Anybody Wanna Buy a House?

The house is done, it's on the market and tomorrow is our first open house.

Let the games begin!

Cleaning the House, Getting Ready to Sell

With the exception of one side of one door and a few doorknobs, the home improvement work is done and we're at the cleaning stage. That mostly means "get shit ready to go to Goodwill / sell on Craigslist / put in storage" as well as getting things in the house at the phase where a Realtor can show the house. I'm systematically working my way from one end of the house to the other cleaning and straightening and packing and organizing as I go.

So far, I've made it halfway through one room but I expect to pick up a little bit and finish a couple more before the night is done. The problem is, I'm going to be so worn out I doubt I'll be able to get to sleep at a reasonable hour, but I've been coming in at dodgy hours anyway so I guess that's OK. I fully expect to be at this until well past midnight tonight, so two more hours or so.

I sold my very first item on Craigslist tonight - Guitar Hero 1 and 2 for the PS2. Sad to see it go, but it wasn't doing me any good since I got the 360 version and storing it was more trouble than it's worth. I've got a couple of other items up there and expect to do a lot more business in that space this weekend.

I keep telling myself this will all be worth it, but we're so fucking far behind schedule (the house was supposed to be on the market October 1, and we're realistically leaving town for good in four weeks) that it's hard to see that right now. I guess I just keep trooping through and hope it all works out.

The dryer buzzed, so it's time for the next load of laundry. There's something that never changes: me doing all the damn laundry.

The Job Thing, By the Book

I received an email yesterday that my company has approved my transfer to our London office and the details (arrival date, pay) are being finalized so they can make me a written offer. Which is to say - that's one less thing to worry about. I have employment. I have a way into the country.

Now to get rid of the house and car.

In other news, I've been reading up on London before I go to both educate myself about the city (more) and find a focal point for my excitement. I started with Alan Moore's "From Hell" and went into Peter Ackroyd's "London: A Biography." The first is one of my favorite pieces of fiction, and I'm about a quarter of the way into the second. Ackroyd's book is great history if a little oddly arranged, but his passion for the subject matter is infectious. Incidentally, "London: A Biography" was a gift from Seth who clearly figured out my tastes in reading. Thanks Seth!

This weekend the house should be all finished and I'll be able to concentrate on selling the car, playing some video games and mapping out which pubs I'm going to try first.

The Home Stretch on the Home

The good news is, we really are on the home stretch as far as the house goes. The bad news is, it should have been on the market this week. After tonight, the last bits will be easy - getting the doorknobs to work properly and painting some trim and doing other minor touch-up paintjobs, and putting things away and getting the house ready to go.

Still no news on the job situation, a source of infinite frustration for me. I'm frankly not sure which is worse: that a communications company can't be bothered to communicate with people about decisions that could potentially affect those people's long-term future, or that in the end all the promises don't add up to anything without something concrete, so I'm essentially at zero.

Coming soon: pictures of the remodeled house, so I have something to remember all this hard work by aside from an ulcer the size of Connecticut.

Getting Ready to Move

Hopefully I'll look back on this post one day and laugh, because it's not all that funny right now.

Preparations for the move are actually going well. Current things in flux are: my job, which I should hear about tomorrow; and the house, which is going to require a few more days of work. We've got a brand-new deck we'll never use, our kitchen is a color of yellow we never would have chosen, but there's doors up and it's a matter of taking care of the little things at this point.

I'm alternating between really excited, really scared and kind of frustrated (at the amount of work and very little time in which to do it.) Seth gave us some great London books and I picked up a couple of others, so I'm reading about the city again and already planning places to go and things to see. It's going to be very different this time, not only because I'll have a job during the day but because I won't be living right in the middle of the City of London itself.

But when I sit down and really think about it, I am excited more than anything else. And every time I smash my thumb with the hammer as I'm nailing up trim around the doors, I imagine myself drinking another pint of Guinness and it's OK. Mostly.

Coming Soon

Coming Soon: Actual content.