Moving

We're moving in less than two weeks. We've sold our house and bought a new one in the King.stream neighborhood. Gosh, those two transactions are so easily summed up in a simple sentence -- if only the actual process were that easy! FAR FROM IT!


First there's the fixing up the home which for us involved: regrouting all the tile in our bathrooms, refinishing our hardwood floors, repainting the whole house inside and most of the outside, replacing siding, "refreshing" our kitchen cabinets, ETC! It all took a lot of time, and we paid people to do some of the work which took a lot of moula.


Then there's putting it on the market. We did For Sale By Owner, so we had to do a lot of paperwork and stuff.


Once it's on the market you have to keep the place CLEAN since anybody can come by anytime. Not easy with kids -- although in trying to keep the house clean our kids were introduced to a new concept -- making your bed. Eli was particularly intrigued with this new phenomenon. A couple of days after the house did go under contact Eli feeling distressed asked, "Mommy are we not making the beds anymore? I liked that!"


Well if we move again, we may have another period of bed making. That'll have to satisy Eli :)


Then we went under contract. The kid (age 26) who is buying our house is pretty nice, but his parents are Mr. Beezlebub and Mrs. Mephistopheles, and since Beezle and Stophel are giving their Wittle Boy $60K for a downpayment we've had to deal with them. A. LOT. Stophel is a realtor in her home state so we've been blessed to be able to converse especially with her. A. LOT.


Stophel doesn't feel the need for pleasantries or niceness. She likes to go straight for the jugular. Por Ejemplo, the home inspector noted some soft spots in the roof decking. Wittle Boy asked to have that replaced. We told Wittle Boy that we would get quotes from three licensed, bonded and insured contractors and give him the average of their estimates back in cold hard cash at settlement.


I purposely found three contractors with stellar reputations to give estimates. When Wittle Boy initially received the quotes he was satisfied and told us the matter was settled. But after he showed the quotes to Mama Mephistopheles all hell broke loose. The three quotes were all around 1000 bucks, but apparently that wasn't enough for Mama. She wanted mo' money for Wittle boy. So she called screaming and immediately accused us of not letting the contractors see the real problems, saying that we had purposely misled them. Mama can be so cranky . . . I wanted to tell her "Sweetums, you catch more flies with honey", but Mama Stoph can't be bothered with annoyances like kindness and being polite.


Then Mama called the contractor with the highet estimate and railed on him. He called us later and said he refused to work with her. Mama Stophel has that effect on people.


Now it was Papa Beezle's turn. He decided on his own that we should give Wittle Boy 2000 dollars back at settlement for the roof decking and wrote to the title company instructing them to make that change. Uh oh Papa, yer posed to talk to the seller before you do that. We wouldn't even have known about it had the title company not written to us asking if we had agreed to those terms. No we hadn't, we had not even discussed that possibility with Papa Beezle or Mama Stophel let alone Wittle Boy -- who is the one actually buying the house.


Of course these roof issues weren't the only ones we got to talk about with Mama and Papa. They wanted to nickel and dime us to death on every little thing. You might think, well maybe money is tight for them so they're being extra careful. No Papa and Mama are loaded and live in a big mansion.


Mama Stoph saw how we live and the cars we drive, she knows we are not rolling in the dough. But Mama, bless her soul, wants to teach us the value of a dollar and fight us for every penny.


The rich are always the stingiest, ain't they?


Okay this post kinda drifted from my initial intent. I obviously have some pent up feelings about Mama and Papa.


Then there's the homeowner that we're purchasing our new home from. He's a treasure too. But I'll have to save that for another time.