before we moved Pam

The real estate agent suggested that we declutter the house if we want to sell it so Pam and I had spent the previous week “decluttering” the house for potential buyers. We’d put the clutter into 2 piles of boxes. One pile was for stuff that was going to Florida. The other pile was for stuff that we’d sell, donate, or throw away. We’d stuffed both piles into the garage to allow for a pleasant house-viewing experience.

unpacking and repacking

After I’d gotten back from moving Pam to Florida, we found out that someone wanted to buy our old house. Now that we had a buyer, I had to move the “sell, donate, or throw away” pile back into the house for an estate sale and then pack up anything else that was going to Florida.

I didn’t really trust my judgment about what Pam wanted sent to Florida so I took pictures of everything, organized the pictures into digital albums for each room, and had Pam add comments about what she wanted done with them. It seemed to work but we’ll know more when we finish unpacking at the other end.

That made for a lot of packing. Luckily, two of our friends, Art and Carol, jumped in and helped me pack. We were done in a week instead of 2 or 3 weeks.

To move the stuff to Florida, we rented a couple of pods from U-Haul. U-Haul dropped the pods on our driveway and we loaded our stuff into them. U-Haul then put them into storage until we figured out where to unload them.

We wound up needing another pod but that’s another story.

the stupid bloody couch

We’d decided that we didn’t want to bring very much of our old furniture. Most of it wouldn’t fit with the Florida fashion and lifestyle. We’d narrowed the list to: a chest of drawers, an armoire, a wine cabinet (thanks Dave), and a couch.

I was worried about the couch because it was 8’1″ long and the pods were only 7’11” long. However, when we tried to get the stupid bloody couch through the front door, it wouldn’t go.

I had been reassured that the stupid bloody couch had come in through the front door but we couldn’t get it out. There was a lot of pushing, pulling, twisting, and shoving for an hour or so but we got no further forward. I gave up at that point since it was very unlikely that the stupid bloody thing wasn’t going into the pod anyway.

Pam and I had a full and frank exchange of views about this but stopped before things were said that couldn’t be unsaid. When I last saw the couch, it was still in the living room.

where in heck was Steve going?

Ever since Pam had accepted the new job, she’d been working with a realtor in Florida to find a house to buy. This hadn’t been going well. The houses that she looked at fell into 3 categories:

1. sh!tholes
2. houses that cost far too much
3. houses that we liked and could afford but we always lost out to better offers

By the time that I started driving to Florida, Pam and I were both considering that despair was the appropriate response.

When I’d left Florida, I wasn’t sure when I was going to go back. Even though I was going back, I still wasn’t sure where our next home was.

from despair to a new house in 7 hours

Just after I started driving to Florida, Pam called to let me know that she’d found a category 3 house (houses that we liked and could afford but we always lost out to better offers). She’d put in an offer and expected an answer in a few hours.

A few hours later, the offer was accepted and we needed a new category of houses: houses that we liked, could afford, and accepted our offers.

One thing about the new house: it’s fully furnished so there’s no room for our old couch in the old house. Good thing that neither of us had said things that couldn’t be unsaid.

meeting Pam in Cincinnati

We usually took 3 days to drive from Michigan to Florida because we didn’t want to kill ourselves. Since Pam wasn’t in a position to start taking 3-day weekends from her new job, she was going to meet me in Cincinnati Airport. The overall plan was:

• On Friday, I would drive myself to the Cincinnati area.
• On Saturday morning, Pam would fly out to Cincinnati airport and meet me there at 10:00am.
• Once we’d met up, we’d drive together to Florida

Around 6:15am on Saturday morning, as I enjoyed a leisurely breakfast in a Cincinnati hotel, I checked the “findme” app to see where Pam was with her flight that should have taken off at 6:00am. What I saw surprised me. It looked like Pam was driving like the dickens up I75 toward the airport. I thought “Hmmm, she’s gonna have a tough time getting on the plane 15 minutes ago.”

Since I now had some extra time, I checked for other flights to Cincinnati. There were quite a few. Pam called a little while later to say that a) she’d overslept and b) she’d be arriving in Cincinnati at 1:00pm instead of 10:00am.

Once we finally met at the airport, we had a nice long kiss. Wearing plague masks sorta ruined it though.

getting to Florida

The rest of the trip was pretty mundane. We stopped at a hotel in Marietta, Georgia and got to our temporary digs (thanks Annette) on Sunday night.

All that we have to do now if finish buying and selling our houses.