That was easy

  Of all the things we are throwing away or donating a few are too large to easily do so. One of those was the patio furniture, a large glass topped table and 6 chairs. No way for us to easily transport somewhere and nothing really wrong with them. So we decided to sell them quickly. Being the modern day and craigslist existing on the internet I put up a for sale advert on there. Within 2 hours we had 3 offers to buy it (although one offered too little). One phone call and email later we had an appointment for someone to take a look at it. A couple of hours after that I had money in hand and helped someone load up their pickup truck with the furniture. All told, one photograph taken, 1 minute to put advert online and 4 emails and a phone call and the furniture was gone.

  Compare that to how it could have been before the internet made this possible. Advertise it in a local shop or newspaper maybe. Possibly get some interest in a few days. Eventually get a phone call and sometime someone shows up and buys it. Things are so much easier nowadays with the internet making communication so much more instant and to a pretty wide audience if need be. I'm just glad our first craigslist experience was not of the scummy variety you hear about sometimes.

Packing up

  We made a start on seriously packing up stuff this weekend. Things are now in boxes, real things we are taking with us. Mostly the decorative stuff we really don't need day to day for living. The stuff that makes a place feel less barren and livable in even though it is there for purely cosmetic purposes. That alone was 18 boxes. Today we have 100 boxes turning up ready to be filled with more stuff and I suspect we won't finish there. You end up with a lot of stuff after more than a decade living somewhere and being together for a couple of decades. True we have thrown away or donated a ton of stuff already but there is a lot we are taking with us.

  I think the only awkward bit about moving all this stuff is that once the movers take it they won't deliver it to the new house for a few days which means basically living in the caravan (or at least sleeping) until it turns up. The timing is such that we can't move in a single day with the distance involved like we did before when moving within California. A shame really but as long as we can feed ourselves and the cats have somewhere comfy to sleep in the house we will be ok. A small discomfort for the long term benefit of a nice new quiet place to live in.

  Basically now though, other than the physical moving, life is a series of bits of paperwork. Various documents the bank needs, or need to be signed for the selling/buying or just documents so that people can justify their fees it seems. Nothing strenuous a tall, just lots of busy work going on.

Poor Fudge

  Well Fudge had his teeth cleaned yesterday. He has needed it for a while and being an old man of 13 it has been quite a while since his last proper teeth cleaning. Unfortunately for him he had to have one removed. As a result though he seems fine and was happily scoffing his food like his usual self this morning. When I brought him home yesterday though he was still a little groggy from the medicine and couldn't quite walk straight. He knew what he wanted to do but his legs didn't always do what he wanted. It was slightly comical if a little reminiscent of when TipTup had his problems all those years ago. Still this morning he was running along with the girls ready to be fed when I got up.

  I think it is going to take a day or so for him to get over the trauma as it were. He is always the most skittish cat and incredibly wary of strangers so spending most of a day at the vets, even if part of it was unconscious, was pretty stressful for him. It took him a while to get back to purring when he got home, he was totally quiet on the actual drive. For Fudge that is pretty rare, he will purr at just getting to come in to the same room as us.

  Still it is great to have Fudge back home with us. Leaving your pet with someone else is kind of scary sometimes. You want them to treat your pet with as much love as you do.

Yay house

  Well the inspection report for the house we are buying came in and the house isn't falling apart. In fact nothing major really needs doing. There are only a few things we would like to get done before we move in and even then nothing that makes the house uninhabitable. You would expect that with someone living there but you never know sometimes. They could have hidden some fatal flaw really well when we went to see it.

  Still that is another hurdle down. Just the appraisal, getting the loan approved and then the physical act of moving everything to do now. It definitely feels like we are past the worst of this moving stress, just final arrangements to me made and it will all happen and we will find ourselves living there instead of here. Woot.

