Life has never felt quite as messy as it does right now – and I’m including the years I spent freelancing as a writer, podcaster, radio presenter, TV stylist and magazine stylist all while trying to nab the man of my dreams*, going to the opening of an envelope a minimum of three times weekly, while living in a one-bedroom house with no hot running water. (My landlord: “Can’t you just boil the kettle to wash up?)
To recap, a couple of weeks ago, a house popped up on Zillow – the US equivalent of Daft – that was perfect for us. Five bedrooms, within budget, in the “right” school area, with three beautiful, tall, established trees in the back garden and solid wooden doors throughout.
It had been on the market for a year, with no takers – our realtor suspected it had initially been priced too high, and honestly, I suspect Americans just don’t really like anything they consider “period”, probably because, no disrespect, they don’t seem to really make anything that lasts longer than 20 years.
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We immediately decided to sell our house, and within a week we had cleaned and tidied it to within an inch of its life, replaced missing blinds, finished the trim on our faux built-in cabinets (Ikea Billy bookcases, installed and trimmed and caulked to look like bespokes built-ins – if you squinted), had photographs taken and listed it for sale.
This is the second house we’ve sold in Fort Wayne, and the first experience – listed on a Friday, viewed on a Saturday, sold on a Sunday – lulled me into a false sense of security. It took a fortnight for this home to sell, which is nothing to an Irish person, but in the US, where houses seem to get snapped up immediately and where, crucially, I was desperately watching the listing of our dream home to make sure it didn’t sell out from under us… it felt like an age.
On the day we got our offer, mere hours before we were ready to put an offer on the other house (they wanted us to have accepted an offer before they would consider ours, “no contingencies”, is the real estate jargon for that), the other house sold (to someone else, in case that wasn’t clear).
We had 24 hours to decide whether or not to accept the offer, acceptance of which would give us roughly a month to find a new house to move into ourselves. We thought about whether we should just abandon the whole project and relist in the spring, when more people tend to move (to coincide with the end of school, for one thing), but I was so devastated by the loss of our dream home that I just… couldn’t bear to do that to the people who’d put the offer on our house.
To be fair, maybe they weren’t as enamoured by the house as I had been with the other one, but the idea of causing someone else to feel the same disappointment I was feeling just didn’t sit right with me. So we accepted the offer, a day before I left for a three-week trip to Ireland.
The day I landed in Ireland, Brandin went to see four other houses – all of which were within our budget, most of which had the number of bedrooms we wanted, some of which had the same period features I’d loved so much, and one of which was in a brand new estate, with neither trees nor grass. That would have been my last choice.
Readers, that’s the house we bought. The others were either too small or too drafty or too ramshackle or in the wrong school district (which we could possibly have overlooked for an otherwise perfect home, but this particular house was also a bit of a kip, according to Brandin). We put an offer on the new house, a five-bedroom home in a good area, right across the road from the sweet little school Atlas and Roman will end up at.
It took a lot of trust for me to agree to buy this house I hadn’t seen, based only on Brandin’s verdict – and honestly, deciding to trust him was something I regretted several times, not least when I mentioned something about the video he’d sent me of the house and he said, “oh that’s not our house, our house isn’t built yet”. Wouldn’t that have been… important to mention?! No?!! (ONLY A MAN.)
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Anyway. We’re buying the house.
The one issue was that this house wouldn’t be ready until a week after we had to move out of our existing home, giving us two problems: firstly, and most importantly (you could argue), where would we stay for that week? And secondly, where would our stuff stay?!
In the end, we decided on, respectively, an Airbnb and a storage unit, and started packing our things into boxes the day we arrived back from Ireland, a month before we had to vacate our home. It was, as I’ve mentioned, a long, laborious and, frankly, exhausting process.
Give me two days to get out and I’ll get out – but give me 30 and I’ll spend every one of those days stressing and packing and worrying and organising and nothing will get done any better or more efficiently but my life will be hell for a full 30 days instead of two. You know? You know.
The weeks leading up to the move both dragged in and flew by, and before we knew it we were packing up all of our earthly belongings to move the final bits – our beds, our mattresses, towels, blankets, bedding, crockery, cutlery… you name it – into the storage unit, taking only the essentials to the Airbnb with us. Except the storage unit filled up fast, and several boxes and bits and bobs didn’t fit.
So we offloaded some of them into Brandin’s Dad’s basement; Brandin brought some to the warehouse at work; and we brought the rest to the Airbnb, which was quite a zen little home away from home but is now a kip, the hall lined with boxes and bags and, randomly, our squatty potty, which is an awkward size to box up and almost got left behind.
There are three bathrooms in the house, which is just as well, because one of them is now full of huge paintings – things that either wouldn’t fit in the storage unit, or which I was too nervous to offload into a cold garage, basically – and the space beside the TV is stacked with boxes containing our record collection, bedsheets we’ll need for day one in the new house, and toys we forgot to box up until the last minute and which, therefore, ended up with us instead of tucked away neatly somewhere I couldn’t see (and hate) them.
