Closing & Moving in

2/25/2004      We decided to drive up to close on the house so that we could leave one car and fly home.  The trip was fairly uneventful other than the fact that it was entirely planned around a 150 mile detour through South Carolina so that we could take the Blue Ridge Parkway from North Carolina to Virginia and after only 20 miles it was closed due to an impending blizzard.  This caused us to get lost in the mountains but in the end we got there without losing too much time.
2/26/2004      We met with Deborah Palsha, our Maryland realtor, and did the walk through.  The place is as hideous as we remembered it and now we found that the plumbing was basically exploding each time a new section of the house was hooked up.  This was not good but at least we didn't end up paying for any of the repairs.  We bought the place 'as is' but water and electricity were must-haves to see the contract go through.
2/27/2004     Finally!  Closing day!!!!!
    After all we'd been through so far it was hard to believed we'd finally own the old girl.  The day started off pretty much as you'd suspect in that the hotel didn't bother putting in our wake-up call.  Luckily for us, Beth hasn't slept well in 5 weeks and happened to check the time during one of her restless moments.  We made it to the table exactly one minute early and it all went without a hitch.
     As soon as the deal was taken care of we raced back to the house and saw that the plumbers were still trying to repair all the burst pipes.  It seemed that each time one run of pipe was fixed the next would fail.
     Our cleaning company showed up at 1:00 and I'd have to say they did a pretty spectacular job.  It was a tougher job than they anticipated and they were one worker short.  We had agreed to 4 workers for 3 hours and when 3 hours were up I told the foreman I had paid for 12 hours of labor and they weren't going anywhere.  They stayed another hour but still didn't get to the dining room or the rear kitchen.  The house was just too big and filthy.  We tipped them each $10 and sent them on their way.
     The plumbers threw in the towel at 5:20 complaining that they'd been there 20 minutes past quitting time.  They did not get tipped.
      When they all left we went into Frederick and bought a mattress and box spring set so that we could set up a small apartment in what will be the den.  We sat and watched TV and listened to the new sounds of our new home.  It was actually kind of creepy.
2/29/2004      Most of our weekend was spent scrubbing floors and tearing out walls & old kitchen cabinets.  It was filthy work but we were delighted with the results.  The old flooring was beautiful in an antique kind of way and once the library and dining room were opened up it was a feeling of relief to be able to walk from one side of the house to the other without having to go outside.
3/4/2004       We're back in Florida. Five days to go until we pick up the trucks and start packing.
3/5/2004      Bill called this morning to inform us that a permit was never pulled on our air handler and also that it has to have a drip pan installed underneath.  I called the guy who installed it for us and he was of absolutely no help whatsoever.  Jimmy Mac is a crook from the get go and I basically told him so while hanging up the phone.
     The long and short of it is that we now had to run down to city hall, buy a $40 permit, and then contact an AC company to come out and install a drip pan.  This means my weekend will be spent clearing out the garage and opening up the ceiling so that I don't have to pay some technicians a million dollars an hour to watch them do it.  The bill will already run us about $450.
    Could it get worse?  Sure it could!  Jimmy Mac didn't jack the unit up high enough to get a pan underneath so the techs will have to do that, too.  I hate that Jimmy Mac.
    You may be saying, "Poor Chuck and Beth.  It just can't get any worse for them after all that."
    Sure it could!
    Even after all of this is done, the buyer (who is a single woman from New York City) still isn't sold on accepting our generous offer of $1,000 for future repairs so that we can get past the table and get on with our lives.  She's excited and in love with our home but she's a frightened little kitten, shivering in the cold and ever so vulnerable!!
    What she doesn't know is that if she asks us for so much as one more thing the entire deal's off and we'll have the house re-listed at a higher price.  She'll be out of luck and if she still wants it it will cost her $5,000 more and I won't fix anything or make a single concession.  It's hard ball time and she's rubbing me the wrong way.  It's a seller's market right now and I'll yank the rug out from under her feet without batting a single eyelash quicker than the proverbial New York Minute.
    I want to hear one thing right now: it's a done deal.  Anything other than that will kill this deal.
3/7/2004   Our hair has now turned white from stress but it's over.
   The buyer has signed over to buy the house 'as is' with a thousand dollars from us for repairs to be put in an escrow account.  We have no idea if she'll need the entire thousand or not and to us it's worth the money just to wash our hands of the deal and get on with our lives.  The only thing we have to do now is get all of our stuff into the trucks by Wednesday at 1:00 and get outta Dodge. 
    Of course, we also have to get it all into the new house which will involve more physically strenuous work than I've had to deal with in almost five years but that's okay.  My body needs the workout to kick-start it for what lays ahead.
3/9/2004      7:30 am-Today will be the day the move starts.  We went out with friends last night (a most enjoyable evening) and so here I sit with a small headache, a need to go pick up the trucks, and Monte sleeping in his truck in our driveway.  Why?  No one knows.  Monte moves in strange and mysterious ways.
     11:18 pm- We are 99% packed and the house is emptied of almost everything.  Our bodies are racked with pain, our minds numb.  No tempers have flared but all of us have felt the tension.  Tomorrow will be strange..  We'll have to decide which things will be staying behind. 
     This will be the final posting at this web address.  Wish us luck.
3/10/2004      5:30 pm  The closing almost went off without a hitch except for the city inspection on the house's air handler.  We ended up having to shell out yet another $350 to the buyer to take care of any work that still needed to be done.  This forced us to search out a contractor and that in turn delayed the closing by an hour.  One thing led to another and so instead of hitting the road at 3:00 as we'd hoped we left Clearwater at around 5:00 which put us in Tampa at rush hour.  Our original plan to stay in North Carolina that night was shot and we ended up in Southern Georgia instead.
