Big ol' Moving Update

So, I've been absent from the 'net for a few days. This has been due mostly to overwhelming moving issues. Like I mentioned Wednesday night, hubby-Eric and I borrowed my Mom's van and went to Eastern Washington on Wednesday and spent the entire day there. We left early in the morning, drove across the mountains and got a storage unit, after stopping to get Eric fingerprinted at the ESD (teachers, bankers, and criminals all must have their fingerprints on file!).

We also delivered some paperwork to Eric's new school district and got some potentially really good news from them. I also got to talk with the Superintendent's secretary for a bit, who told me a funny story that I'd also heard about at the ESD. I don't have her permission to blog it, so I won't, but the moral of the story was that you shouldn't use an EpiPen without some good instructions.

We went to lunch at a Mexican place recommended by the secretary, and enjoyed it a lot. Then we met with our Eastern Washington realtor and looked at a bunch of houses. The first one we went in was a HUGE house, well within our price range. The reason it was in our price range is that it needed a lot of work. Virtually every room had some serious problem with it. There was a pool out back... or what had been a pool once. It needed to be cleaned out. Badly. In short, it was not a house for us.

Another house we visited was in a Stepford Wives sort of neighborhood. Everything perfect and cookie-cutter and vaguely sinister. As the temperature was soaring and I was exhausted from the heat, I was a bit grumpy when we went into the neighborhood and my gut reaction was "ICK!". We went into one of the Stepford houses and found that the inside was very nice. Good layout, lots of room, enough for us to have a guest room. But I still felt uneasy about the place. Eventually, a little later than we'd hoped, we left off for the day. We got some ice cream then headed back over the mountains.

The trip is three hours each way, and we got caught in Seattle-area construction on the way home, so it took even longer. Argh. Traffic is one really good reason to prefer Eastern Washington.

Have I mentioned that I tend to get carsick? After a few hours in a car I get nauseous. I also get extremely exhausted, moreso than usual. And I was having trouble with dry eyes because of the air conditioning, so we had to stop and get eye drops. I just don't travel well at all. So Wednesday night was mostly recovery time.

Thursday morning we went through the paperwork to officially put our current home on the market, and got a real estate lockbox on the door. It went through Thursday night, so now we're living in a house that no longer feels like it's ours (If you want to buy Frankenhaus, here's the listing). The rest of the day Thursday was spent trying to pack and recover from the road trip, as well as get Eric ready for his trip to Oz. We ran a load of errands, worked out on the Wii Fit, and just tried to get ready for more life to hit us fast. And I planned out a second trip to Eastern Washington, this time with my Mother and Evil Twin. And Eric and I loaded up my Mom's van yet again.

That's right, Friday morning, bright and early, I took hubby-Eric to the airport to send him off to Oz, then I went to my parents' house and was on the road again. Once we got close to my new home, I took us down a road we'd heard about called "Emerald Road" which Eric and I thought might be fun to live on. Um, no. It was a winding road with a nasty drop-off to a river, and there weren't many houses along the road, just far too many cows.

So Mom, Evil Twin, and I went to the storage unit and unloaded, while calling the realtor to let her know we were in town. I wanted Mom and Lisa to see the Stepford house and tell me if it was all in my imagination. So after dealing with the storage unit, we went over to the Stepford neighborhood and looked at the house. With the temperatures MUCH nicer, and me not suffering from heat exhaustion and visiting other houses, the place looked better. We walked around the house, checking out how much land there was, and decided that my mental picture of a tiny lot with no room was all in my head. It wasn't a quarter acre, but it wasn't nearly as small as I remembered it, either.

When the realtor arrived, we went inside and Mom and Lisa were as impressed as Eric had been with the interior. Really, it is nice. So, after calling Eric to get his permission, I started the initial process to see if we can even qualify for the mortgage on the house.

Whew. That all done, the three of us left to go find the quilting shops Mom wanted to visit. I went on a little roundabout way, so I could check out some other possible neighborhoods on the way. Even if the Stepford House is good enough, that's no reason to stop scouting for other places. We found both the quilting shops, and one of them was just a couple of doors down from my realtor's office, so Lisa and I went into the realtor office while Mom went quilt crazy. We chatted a bit with the head realtor, since my realtor wasn't in. I mentioned my nicknames for various houses, which amused him greatly. Then we headed out for lunch at the same place Eric and I had got ice cream at on Wednesday.

Unfortunately, the place was closed due to a power outage. We wondered if it might have anything to do with the crew working on a power pole when we went by, and we later learned that someone had rammed the pole earlier in the morning and taken out power to the whole area. Whoops!

With three very hungry women, myself included, in the car, I went to the only place in town I knew. The same Mexican place Eric and I had gone to on Wednesday. It was still good, if a little slower than it had been two days previously. And no flan on Friday, either.

After lunch, we visited the local grocery store to get some newspapers for Eric, who wants to decide what paper he will take when we move. I'll just continue to read my news on-line, I think. Then we went back to the Stepford house to take some pictures. Then we went back to the ice cream place to see if they were open. They were. We got ice cream before leaving town. YAY!

So back over the mountains we went, to home. I got home at a decent hour, and almost immediately went to sleep, only to wake up 12 hours later feeling almost human again. Yeah, I don't travel well at all.

As for the financing on the Stepford House, we don't yet know what Eric's exact salary will be. That information is crucial. However, we got a pre-pre-approval that is contingent on selling this house. If we can sell this house at the current asking price, we can afford the Stepford House. If not, we'll need to find a rental until Frankenhaus sells. So we're back to the first step. We've got to find a buyer for this house. If we do, everything comes together nicely. If we don't, then life will be a little messy.