18 posts tagged “moving”

Last night, just as I was about to call my realtor and say, "Let's make an offer on the Filthy Hippie House," he called to say that it had been sold.

Crap.

Back to square one and there's nothing much on the market here in Lawrence.  I've already looked at and ruled out the only five houses that were close to what I wanted.

Which leads me to this craigslist ad:

http://lawrence.craigslist.org/reo/1202335142.html

What do you think, Cranky?  Buy an empty lot and set this baby up?

Yesterday, while the inspector was at our house with the buyer, I went out with our real estate agent to look at houses.  Wowie.  A couple of cute little prospects, and some seriously scary ones, too.

We're looking to really take a step down on our mortgage and get some of our equity out of our current house, so most of the houses I looked at yesterday are currently rental properties. Most of the renters are college students, although one house was occupied by a family of hippies.
 

I've lived in rental properties before.  I was prepared for things to be rough around the edges and that was certainly the case. What I wasn't truly prepared for was the piggery.  Of the five houses I saw, four were occupied by people who weren't using a dresser or a closet to store their clothes, but were simply stockpiling them in one giant mound of wrinkled, festering fabric, wedged between bed and wall.  Was there, I wondered, a system?  Clean clothes go in one side, dirty clothes in the other?  Was there a continuum?  Like a Kinsey scale of cleanliness.

(The fifth house?  It was EMPTY.)

And the hippie house?  Oh lord.  In addition to Peasant Skirt Mountain and the Birkenstock Valley, there was The Bedroom That Could Not Be Entered.  Full to the ceiling with crap.  Look, you wanna call your second bedroom a "recording studio" and sit around smoking pot in it and burning incense until the pores of the walls are infused with Patchouli, fine.  Whatev.  But when your three kids have to sleep in the same bedroom with you and your partner, because the third bedroom is full of dirty clothes, broken toys, old magazines, and boxes of unknown crap, you have a problem.

Similarly, slacker college boys, when you've let the kitchen get so dirty that the only way to properly clean it is with two gallons of gasoline and a Zippo, it's time to get a fucking grip on yourselves.

So, can you guess which house I'm considering? 

Well, I will be soon enough.

As of Sunday morning, we have a contract on our house.  The buyer wants to close quickly, so tonight I go house-hunting for me.  Yike!  Here's what I want:

1.) Walk to work
2.) Non-skanky kitchen and bath
3.) Hardwood floors (carpet is Teh Gross)
4.) Decent neighbors

Am I asking too much?  I dunno, but I guess I'll find out this evening.

All of this means PACKING AND MOVING!!!! AAAAAAGH!

We pack up Hubbicula's stuff this week and take him to Arkansas on Friday.  Then it's back home for me, where my packing and moving hell begins.  I'm trying to be smart about it.  Since we'll have our house sold before I buy the next house, I'm going to rent one of those PODS.  Pack it full and have them store it for a week or two (or however long I'm homeless), and then deliver it to the new place for unpacking.  Meanwhile, I'll be couch-surfing and living out of a suitcase.  Joy.

The cats?  They're either going for a spa vacation in Wichita, or going to spend some with Daddy in Arkansas.

My department was scheduled to move (once again!) back to our original offices, starting on Thursday. 

So it comes as no surprise that the moving supervisor came by 15 minutes ago to see if any of our offices are ready to move ... TODAY!

Par for the course around here: nothing goes as scheduled.

At any rate, despite the fact that I'm getting ready to go into frantic mode, I'll be glad to get back to my real office.  The one with the best view on campus and the no constantly talking receptionist.  The office with a door I can close and a window I can open.

ETA: Oh, my beloved office.

The nicest development is that when they renovated, they removed the old wall radiator that used to be under the window.  Here's to not stubbing my toe on it ten times a day.

on the third floor of Brain Tumor Hall.

Yup.  Now that I've finished cleaning up after everyone else's crapgasm, I'm packing up my office.  That means I've gotta power down the computer and sign off for at least tomorrow, perhaps longer than that.  Not that I couldn't Vox from home, but just on principle I prefer to steal my Vox time.

People are disgusting, stupid creatures.  How they ever managed to crawl up out of the slime and create the wheel or harness fire amazes me.  I am not at all surprised that we only took to regular bathing within the last century.  Cleanliness doesn't seem to be our forte.

Oh, the move?  It's going swimmingly.  Swimmingly, if I relished opening desk drawers to find the dessicated carcasses of abandoned sandwiches.  Or packing keyboards that when turned over leaked out five years worth of crumbs and dead skin.  Or discovering that a man with two PhD's is apparently incapable of doing something as basic as writing his name and future office number on labels on his furniture.

My original title for this post was going to be: Give me liberty or give me head.

I censored myself. 

These are two of the six enormous plaster heads that our department owns.  As we prepare to move before renovations on Brain Tumor Hall start, we have to figure out what to do with our heads.

Our leprous, heavy, fragile heads.  Secretly, we want them to get broken during the move, so one possibility is slipping the minimum wage movers a tenner and saying, "Maybe these heads have an accident on their way to storage."  Wink wink.