Science quiz

  Found this science quiz link in my morning breakfast browsing. I took it since it was only 13 questions and got all of them right. Then I looked at the survey results and some of it is quite scary. There is nothing in there that is particularly difficult or obscure and yet quite a few people got some of them wrong, one specifically to do with the atmosphere. It makes me glad that my wife and I don't interact with too many other people since if that is the quality of their knowledge of science subjects then we are in trouble.

Not going to miss this

  Back in the office today for a couple of days. To be honest other than talking to a few people face to face me being here really doesn't achieve much. When the house move happens and I'm working from home most of the time this is something I'm really not going to miss. It is basically 12 hours of my day with commuting and work time to do what I can do in 8 or 9 hours at home. That adds up over time to far too much time wasted. Then consider that I've had 12 years of this since we moved in to the house we are in right now and that is so so so much time. Can't wait to get some of my life back.

  Even more organising going on right now. Still trying to get proper in home estimates on moving and see which moving companies will help us pack rather than us do all of it. Then there is home insurance which is now being quoted, internet access install to be arranged, some kind of satellite TV package to be sorted, electricity to be moved over, garbage collection, fire service, DMV change of address, change of address for cell phones, cancel terminix pest service, change of address on the caravan loan. You get the idea, so many people need to know that we have moved. At least we don't have to inform immigration though this time since we are now naturalized citizens. I've got a huge list of stuff that I'm slowly ticking things off of. Kind of scary how big it is.

Never enough Lego

  Did something quite appropriate yesterday. I broke down all my Lego that was still assembled and got it away in their storage boxes I have. It took me most of the day and made quite a nice pile in the end. I think I took apart roughly 10,000 pieces of Lego and even then I didn't do the over 4,000 pieces in the Lego Tower Bridge I have, that simply got roughly dismantled in to its own box. While I was doing this my wife was watching episodes of Hoarders which seemed really appropriate for the amount of Lego I have accumulated. Nowhere near enough to overwhelm our house like these people with their random rubbish they have strewn about but it does make you go wow that is a lot of stuff.

  With the amount of stuff we have thrown out over the last couple of weeks we should be in a good state to move. All sorts of things we simply don't need anymore, have no use for or simply don't want have gone in the rubbish. Then there was the car full of stuff that was donated to charity and the couple of dozen empty paint tins that were taken to hazardous waste disposal over the weekend. I think we are almost there, we just now are looking at getting rid of the patio furniture since we don't enjoy it much and would rather get something more like what we would use after we have moved.

  It just feels so close now to actually moving. We've passed all the hurdles with selling our house, appraisals and inspections etc. The buyer now just needs to make sure they get their loan and we are done other than signing the final paper work. This week should see any issues with the house we are buying found and resolved then that is sorted. Then just comes the minor point of actually physically moving. Not a trivial step but arguably the most important since it will result in us living somewhere else. Not long now, just under 5 weeks until we are there. Gulp.

Weight weirdness

  Here's a random happening. Both my wife and I have lost weight. We've not really done anything, eaten normally and maybe changed how much we eat a little bit. However we have both lost 7 lbs or so since we last checked out weight. It is really strange, we've not been eating any healthier, in fact there has been more take out food at the moment with all this house stuff going on but there it is. So much for healthy eating and exercise for weight control.

  It really does show how wrong the general opinion about some things can be sometimes. Makes it hard finding help sometimes since the advice you are given is totally wrong for you. Just wish we knew how we managed this so we can keep it going.

Twiddle

  Bit of a thumb twiddling moment right now. Basically we have sent off everything anybody else needs in this whole house moving thing so we are sitting here twiddling our thumbs. Sure there is a moving company to get an accurate quote from but considering that is 5 weeks away there is time. Sure we can pack some stuff up but that is what this weekend is for, starting on that by sorting out the garage and finding more things to throw away.

