T minus (roughly) 18 hours

We are counting down the hours before we leave our house forever and take our first steps into our new sailing life! Our house is nearly empty except for a last few items that are coming with us and the furnishings that were sold with the house. It has been a crazy busy week since we listed the house for sale around this time last week. Below is a timeline of events plus a little, funny last celebration story!

Friday, Jan 15: The day before, we had a couple of early viewers of the house before formal listing. One couple are friends of our neighbors, and the other couple had been clued into our property coming for sale a couple of months previously. The house wasn’t quite right for one couple and the others eventually would make an offer. They viewed the house again today, and we started filling out all those fun forms one gets to do when transacting real estate. We’ve been at a bit of a crawl with packing because of needing to keep the house looking ship-shape and staged. We also heard from our real estate broker that they would wait a day to list, thinking an offer would come from one or both couples who got an early viewing. We insisted that they proceed ahead with listing…we wanted a bid war and not listing was not going to accomplish that. The “For Sale” sign has made its way to our front yard.

Saturday, Jan 16: This was a bit of a down day. The real estate folks were busy getting materials published for listing, but ultimately did not go live today. However, there has been a continuous parade in front of our house of folks stopping to write down the number on the for sale sign. Even without a listing, there’s already a ton of interest. Real estate brokers were at least notified via their list serves and our broker was fielding calls all day. Sunday is already fully booked with multiple showings. Monday is starting to fill up.

Sunday, Jan 17: Happy 11th birthday to my son Ian! My how time flies. Ed and I did some rounds of having a last visit with some of our family and friends as we had to stay out of the house all day. First offer came in around 4pm…full price and cash! We also got word that two more were on their way!

Monday, Jan 18: Happy birthday to my stepson Nick! Lots more appointments for showing, and we have run out of ideas for things to do while out of the house. I guess driving aimlessly around town is fun? Selling a house during a pandemic kinda sucks…. I also got a text from our boat dock neighbor that the owner of the house where we rent our dock is in foreclosure and his house is getting auctioned tomorrow!! WTF?! Thanks for the notice?? Ed and I spent our entire morning feverishly making phone calls trying to figure out exactly what the heck was going on, why our landlord failed to notify us, and trying to secure a new dock on short notice. At least our boat is getting moved to be hauled out in two days, so that gives some time to find a new dock. That dock has been a comedy of errors from day one…but that’s a discussion for another time. Last showing was at 4pm, and then we sat down with the real estate broker to review offers. We received the other two, one of which was also cash with an escalation clause. Sweet! Bid war! After a bit of back and forth, we finally settled on the cash offer that went over asking price. Yay!

Tuesday, January 19: Now that the house is effectively sold, we can really dig in on the final stretch of packing. We made numerous runs to the storage unit, good will, and the dump. We are still planning a January 25 departure which gives us six days to clear out the house.

Wednesday, January 20: Early phone call from the captain who is supposed to move our boat to the marina. Apparently the folks that were supposed to make the haul out appointment forgot to do that. *Facepalm* Is anything going to go right with this boat this week?? Waiting to hear back when they can haul. More packing, more trips. I also decided to start looking at the weather forecast for driving south. The Siskiyou Pass gets snow fairly regularly this time of year, and we’d rather avoid that if possible. It appears snow is forecast starting midday on Sunday and continuing for the foreseeable future. Monday is starting to look like too late of a departure. We are now going to attempt to get out of here as soon as we can on Saturday. We also got a request from the buyers to come see the house again on Friday because the wife and son can’t stay for the inspection. Grumble. We okay-ed it, but with explanation that we will try to time an errand around that time, no promises, but will be packing and the house will look like that. I scheduled with U-haul to pick up a trailer on Friday at the time they are supposed to be at the house.

Thursday, January 21: More packing, more trips. We already cleared out so much stuff! How can we still have so much to go??? AAAAAHHHHH! It’s never ending! Good news though. They can haul the boat tomorrow! Thank goodness. We are now committed to leaving Saturday. We don’t want to get held up with snow. Ed’s sister is taking many of our kitchen items that we aren’t keeping so we’ve implored her to come quite early on Saturday. I decided to cook one last, albeit simple, meal in my beloved kitchen. We also packed up all our wine today, and found a bottle of cabernet from 1984 that was gifted to Ed many years ago. Cabs keep a long time, but 37 years is probably pushing it. We decided to crack it open and enjoy with my “macaroni surprise” (literally a hodge-podge of whatever I had left). Mmmmm, nice wine pairing, hahaha! The wine was definitely at the end of its life, but drinkable…not great.

Ed, on a whim decided to look up the price of this vintage just out of curiosity and found this:

Holy shnikes!! We managed to have the cheapest expensive meal on one of our last nights in our house. We got a pretty good laugh out of that. The wine was past its prime though. These prices must have been from earlier years. Anyone who would pay that now is crazy.

Friday, January 22: We woke up to good news that our boat actually, for real, no kidding, made it to the marina. We asked for photo evidence just to make sure:

It’s definitely Serenity and not a decoy! Big sigh of relief on that one!

More packing, packing, packing…ugh, I sound like a broken record. I can taste freedom from this never ending chore. It’s sooooo clooooose! We picked up the trailer and the buyers made it over for their visit with their agent. Despite multiple notes and emails to agents showing the house to NOT LOCK OUR DEADBOLT, he locked the G– d— deadbolt! We have a good reason for this, but I won’t bore you with details. I have now resorted to taping over the deadbolt with a big fat “NO” written on it. We started loading up the trailer with the stuff that’s coming with us to the boat. I thought we’d have a lot more stuff coming with us than we do. The trailer will only be about half full. I guess it just feels like so much more because of the time involved with getting the house emptied out. I guess we did pretty good with not keeping too much stuff. Yay!

It still seems like we have so much to do tomorrow, but perhaps we are just starting to feel the stress of this week. I can’t wait to get on the road. There is something calming and liberating of simply getting moving. Ed and I have felt like we’ve been in a holding pattern for so many months now, and we are FINALLY going to get clearance to our next fix! Sorry, pilot nerd joke.

We will miss our Portland family and friends dearly, and we can’t wait to have them visit us on the boat. We are also ready to start our next chapter, and Day One starts tomorrow.

Farewell, until we meet again!