We also ended up bringing all of the clothes we had left in the house, which includes all of Roman’s clothes, all of Atlas’ clothes, and every item of clothing Brandin and I have worn over the last four weeks. In other words, the Airbnb is full. And stressing me out.
Next: we close on our new house on Wednesday at 3pm and need to be out of our Airbnb by first thing Friday, which gives us, basically, Wednesday night and Thursday to get the new house set up and ready for us to at least sleep in on Friday night.
Except Wednesday night marks our eldest son, W’s, school band concert, along with the festival of trees (and visiting Santa etc) at the older boys’ school, something we can’t miss – we missed his marching band semi-final, as we were in Ireland, and we also missed the marching band state final, as it was on the same day as Brandin’s grandma’s funeral.
Plus, honestly? I want to go! I missed last year because I was so heavily pregnant I could barely walk, and I don’t want to miss another year because, not to sound like a massive sap, you just don’t get that many years of your kids truly buying into – and loving! – the magic of Christmas.
So we’re currently trying to find a moving company who can pack our storage unit up into a truck on Wednesday and bring it to our new house by Thursday morning, then we’re trying to find people who aren’t working on Thursday and can help us unpack.
It’s occurred to me, more than once, that the reason moving house was a lot easier the last time we did it is because we didn’t have small children to worry about. We had the older two boys, but I think they stayed with their mum as we were doing the actual moving business, which, another important factor, happened all in one day – we sold one house, bought another, and drove straight from our sold house to our bought house in a U-Haul with all of our stuff.
Also? We had a lot less stuff! We had three beds, for example, one king and two twins, whereas now we have, technically, five and a crib: a king, two twins (one is spare), a double and Atlas’ pirate bed. We own three La-Z Boy armchairs (don’t ask), two bar stools, an L-shaped computer desk, a blanket ladder (!!), a ladder bookshelf, two enormous Adirondak chairs, a desk chair, two changing tables-slash-dressers… the list goes on.
In case you wondered just how nightmarish this whole thing is… see above.
ANYWAY. By this time next week, all of this chaos will be but a speck in the rearview mirror of life (I hope). I’m not imagining we’ll have everything unpacked by then, but I’m hoping we’ll be well on our way.
It’s at times like this that I really resent the capitalist machine that means we still need to work and make money and, to a lesser extent, the fact that other obligations – school and speech therapy for Atlas, feeding Roman actual meals, cut up into tiny pieces (time-consuming and messy) – can’t just be ignored until it’s all over.
From Atlas’ perspective, I’m sure he would like me to tell you: the Wifi in the Airbnb is so bad that he can’t watch anything without it buffering a dozen times, and it’s causing him no end of anguish. “This is so annoying! It’s happening again!” he wails on a regular basis. (Silver lining: speech therapy is going great.)
From Vinny’s perspective: the Airbnb’s floors are all laminate, and he’s having no small amount of trouble getting around. He spends a lot of time whining, teetering on his little tippy-toes like a baby foal on a frozen lake.
From Roman’s: I’ve put his pack ‘n’ play in the walk-in closet, because it’s dark and cool in there, and it made sense given the amount of space, or lack thereof, in the bedroom (plus, there’s no door so it’s not like he’s shut in or anything). He hasn’t said anything (because he can’t), but I suspect he feels like the Harry Potter of the family (which makes me Mrs Dursley, an unflattering comparison).
For now, I have escaped to a nearby cafe to get away from my children do some work, and to just sit somewhere that isn’t full of the evidence of my rampant consumerism and bad decisions.
Because I need this, I wish to tell you some things I’m looking forward to:
* Roman going into his own room. I truly cannot wait to sit in my bed at night with a lamp on, reading my book. What a LUXURY.
* My parents bought us a gift of new crockery, and I am very excited to unpack it in our brand new shiny kitchen – and then use it, obviously. (Truly the temptation to throw out everything we owned and buy everything new was… almost overpowering, so it’s a good thing I care about the environment and am poor.)
* Our new fridge. I’ve never in my life had a new fridge. See also: our brand new shower. It’s double-width! A super big shower!
* I’m quite excited about the light in our downstairs kitchen-dining-living area. It feels like a really nice, warm, airy space (I mean, right now, before we fill it full of our mountains of s**t.)
* Being closer to the older boys’ school (15 minutes’ drive instead of 45), meaning extracurriculars and events won’t be such a slog, and we’ll hopefully be able to be more available for pick-ups and drop-offs as necessary!
* Finally, honestly, living closer to some of my friends – the majority of whom seem to live either north (where we’re going) or downtown in Fort Wayne (closer to where we’re going) – and the mall. I never said my rampant consumerism was going to change, now, did I?
*spoiler alert: he was not the man of my dreams
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I’ll leave you with this absolute banger by Irish singer Morgana. Strong Kate Bush… vibes? Inspiration? Imitation? I don’t even know and I DON’T EVEN CARE! This song is so, so great.