Legend has it that one of our heads helped to rescue a damaged sculpture at the Louvre.  These heads have belonged to the department since the 1920's, and in the 1960's, during a student protest in Paris, several marble busts were damaged.  Apparently, the only other copy of one of the busts was ours--a plaster replica custom made for one of our wealthy alumni.  The Louvre sent a photographer and a plaster cast maker to make a cast of our head, in order to properly repair the damaged original.  Maybe we'll try not to break that one.

That time of year has come around again.  On Sunday, the roads in and out of town were clogged with Dorm Okies, Suburban Exodusters, College Joads: incoming students and their parents. 

All the cars, trucks, SUV's and minivans pull into town, piled high with boxes and suitcases and furniture and everything the student could possibly need.  Plus some other stuff.  There's something both reassuring and horrifying about that bumper to bumper procession of overloaded SUV's. 

On the one hand, it's nice that parents are still taking their kids off to the first day of college, just like they took them to the first day of kindergarten.  It's an equally big step to the one the kids took at age 5.  They need the emotional support and those last-minute twenty-dollar bills Mom and Dad are going to slip them.

On the other had, it's scary to contemplate how dependent on stuff these kids are.  Please excuse me while I go into old fart mode for a moment, but that was not my college dorm experience, nor the experience of anyone else in the dorm I lived in.  I went to college with a large suitcase, a laundry hamper, and a milk crate.  Basically, all I took was clothes, shoes, sheets, towels, a stereo, a dictionary, and a few odds and ends.

That was pretty much what everyone else brought, too.  Oh, sure some girls bought matching curtains and bedspreads and throw rugs for their rooms, and one girl brought a toaster, to maintain her Pop-Tart addiction.  Other than that, though, we made do.  Most of us used the computers and typewriters that were freely available all over campus. 

Watching the Suburban Exodusters on Sunday, I could see how far away those days were.  People were unloading microwaves and mini fridges.  TV's and computers and video game consoles.  Bunk beds and couches and scooters and exercise equipment.  All the comforts of home, in short, as though they expected college to be just like home only in a different town.  I wonder at what point they'll realize it isn't. 

How many houses have you lived in? How is where you live now different from where you grew up?

A lot.  A lot lot lot.  Which is why I am now going to write a novel about it.

1. I came home from the hospital to a little house in Bethany, Oklahoma, where the streets were and still are dirt.
2. When I was a year old, we moved to another tiny house on Polk Street in my "hometown" of Hugoton.
3. A year later we moved to a big old house on 10th Street, which had been cut into two apartments at some point.  Because I wasn't in school yet, I stayed home with my mother and my grandad, while they remodeled it back into a single house.  I remember quite vividly the day after they built an interior staircase, and I stood at the open doorway to what had been the exterior staircase, watching them rip the stairs off the side of the house.  Can you guess where I got my home remodeling urge?  At age three, my main toys were various sized nails and screws, a hammer and pliers, and some scraps of wood.
4. I'm going to count my grandparents' house, too, over on Harrison, just two blocks from the train tracks and the grain elevators.  It was my real childhood home, where I was always a child, spoiled and doted on.
   
5. After my parents got married, they decided to build a new house, but in the interim, we moved to a house on Trindle, which was much smaller than the 10th Street house.
6. Then the landlord on Trindle sold the house and we had to move again, because the new house wasn't finished yet.  We moved to the horrid little Blue House, where everything was blue.  The carpet, the paint, the kitchen, the bathroom, everything.  Also, it was only two bedrooms, and with seven of us, it was like hell on earth.  On top of each other all the time.  Also, the air conditioner didn't work for shit.  Also, the hot water heater didn't work at all.  Also, you couldn't run the drier and anything else at once.  Also, did I mention that everything was blue?  I hate blue.  That house was so bad I would have been ashamed to invite my friends over, if I'd had any friends.
7. At last, the new house was done.  Mom's new house.  It would never be our new house, because Mom had designed it and picked out everything in it.  All the carpet was the same, all the furniture the same, so that all the bedrooms looked the same.  It was like living in a motel.  Salmon carpet, ivory walls, and freaky faux-Danish furniture.  Oh, except in the kitchen where the floor was tiled in brown and the counter tops were orange.  Fucking 80's.
8. Then I left for college and lived in a dorm room for a while, which I don't really count.  My junior year, I moved in with Allen, my football buddy, and two architecture types: Ken and Jen from Colorado.  It was the first time in my entire life that I had my own room.  At 19, my first room.  It was about 9 x 10, with a sloping ceiling in the attic.  I had enough room for a twin bed, a small dresser and a milk crate for a night stand.  It was lovely.
9. After two years of that, I moved into my very own apartment: part of a huge Victorian, where my bedroom was the formal dining room, complete with chandelier, and my bathroom was the butler's pantry.  That's where I also had the cat ghost.
10. I made the mistake many college co-eds make.  I agreed to move in with my boyfriend.  He picked the house and it was a dump.  I'd moved out in about six months, and so I only count it as representative of why you should never trust someone else to pick out your living space.  It was located in the flood plain of the '51 flood and it flooded.  We didn't get water in the house, but we got it right up to the underside of the floor boards.  Mosquito central, nasty filthy place, and then we got a dog--which boyfriend also picked out without any consideration for my opinion.  Spastic little dog.  Nice enough, but never destined to be my dog.  Then, my cat got shot by some hillbilly neighbor.  I was done.
11. After that, I moved into one of my favorite homes: an apartment in the old Wareham Hotel.  Elevator.  Restaurant and bar downstairs.  Swank.  Soundproof.  Beautifully tiled old bathroom, walk in closet.  My own.  Pigeons walking by on the window sills outside.
12. Then I got a job in Japan and moved into a traditional Japanese apartment in Nakazawa, upstairs from the Quickie Mart and just down the hill from a massive Shinto shrine.  Tiny bathroom.  Tiny kitchen.  Two lovely 6-tatami rooms that opened out on a balcony that overlooked a few thousand acres of rice and the Honshu mountains.  I had tree frogs and mud swallows and a stray cat. 
    
