Sound Asssociation

I can still recall the nightmare I kept having in the latter stages of building our home.  We bought one of those Wagner power paint sprayers.  It worked well until either the bucket level dropped too low, or the sprayer experienced a change in paint viscosity.  When either occurred the sprayer would make loud, obnoxious belching sounds until we shut it off.  I had nightmares that sprayer was chasing me around the house, constantly making that bleaching noise.

Now my nightmares include the sound of packing tape as it's wrenched of the spool and applied onto a box.

The Home Stretch

We're nearly done.  Whew.  All the outbuildings are now empty (thankbob) with the minor exception of my studio which still houses two partially dismantled floor looms.  The Habitat for Humanity folks will be here on Wednesday, and the furniture/loom movers will be here Thursday morning.  Since all our beds are heading for storage, we'll spend Thursday night in our travel trailer.

Today is the day to say farewell to my Spanky goat and all of G's chickens, including our gorgeous rooster, Captain Kool.  Thank goodness I don't have to say goodby to my Hunter cat as he's joining us down at the beach.

People have asked us why we're moving as we have such a nice place.  It is a nice place, we built all of it ourselves.  And if we could pick it all up and move the whole shebang, we would've.  This rural, higher elevation place has gotten to be too much for us.  And holy cow, it's been nice to destash a TON of crap(!). Even G was shocked at how much had accumulated.  I told him it felt like the super long, heavy chain of Marley's ghost.  Too weighty and smothering.  I'm fairly certain we shall be destashing more once we find our new home.

We continue to look for a new home....more are coming on the market now.....but few fit our criteria: two car garage, one main floor bedroom, and about 2200 sqft.  It's the bedroom situation that has been the main hurdle so far.

Also, it only just now occurred to me.....I'm wondering about all our belongings in storage...and insurance.  I hate to pay for insurance, but now I probably should look into that.

scheduling

My job title when I retired was "optimization & process control engineer".  The old adage of time being money in a manufacturing field was never more true.  It was, at times ridiculous.  That job will take too long, trim some of those steps down, do more overlap, yadda yadda yadda.....

This would invariably set us up for failure about 90% of the time.  It got very old, constantly getting beat up for not making schedule.  Or hey!  Making schedule but suffering rework due to poor first effort due to excessive speed.

Here we are moving under a tight timeline.  The process is at the point where the schedule can go sideways quickly, not unlike a paper machine outage schedule.  It's likely a common point in any schedule in which steps must be done in some semblance of order.  And the closer you are to projected completetion date/time, the faster the process moves.  I'm sure there is a name for that phenomenon.....

Thus the urge to rough out a gannt chart.  Yes, I began doing that this morning.  It's very helpful in mapping out process flow when you've got a shortage of time.  We've got a couple of beach runs to make, people picking up stuff, many tasks in progress simultaneously....all sorts of fragmented loose ends to tidy up.  I've learned if I don't map them out, I will discount how long they will take in my mind....and then it's a horrid scramble to the finish.

We can't afford a horrid scramble as we're both exhausted and not thinking as clearly as we can.

We are packing and hauling all the things to storage except the furniture.  Some of the furniture will be donated, and we will hire movers to move the rest.  And I'm totally thinking of hiring the final cleaning.

My LYS(s)

i am quite fortunate to enjoy two wonderful LYSs (local yarn shops for you muggles out there).  One is located in downtown Kelso (LaFavorites), and the other currently resides in my garage in moving boxes and plastic tubs.  Holy moly do cones of weaving yarn weigh a ton(!).  Nothing like having reality smack you in the face.  And I'll just be brutally honest here and admit that packing it all away is giving me a minor amount of anxiety.

I hit a hard wall yesterday.  I've been super laser focused (soccer camp reference for my former workmates if any are reading this) and have been packing like a machine.  The stress is getting to me and I didn't sleep hardly at all Tues night.  By 1 pm yesterday I was a zombie, and I literally couldn't function with any brain power.  It was weird.  I'm waaaay ahead of Gary in packing duties so I took the afternoon off.  I tried to take a nap and failed, but I think just resting helped me a great deal.

I woke this morning feeling much better, ready to face the day and relocate my yarn shop.
This afternoon I've a local guild meeting to run.......

Report Card

We received our home inspection list late last night.  Of the eleven really minor items on the list we are asked to complete three of them.  Some items were super nit picky, like a couple of loose siding nails.

In the end we have to caulk the top of the chimney edging, fix one strip of hanging insulation in the crawl space, and vent one exhaust fan to the outside. We have two bathrooms and both have exhaust fans that we DID vent to roof vents when we installed them.  I wonder if one came loose?  Guess we'll find out soon.

Then there are two ads-ones which were not code when we built our home: hurricane straps on the hot water heater and CO2 monitor.  Not sure why the CO2 monitors....

Also?  I'm finding this entire process moving at lightning speed.  I guess thats how cash sales work....

Prep Work

This winter I went through several rooms in the house and did some major destashing.  It felt so cathartic!  And now I'm reaping the benefits....those areas are straightforward to pack up.  The areas that did not suffer a destashing are taking the longest to pack: the pumphouse, greenhouse, garage, and our third bedroom I refer to as "Gary's cave".  Ugh.

The inspection guy came yesterday morning, accompanied by the buyers realtor.  We had errands in town, so we left.  Who knows what he will find?  We're not expecting anything terribly bad, but you never know.  And gads, it's not like we have a ton of time to deal with much else right now....
That whole inspection thing feels weird.  I get it, and will expect the same when we are looking to purchase.  The buyers don't do email, so yet another thing to slow the process down.

Uncertainties.......

Rolling, Rolling, Rolling

We are now packing.  The reality of our decision has smacked us in the face!
Selling a home on a deadline is sort of like a family reunion: you can plan the event to death, but once the process begins it takes on a life of its own.

The amount of packing materials one needs is staggering.  Thankfully we received a HUGE amount of boxes courtesy of our former employer and Gary's sons current employer.  Yet I needed a ton of smaller boxes.....we own an alarming amount of books.  So off to town for them.  And yes, I bought them at Home Despot before I was aware of all the political issues......at this point, I'm using them.

Yesterday I filled every one of those smaller boxes and relocated them to storage.  I think I packed most of the heaviest stuff yesterday.  I'm actually looking forward to packing the studio contents as those will be blissfully lighter boxes.

I was contemplating a fire sale for fiber I wish to downsize, and I will do that eventually.  It makes more sense to do that later rather than now.  So instead of packing my vendor booth in the truck for CO, we loaded it up for storage.  It will be in the verrrrrry back of our enormous unit until we have a home again.