that needed replacing, etc. Doesn't take long to realize it was time to leave that house.
No, I totally agree. It's like a bad breakup. You start to romanticize the relationship that you WANTED but never was. You have to remind yourself of the jerk who called you a bitch and left his socks on the floor.
Expect to cry more when you actually close on the house. Even though JC and I moved into a 'better' house after our first, since we didn't get to close on our new house for 3 weeks after our sale and had to live with his sister, I couldn't help but think we had made a mistake. We closed on our sale, then took one last look at the house and both cried and hugged right there on the lawn for all the neighbors to see. There's something special about the house you bring your kids home to. I think in time you will be able to drive by it with the girls and point to it and tell them that's the first place they lived. And you'll soon be creating new memories. Time will heal this wound.
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