That was the move that was

This past weekend, we moved. And moved. And moved some more. I know because today I am sleep-deprived and very, very achy. I broke my kneecap in a car wreck 30 years ago, and halfway through Friday it started to swell on me and spasm in protest against all the work I was making it do. It's probably been close to 20 years since it acted up thusly. My hands ache. My fingers are swollen and sincerely do not want to bend. I'm certain I became dehydrated several times over the course of the weekend, and ended up taking multiple showers each day because I reeked that badly.

Still, the move is completed. Mostly. This is something that, at times, I doubted would ever happen. Back in July when we first decided we desperately needed a new residence, we pretty much expected the process to take a year or more. When we rented a storage garage to being packing things away, we purposely left out all of our Christmas decorations, because we expected to live in our old house through the New Year at least. But then our house sold that quickly when we put it on the market in September (shocking everyone) that we were suddenly faced with the prospect of being homeless and having to find a short-term rental. At which point the ordeal that was 3148 Oak Hollow in New Braunfels inflicted itself upon us. As I've said elsewhere, this was the first property I saw online at the beginning of summer that convinced me a move to something nicer and more suitable for our family (ie more distant neighbors and more land) was within our means. That the Oak Hollow house was still available, with its 3.5 acres of land, when we were ready to buy seemed a sign from above. Myself, The Wife and kids fell in love with its potential. But then the realtor started jerking us around and once that was settled and we were under contract... well, the disastrous inspection report resulted in us getting out of the contract very quickly. That was rough. Very, very rough. The Wife likened it to a painful breakup, and I have to agree. We went through a period of mourning, even a brief bargaining session with ourselves where we asked "What would it take to make it liveable, and viable for our budget?" But it was not to be. We had to put it behind us.

Fortunately, we had one heck of a rebound waiting for us. While negotiating for the Oak Hollow house, we looked at another on the market nearby. It was gorgeous. It had lots of space, a pool, solar panels, a 5-car garage (which could be converted into a nice studio for Lisa On Location Photography... in truth, it was more swank than normally befits the Blaschke family. And it had flaws--a homeowner's association, which we'd wanted to avoid, and only one acre of land as opposed to the 3-plus we wanted. It was also out of our price range. Not a lot, but enough to tell the kids not to get attached to it. So when the Oak Hollow deal officially died, following a whirlwind viewing of countless houses in our price range that didn't offer much more than the home we'd already sold, in desperation we made an offer on the rebound house, now dubbed Plan B. It was a big offer for us, but less than the sellers were asking. They countered. We countered that. They countered again and we accepted--even throwing in a 5-day pre-lease prior to closing, because we really didn't want to be homeless.

From Thursday afternoon on through Sunday we moved. It was brutal. Saturday was hot. Piano, refrigerator, washer, dryer, beds, dressers... if it hadn't been for my brother and sister-in-law driving up to help with a huge trailer in tow, we'd never have made it. Even last night The Wife and I were at work, me collecting the beagles, fish (30-gallon aquariums are heavy even when empty), pet chicken and on suspicious outside cat, while she went over the house one more time making sure all the cleaning had been completed properly and not undone by someone's muddy boots tracking through the house (someone, namely being me).

Today I went back to the old house during my lunch break to drop off the final key, so that the new owners (a young couple married barely a year) could get in a little big ahead of time. I dropped off a map/key of all the fruit trees/plants I've been growing in the yard, with harvest/care instructions so they won't think all the pears bad (pears don't ripen properly on the tree--if they drop, they're already overripe and gross). The Wife had left a scrap book on the kitchen counter for them, a photo essay of the old house's first 10 years with all our family's milestones chronicled, with a lot of blank pages for the new couple to add their story to the book. To be honest, it choked me up. Hell, I'm choking up now just thinking about it. A tremendous amount of our lives were spent in that house. We made it ours. The new house, as nice as it is, still isn't ours, so to speak. We've moved in, but haven't put our mark on it. We missed the old house in Temple when we moved, but never like this. I hope the new owners love it as much as we did, because leaving the key and locking that door for the final time was far, far more difficult than I ever imagined.

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