3/11/2004     10:30 pm (Brunswick, Ga.) -  After six hours of driving we ended up staying at a nice little hotel just off I-95.  The fact that the town's name is Brunswick is just a coincidence as we had originally stopped at a Motel 8 and since they didn't accept pets we were sent up to the next exit which took us to this town.  Monte was given his own room and that left the rest of us in a very small room where we quickly showed the cats their temporary litter boxes.
     The cats are hilariously funny and we have taken great pleasure in watching them as they attempt to do normal cat things and end up on their backs or falling into waste paper baskets.  Both of them are completely doped up and their eyes are completely unsynchronized making them appear drunk or retarded.
     We slept almost immediately and got moving as quickly as possible in the morning.  Because of our weak start I figured we'd roll into Brunswick at around 10:00 pm.  This wasn't to be the case.  We actually got within 1 hour of DC and hit a solid traffic jam at around 12:30 am.  I checked the map and decided to reroute us across Virginia and then take a smaller road North which would take us right into Brunswick...or at least pretty close to our mark.
     Famous last words.
     Taking I-95 would have normally brought us into Brunswick in about 2 hours from the point we left it.  It now took 3 hours and this was while driving trucks loaded from end to end, top to bottom.  Most of the roads were okay but poorly lit but the last 30 miles turned into small country roads with many twists and turns.  In fact, the final 12 miles were on tiny roads peppered with even tinier bridges and incredibly steep hills.  We found ourselves either riding the brakes down inclines neither Monte or Beth had ever experienced or flooring the engines as they climbed 1/4 mile long grades that normal cars would be challenged by.  The trucks often got down to 18 mph and there were moments when we weren't all together positive we'd make it up and over these monsters.  In our exhausted states we felt somewhat helpless and a little frightened but we made it.
     I should mention here that we had purchased short wave radios so that we could communicate with one another during the trip.  These had turned out to be invaluable, not only for keeping us together at odd turns in the road but also for keeping us awake for the last stretch of the trip.  We were literally hallucinating by the time we hit Brunswick and all we could think about was sleep.
     The trip ended horribly but we were too tired to do anything but laugh at our situation.  I pulled the first truck onto West C Street and found it impossible to back up to the house so I took it down the hill.  Monte decided to just park at the top which was a very smart decision.  When I got to the bottom, the tail gate dug into the asphalt and the abrupt angle wedged the truck so that the rear tires were suspended in the air.  I had to call a towing service to be dragged out onto the main road.  The state and local police showed up and kept us company while we waited and we had a nice chat with them about the house and the town.  It was then that we learned that the former tenants were crack addicts and so we could now proudly say we had purchased a true crack house.  Lovely.
     At 6:30 the tow truck driver showed up and yanked me off the hill.  I parked the truck on the side of the road, trudged up the hill, and we all settled in for a nice 4 hour nap.
3/12/2004      2:45 pm.-  Monte and I unloaded as much as we could and finally had to quit.  We just didn't have any strength left and so as soon as it was verified that we'd have a crew coming on the 13th we just dropped everything.  The four of us drove into Frederick, ate dinner at the Double T Diner (a great restaurant if there ever was one) and returned to the house to get some much needed rest.  All we had were a few mattresses and enough supplies to shower and drink Pepsi.  We didn't care.  We only wanted to rest.  Our minds were fuzzy and our bones hurt.
3/13/2004     9:00 am-  My brother Jim called and said he was on the way.  We all raced around to get cleaned up and the guys my other brother had hired showed up. My buddy, Tim DuPriest showed up at around Noon because he had hit a traffic jam that involved a medivac chopper but he was the proverbial 'fresh horse' we needed to pull us through and we got the job done!  I have to say that with only a crew of 5 men, 2 women, and 5 children we did an absolutely amazing job of gutting the last 1 & 1/2 trucks.    Some of the larger pieces wouldn't fit through the stairways and had to be lifted up onto the rear roofing and then pulled in but in the end we got it all in and ordered up a ton of pizza to feed our crew.
     I just can't thank everyone enough.  It was an amazing end to an impossible journey.
3/14/2004     We started organizing our lives and shifting boxes around here and there but a big part of our plan was to take a few days off from the move and see some of the local sights.  Monte had never seen DC so we all took off and went to the National Cathedral and then the Smithsonian.
3/15/2004      Beth stayed home with Christina and worked on getting the kitchen organized.  Monte and I took the subway into DC and saw a couple of museums and an albino squirrel out on the Mall grounds.  We returned home to a smoked chicken dinner, ate, and everyone crashed.
3/16/2004     I've been up since 8:30.  It's going on 11:30 and Beth has emerged but Monte is still sleeping.  I only mention this because it's raining and is the first day everyone has been allowed to rest until they feel they've had enough.
    We live in a sea of boxes with pathways carved through them.
3/20/2004     Monte will be leaving our company today and so it's finally time to really get down to business in respect to putting things away.  At this point we have several rooms that are just beginning to look livable and the goal is now to at least get all the boxes out of the way, either in the attic or stacked off into closets as in the case of our library.  
      Today is a Saturday so we'll have a day and a half to rip into this project before I start  work on Monday and Beth is left to her own devices in respect to decorating.  The kitchen appliances will be here on Monday and that leaves us with the task of demolition and removal of the kitchen walls and ceiling for the rest of the week.  We also will be ordering the new cabinets.  With a little luck?  We may even have our kitchen done in 1 month.*
That ends this section.

*  Was I really this stupid just six months ago?  Chuck 9/7/2004