  Still thinking about it and realising this is going to be weird. Different from anywhere we have lived before in our lives. So much more remote and less people around. It should suit us really well, we are very quiet people who keep to ourselves so finding somewhere we can be that is going to be great. Still the upheaval and change is a huge thing to do. We've done it a few times in our life and it is such a massive change when it comes. Moving country, moving to a totally different house that needed completely fixing up and now moving to a remote place with lots of different things about it. Heck even living in a hall of residence at university was a big change, all those other people around you and no real way to escape from it all.

  Oh well, no point thinking about it until it happens. As long as everything is planned and thought out stewing on it isn't going to do anything. When's lunch?

More trophies

  Spent even more time playing Skyrim last night polishing off a couple more trophies and quests I had not finished. For those interested I'm now at 2505 trophies with the bunch I got from the add on content for Skyrim. I use a trophy tracking web site to work out which ones I have left to get and the best way to go about them. Part of that web site though are the stats from people all over the world, just over a million on the one I use. When you get to look through the stats of other people I realise even though I play a lot I play nowhere near as much as some people in the world. There are people with 5000 or more trophies or have played 300 plus games. I've only played 78 trophy enabled games and probably 20 to 30 or so that don't have trophies. It is staggering how much some people play.

  Then again you don't know who these people are. Spoiled kids with far too much time on their hands. Bachelor nerds who do nothing but play games. Or just an account that is shared between several people like some of them admittedly are. For a normal guy like me who works, spends time with his wife, watches TV etc I suppose my level of playing games isn't too bad. Still I'm proud of what I've "achieved" playing game beyond the enjoyment I get from doing so. It is my way of saying "look how good I am at this" really. Or in some cases "look what I was bothered to do" considering I shun the multiplayer side of gaming due to the amazing amount of internet idiots it attracts. It is just a shame that there are cooperative games that could be quite fun if I could find the right people to play with. Competitive stuff is kind of boring to me, I played it when I was younger and did quite well but just got bored of the same action over and over again. Fighting other people became too predictable to be honest and was a hassle. It is more fun to just go up against a computer, which can be very predictable but comes without the annoyance of other people.

  Well, that was a waffle about nothing wasn't it? Just trying to take my mind off of this moving stuff for the moment while we wait to hear back from various appraisers, testers and inspectors. Lots of other people doing things that we need the results of at the moment.

Crunching numbers

  With all this moving stuff going on I've been doing the numbers on cost of living, rough bill amounts and various bits of money coming in and out that will happen at the new house. To say the least it is looking good. The new mortgage is only a little bit more expensive than the current one and cuts 5 years off the time period even if we don't pay more each month. Property tax is less, vehicle registration is less, state income tax is about the same, no water/sewer costs, the list goes on quite a bit. Not to mention that fuel costs for the car will go down significantly, we won't have to pay a monthly fee to store our caravan, no monthly maintenance fee on the pool. Sure there will be some other fees but nothing that we aren't paying right now, satellite TV instead of cable, internet access instead of cable internet and the fact that we will need to pay for rural fire service since we are outside the city area.

  All this with a salary that is based on living expenses of one of the most expensive areas of the country to live in. It just makes me hopeful that a lot of money can be saved for retirement in the future, bills will never pose a problem (not that they do now really but still) and some more can be spent on recreation for my wife and I including actual holiday trips.

  I know in the end we won't know the exact impact financially until we have lived in the new house for a few months but I am certainly at the point in my life where I just don't worry about the money. After having such a hard time early on in my career proving myself and getting to the point where we could live comfortably I really don't want to give up what we have. With things as they are the rest of our lives are looking really good.

And so it starts

  Well we accepted an offer on our house and over the weekend put in an offer on a house to move to and had it accepted. Today the fun busy stuff started. So far I've interacted with 2 realtors, a loan officer, 2 internet service providers, a title company agent and looked up information in 3 different places. Oh and also asked for a quote on moving our stuff. All that in the first day after this process really started going now that we know it is happening. I suspect the new few weeks are all going to be like this, stuff to do. That and I need to keep working and doing stuff here, life is going to be busy fun :) .

