And that's what I feel like. This move, this summer, it was like our entire family narrowly avoided being crushed by a car...or rather, an entire FLEET of cars. Wait. An entire fleet of Escalades.
What would that look like? Well, the pain starts at $63,170.
We made the first of our dreaded Double Move on July 2nd.
How a double move signals it's arrival.
And from there, the roller coaster began.
1. We had a contract on a Victorian house built in 1871 on 12th st. This was at the top of our price-range, great location but it needed a lot of work. A LOT. Still. We hunted it down through an expired listing and it seemed like it was going to work. The inspection proved otherwise. It failed everything. Every. Thing. As in: not really livable. The guy doing the inspection told us "I would not buy this house. I've only said that to one other person in 20 years of doing this."
We were back to square one.
2. We found a place East of Hwy 93. In view of our new Elementary school. It was a short-sale, which means it may have taken 6-8 months for everything to go through. It was gorgeous. But HUGE. Spacious doesn't really explain it. More like cavernous. This went against one of our main goals in moving in the first place; to DOWNSIZE and to be within walking and biking distance of almost everything day-to-day. So the ginormousness didn't settle with any of us. BUT. It had truly spectacular views off the back deck overlooking Golden and Lookout Mtn. The house was really amazing and very modern and right at a doable price-range. So in an effort to just lock it in, in case nothing else came along, we went under contract with that one.
And we kept looking.
3. We found the perfect town-house on 8th street. And when I say "perfect", I mean it.
- just a few blocks from the library and creek on 10th
- our church is on 13th
- biking and walking distance to the Elementary school by path and sidewalks
- on the lower end of our price-range
- and the perfect size--right in the middle of the size of our first house and our last
- not too big, not too small
- a rock climbing wall in the basement-seriously
- little front yard for girls to run around in
- and about 2 blocks from the rec-center and Lion's park
We love it. All of us love it. We ditched the short-sale and are set to close and move on Friday.
There are many things I am looking forward to. Some of which surprised me. Like wanting to use a real dining table again instead of our grotesque card table. The very sight of this table irritates me on a level that is truly frightening.
Also. I hate the sinks here. I'm not sure why, but I clean them obsessively. Although, I stopped doing this as of yesterday in an effort to distance myself and focus on what really matters: getting enough caffeine in my system to kill a small horse (or a pony, if you will, but not a dwarf pony, because I think those things are creepy).
Our poor espresso maker that a dear friend gave us for Christmas a few years back, has also been displaced. I didn't dare put her in either of our two storage garages, but there simply was no room for her in this shanty of a kitchen. Yet, I still needed her presence. So. Here's where she's been all summer.
That's right. In the bottom corner of our pantry. A shell of what she once was: the reigning queen of our previous kitchen, dare I say, our HOUSE even. Sure, we didn't use her powers every day, but even the coffee maker that we use sometimes 3 times a day, knows she is a mere second best. This is but a metaphor for the entire move in general. I feel like a tired queen that got shoved in the pantry holding up boxes of EmergenC. Only it was more like the queen who must battle dirty hippies in our town-house community that chain smoke and strum (poorly strum) ukeleles.
So it is with great joy that I will be packing up the queen today. Dusting her off and finding her a place of honor at our "real house". She will reign again. Because despite the summer of uncertainty, we DID dodge the Escalades and nobody. NObody puts baby in the corner.
"C'mon."
