I’ve said it before: I hate moving. But with any luck, I won’t be saying it again. 🙂

Our experiment at renting out our old place ended a few months ago. Some of you know the details; for everyone else, I’ll just say it was a minor disaster, and it took more than a month to clean up the place. We aren’t giving up on the idea, but we’ve soured on that house. We’ve also got nine years of equity in it, and the value has gone up significantly in that time, so we’re selling it.

Soon after we put it on the market, GoddessJ started looking for a new place. This one is okay, but definitely not what we want, and she didn’t want to live here any longer. (And I wasn’t too enthused about it either.) She found what looked like the perfect place for us through the Internet-accessible real estate “multiple listing service,” just a couple minutes away by car, and half a dozen others to consider as well. We arranged to see them all… some we liked and several we didn’t, but the first one she’d found was far and away our favorite, even beating out noticeably more expensive locations. I’d made a list of the features we wanted (and didn’t want) in a house, and it had all but one of them, as well as heart appeal.

The price was a problem. It was significantly over-priced for what it was worth, to the point that it had been on the market for months with hardly any offers. The owners had had it built for them forty-six years ago, and had put a lot of value into it since then. They were also the owners of a flooring company, and had put in tens of thousands of dollars worth of hardwood flooring too (it’s all hardwood flooring, or expensive ceramic tile in the bathrooms and laundry room — why not, if you’re getting it at cost?). Unfortunately the value they’d added didn’t translate to equally higher value in the housing market, and they were having a hard time accepting that. We put in a low offer, and managed to dicker them down to a price that was almost exactly what it was worth (even though, we later discovered, they’d already rejected higher offers).

The last month, trying to work out all the details, has been pretty stressful. It was an open question, right up until the day we were to take possession, whether we’d even get the loan. But it all worked out in the end.

Last weekend, c-square and W helped us pack up our library, and we (mostly GoddessJ) have been packing the rest of our stuff this week, in addition to fighting off a nasty cold. On Friday we stripped the wallpaper out of two of the rooms. (The previous owners had had a huge piece of furniture in one of them, and it had been there so long that they’d wallpapered around it instead of moving it; once it left with them, we didn’t have much choice. And this was the old seventies wallpaper… very nasty to remove.) Yesterday our friend S, GoddessJ’s cousin A, and A’s husband J came over to get the grand tour and to help us paint those two rooms, plus another where the leaving owners had removed a huge wooden mural. It’s a good thing they were there too, because even with their help and the whole day to work, we only managed to finish two of the rooms and part of the third — GoddessJ and I will need to finish the last of it ourselves today. We also need to finish packing up, because the movers will be here bright and early tomorrow morning. (The cats are going to be visiting GoddessJ’s parents during the move this time… we don’t want a repetition of the last move.) And then, of course, there’s the unpacking stage.

The end result should be worth the effort though. The new place has three times the square footage of the one we’re currently crowded into. It also has a garage… it’s the first house with a garage that I’ve ever owned, and that’s one of the features I’m looking forward to the most, as strange as that may sound. Or maybe not so strange, given the snow that we generally get in winter, and especially the amount that it looks like we’ll be getting this winter. Having a garage will drastically reduce the amount of snow I’ll have to remove from the car over the course of the season.

Barring unforeseen circumstances, this will be the last move we make until we’re too old to want to deal with stairs anymore.

We’ll be off-line tonight, and most of tomorrow until the technician hooks up our new place for Internet service (which will be in the afternoon if all goes according to plan). I’ll set up a delayed post to appear tomorrow morning, and I’ll post again on Tuesday if everything’s good. Wish us luck!