  I'm so nervous and excited now, things are really moving, we have committed to stuff and I've even told a few people at work so they can get used to the idea of me not being in the office. After all this time of wanting to do this it is a relief and gives me hope for things to come. We even started throwing out stuff we don't need last night, all sorts of old crap we don't need and will never use. Found a couple of things where we went "huh, what is that?" or "we still have that?". Much more of that to come I suspect.

  Anyway, time to get on with more things, internet access to check, work code branching stuff to finish and then packing supplies to arrange so we can get a head start on that.

Off we go again

  We'll soon be off again on a short trip (well 6 hour drive for a day and half stay) to look at more houses and take a second look at another. Even one house that had gone to pending is back as active and we will be looking at that as well although you do wonder for what reason it is being listed again. Still with the choice of houses we are looking at we will definitely be putting in an offer this weekend. The whole deal of if it gets accepted and when the dates turn out to be is another matter but there we go. Fun.

  Really not much else going on in my head at the moment. It is all moving stuff with the odd distraction of watching some TV or playing more Skyrim. Once we get past this I suspect more will be going on and my mind can think about other stuff but for now it is all it can do. Definitely a stressful thing to do this moving lark.

Too much cute

  Living around lots of cats you see a lot of behaviour that is just downright adorable. True that behaviour comes with some disgusting side effects like cat poop but the upside is amazing. Take this morning for instance. Our smallest cat Daisy decided to spend some time laying around on the desk where our computers are, purring her little head off, and nosing around both of us, rubbing her head over my laptop, sniffing things and generally being very affectionate and happy.

  To be honest I've never really seen our cats be anything but happy and lovely. They may get mischievous every now and then and try to do things they shouldn't like scratching at furniture, climbing up where they shouldn't and in the case of Boots just needing following so he can go eat food or have a drink.

  You get things like I do every evening though. Towards the end of the evening when my wife has gone to bed to read and I'm sitting up playing games Lucy will climb up on to the sofa and lie down beside me ready to nap for a bit. It happens without fail every time I'm there, this messy furry cat laying around on her back or curled up and purring while half asleep. It then just takes a small tummy rub on her and she will stretch out with all four paws and soak in the rub. If I then stop she looks at me all disappointed and then goes back to sleep.

  What can I say, cats are too cute.

Deciding

  Quite a big decision coming up. What house to put in an offer on in the place we are moving to. Which one do we chose? The really nice house that is over priced? A less nice house that is reasonable? A different one that is in a great location? All sorts of things to consider. As long as the house is good and we are in a quiet area I think we will be happy. Making sure which house that is though is really hard. We will make the decision though and then fret and worry about it. It is the way with these things that you worry about them even though you really won't know then end result for quite a long time afterwards. Only when we have moved and lived in the new house for a while will we really know if we chose the right house. It is going to be stressful but the more we can do to relax and not stew over it the better.

  For now until we go and chose I think we need to relax, maybe pack some stuff away, chose some things to throw away but generally not stress out too much. Last night I slept like a log and didn't worry a bit. Not something I've done for a while now. I can see us moving somewhere nice and getting this over with so we can get on with living our lives together happily.

Different worlds

  I've come in to the office today to show my face and get a couple of things done here. As a result I've been talking to a few people and talked about our house selling process. The people who live in this area are pleased at how it has gone, since for the homeowners amongst them it means good things for their house prices. For people who don't live around here they are completely shocked at how quickly our house sold. We may live in the same logical country but as far as the actual realities of living in a particular place they really are different worlds. Simply telling how fast and overwhelming the response to putting our house on the market dumbfounds people from other parts of the country. Especially if they have never seen a market where supply and demand are so different like they are here currently. It could lead to a bubble again here but by then we will be well clear and living elsewhere.