13. I made another mistake.  I moved in with my sister and remodeled an apartment in a house I didn't own.  A story better not dramatized.  Another lovely living space, but one I had to leave when my sister got remarried and sold the house.  Au revoir.
14. I followed that with a dinky little subsidized apartment in a brick WW2 era complex.  Subsidized because I was making about $18K a year working for Planned Parenthood.
15. After two years there, I got married and moved to Florida, where Hubbicula and I resided in a craptastic apartment in a craptastic complex for about a year. 
    
16. During which year, I did mountains of research to figure out where to buy a house.  I drove endlessly through neighborhoods and researched property values and sales trends, and we looked at five houses.  House #5 was perfect, except that it didn't have a garage.  It was a lovely little Arts and Crafts Bungalow in a suspect neighborhood a block from the interstate.  Still, it was perfect, with oak floors, original tiled kitchen counter tops and ten-foot ceilings.  And thousands of little lizards living in my yard, sneaking up my walls, sleeping in my potted plants.  Loved that house.  Almost nothing to remodel in it, except for the urgent need to paint over every room in the house.  Pepto-bismal pink in the living and dining rooms.  Dining room had exquisite paneled walls with a plate rail and a lovely chandelier.  Hideous other colors throughout.  No remodeling until the end, when we got ready to sell it, then we redid the front porch and I redid the kitchen ceiling.
17. That brought us back to Kansas, where we spent two months living with my parents.  It was...okay.  Hubbicula might have other things to say about it, but living in the suburbs was never our plan.
18. So we bought the house we have now.  The tiny, adorable little limestone gnome cottage.  The house of the charming screened porch and the leaking basement.  I have mixed feelings about this house.  I'd probably love it if it weren't the size of a postage stamp.  Oh, and if I didn't wake up on rainy nights and panic. 
    

I believe that's an adequate survey of my various homes, and I'm frankly shocked to discover that I've lived in 18 different houses.  No wonder I'm tired of moving.

What's different about my home now and my childhood home?  Well, not a lot.  It's in Kansas, surrounded by Kansans.  It's a lot bigger town than my hometown.  90,000 people vs. 3,000 people.  It's humid here, but not brutally windy.  We've got eight movie screens instead of one.  We've got squirrels and cottontail rabbits instead of coyotes and jackrabbits.  I don't know everyone yet and I'm related to almost no one.  Still, it's Kansas.  I've got that going for me, which is nice.

I did.  You don't like it, you can fuck off.

Today is Phase One of the Sadly Only Temporary Evacuation of Brain Tumor Hall.  This means that all the GTA's in the building get relocated elsewhere.  So all morning, I've been running up and down the hill, dogging the movers, nagging the IT people, to get ten offices relocated to the Glorified Quonset Hut that will house the GTA's for the next 16 months.  (And really, it's not that glorified.)  I've sweated through my clothes and courtesy of the 99% humidity, I have an orange afro going on.  Add to this the fact that all of the movers are stoners who weren't very smart before they started smoking the weed.  They barely understand how a moving dolly works and every desk they've rolled around the corner of the main entrance, they've smacked into the wall.  Thus all the newer desks now have one dinged up corner, and all the old, steel WW2 battleship desks have left dents in the wall.  It's lovely.  Oh, and can you imagine what a hundred pound steel double-pedestal desk sounds like tumbling off a dolly and down two flights of concrete stairs in an enclosed space?  Yeah, like a migraine.

The best part: we get to do this over again come December.  Then the rest of the department--twenty more offices and all of our administrative space--temporarily moves out of the Brain Tumor Hall while the duct work is replaced.

No, wait.  Here's the best part: we get to do it all over again on a grand scale come next August, when the whole department returns to the places we're now vacating.  Supposedly, the end result will be fewer brain tumors.  I want to believe.