There are some things a person just shouldn't watch. One of them is the entire contents of one's life being lifted, tossed, and well stirred. Today is packing day at our house. That means that three very nice professional complete strangers are going through everything we own, manhandling it, and putting it into a box. It's a site of destruction. Pictures are coming down, boxes are piling up. Shelves are being emptied, laid bare. The bones of the house are being exposed and years are being stripped away. Back in time to 1998 when we first moved in.
SOmehow I find this unnerving. On thursday I'm sure I will welcome the arrival of all this stuff at the new house. The new house is the place of CONstruction, the building and the beginning anew. The old house is the exact opposite. It's painful to be there. I helped for a while with baby in tow. I cleaned out the linen closet and through away many defunct health and beauty products. I Hauled out some trash and packed up some bedding. But then the baby was fussing and I was overloaded with emotional intensity. So much sweat equity in that house! Our starter house in the truest sense.
Meanwhile we've been negotiating hard with these potential buyers. As of Friday the deal was off and we were depressed. We muttered some unkind things about them over the weekend and then Monday morning, humbled, reopened the conversation by basically agreeing to their slightly painful terms. But only slightly… there's additional fiscal loss in keeping the house on into the future. And if we're forced to drop the price and repaint and recarpet in order to lure the imaginary new buyers, there goes the money that lay between us and these buyers that we already have. Each day we all are hearing how terrible the market is, and how it's only going to get worse. So we decided to try again to make it work with the bird in hand. I just heard from the realtor that they want to look yet again at the house tonight. Sadly, it will all be in ruins then. We had it so lovely for all these weeks, a house and a showplace, and now they want to look tonight when it looks like, well, like a kit that one could make a home out of. Unopened and still in celophane.
tomorrow there's a weird lull in which we can only barbecue and forget about all this. Then Thursday the truck will come and disgorge everything we own in more or less a heap. Then the fourth and final stage of this project, reassembly and settling in, will begin at last.
I'm hoping that by the end of the week, all our possessions will be in one place and we'll have a deal agreed to in order to pare our holdings down to just the one house.
Upstairs it sounds like a mule is kicking the walls in. Just the carpet installing guy. The new carpet looks great, but the project has been fraught with cost overruns, mistakes, and delays. Ben didn't mind the to-me hideous navy plush, and yet he's been very VERY patient with my need to replace it.
I'm very glad I have a forty foot wall of green trees– how many shades of green are there, anyway?– on which to rest my eyes. I find that the wind moving through the trees has the same exact sort of calming effect as watching the ocean.