  I suppose it does come as shocking when you hear of something happening that you could never conceive of occurring in your part of the world. Even then though you can never expect to know of everything that could happen, you should realise that things can be very different. Just strikes me as odd really that people are shocked about things despite the ease of communication in the world now. Unless you shut yourself off from things you hear about most things or at least have the ability to. Keeping an open mind to the possibility of something very different always seems a good idea.

And another one

  It seems some people are still desperate to see our house. Despite knowing that we are looking at offers this evening we have another viewing this afternoon. It really does seem like we chose the right time to sell our house, the prices have recovered enough and there is such a short supply for a large demand selling a house around here, especially one in such great condition as ours, is really easy.

  I think the only time we have been so desperate to find a house to buy was when we first moved here. We had a limited time to find somewhere, buy it and move in. We had not even finished selling our house in England when we started looking. In the end though we did find an ok place and it served us well enough for a few years. Still I hate to think what people with even shorter timelines than us would go through right now. So little chance of getting your offer accepted and then probably not on a place you want but just a place that is available. Really glad we have never had to go through that.

Sniff sniff sniff sniff sniff sniff

  What a weekend. Despite both of us suffering from a cold which spread from my wife to me rather than the usual other way around we showed the house 21 (or maybe it was 22, I lost count) times. By yesterday we already had 4 offers on the house and were expecting that many more to come. As long as one of them is for lots of money I don't mind and with that many we can be choosy about which one we accept in the end. A nice position to be in.

  Now if you will excuse me I'm going to sniff and cough some more until our realtor shows us the offers later today. Just want to get this bit over with so we can make a definite decision on a house to move to when we look at more this weekend.

The motions

  It has and is going to be a couple of days of going through the motions in selling the house. You have people come around, they look all round the house, they make comments, they go away and so far we suspect several offers are coming our way. We have 5 more showings booked today already and the potential for more. In the end though this is just boring drudgery to get to the point we know we will be at, a sold house and an offer on a new one somewhere else. It is just annoying that we have to go through this crap to get to the end, why can't we just skip to the final bit where we live somewhere else, it is inevitable.

  So life is kind of exciting in that stuff is happening but really boring in that all we are doing is showing people our house. There are so many tedious and boring steps in getting to the fun stuff. Life is annoying like that. Still the good stuff makes it worth it in the end.

Doesn't take long

  Well after the house appeared on the listings sites last night we have already had one person to look at our house. Two more turn up in an hour and a half and another one is coming tomorrow. That is just the start, not sure how many more will try once the pictures that are being taken today go up. The people coming so far are doing it just on the description, there is only just now a picture of the front of the house. Not bad for us really. This first person is even going to put in an offer apparently. It just makes me wonder what we will get for this place and hence what we can get where we are moving to.

  Still it is heartening to hear people, who after looking around your house, say you have a beautiful home that is well maintained and you are clearly proud of it. Well I suppose we don't want to live in a dump but if they knew the effort we took to get it looking like this.

  Also found a side effect of working from home. It seems the cleaners at work keep accidently hitting the power strip that my work desktop computer is plugged in to and turning it off. Not so useful when you are trying to use that machine remotely. Fortunately I can ask someone at the office to go check on it and turn it back on. Still it has happened twice so far this week in four days, need to do something about that when I'm next in the office.

  So we are one step closer now. Offers are going to start and we'll accept one of them soon. Then we'll have an offer on a house we want to move to accepted. Then we move. That is all it takes isn't it?

How long?

  Sitting here doing some work and wondering how long things take. We have been checking the websites and our house doesn't show up as for sale yet. Is it done or just not propagated to the various online sources? We need to know. We are in the mode of ready to show people around our house (well, stay out of the way while they look around) and want to get this part over and done with so we can live normally here and relax. We don't want to sit around with the chance that someone might show up. We were told the listing would be up by today but don't see it. Sigh. If you tell someone something it is usually nice to actually do it when you say you would.

  At work this comes up all the time. You have to give an estimate of when something is going to be done, quite a bit of what I do can take some time, on the order of weeks or months even sometimes. Usually it is only a day or two but you need to balance it with everything you are doing and give a reasonable estimate. Don't just say what the other person wants to hear, say what is realistic. Once people get used to you meeting or occasionally beating your realistic estimates they will trust you when you tell them ones later on. It isn't a hard concept to get right. Even if something takes longer as long as you let people know how much and why there usually is no problem.

Grumble

  Got a really rumbly tummy right now. Also slightly pensive with the house allegedly being on the market (we don't see it on the MLS stuff yet). Just waiting for the start of people calling about and coming to see the house. Shame the weather today turned wet and cold, not a great way to show a house but not much we can do about that. It will clear up later and I suspect most of the views we get will be this weekend and we won't have much time to ourselves.

  So decision time. What snack should I get to sate my stomach right now? Really can't think about much else at the moment since I'm just in a sit and wait for things to happen kind of time. We just need to wait for the activity to start.

Out there

  Well, we officially signed the papers to list our house for sale today. It will be on the major listing services later today and pictures will be taken Friday of the interior to spice it up a bit. We suspect though that with the current market conditions here it will sell quickly for a good price. We've also booked another trip to go see some more houses where we are moving to. A couple of new possibilities have turned up that are worth seeing and we want to see a house we are interested in at the right price again. All we have to do now is live in a house and make it look like we don't live in it by keeping it spotlessly tidy and watch the people looking and then the offers roll in.

  Got that feeling right now of things actually happening. We've been getting ready for it and now we know a whirlwind of activity is going to take place and our lives are going to change. You start on something and get things going but you don't feel like anything is happening until you suddenly realise that things are happening and you can see it taking shape. I've hit that point, we've done so much for this moving now that I believe it will be a matter of going through the motions to the end now. Sure decisions will have to be made but I don't think anything difficult will come up (other than choosing an offer on our house, making the right offer on a house and so forth) and we can then move on to sitting down in our new house.

  So close now.

Finally done

Well we have finally finished all the work we had to do to get this house in a state to show and sell. The garden is tidied up, the house cleaned all over, the vast majority of stuff put away and two very worn out people sitting at their computers. The realtor turns up tomorrow to start the process of selling this house and then the real fun and stress begins. Seeing how much we can sell this one for, what we can get for our money where we are moving and then arranging and timing it all so it all lines up when the actual move comes around. This will be the fourth house we will have bought, one in England and so far two in the USA. Should be very interesting living in another state in what is effectively a quite different part of the country. Over 400 miles in some countries is the other side of the country or in a different country all together. Here we are barely making it to another state although the culture of that state is similar to California it has its differences. Time will tell how a more rural quieter lifestyle will leave us. As long as people give us our space I think it will be good.

  Here's to the next couple of months when things happen and plans come to fruition. God help anybody who tries to get in our way, this is happening now.

Proud

  I'm quite proud of all the work my wife and I did this weekend. Especially my wife. Sure it would have been nice to get someone else to do it but we managed it ourselves. We didn't quite get it all finished since the rain arrived and really really rained quite hard, including some loud thunder every now and then. That put a literal damper on things and brought down more leaves but the end result is much neater than what we had. Even as my wife was coming down with a cold she kept going and while I was doing stuff in the garden by myself she was busy indoors cleaning up various things. The house will be ready to put on the market and show this week.

  Starting to make a list of all the people and companies we need to tell once we move and working out how to time the move such that we can move out of our current house and in to a new house close together. It would be nice to do it all over a long weekend and have everything roughly in place the next week. Sure I suspect arranging everything in the new house will take a while and then we will move things around again once we have lived there a while and gotten used to it.

  Thinking of all the work we did, last night I slept so soundly. This morning I actually got woken up by my alarm clock, something that doesn't happen that often. Glad we don't have too much more to do since too much working like that will break me. However we just kept going since the need to move is so high up there a little physical discomfort in the short term will pay off in the long term. Oh well, hopefully this will be the last time we move until I retire at some point.