May 4, 2012 4 min read

“How’s the move going?”

Oh, dear friend, if there was only a simple answer to that question.

My wife and I moved last Monday and here we are a week and a half later, and I’m not really sure how to answer the repeated requests for updates from family and friends.

Let’s begin at the top.

First, we were moving into an unoccupied home, so we had hoped to get in a few weeks before we had to move out of our then-current home so we could clean up, spruce up, paint and do all those things that are easier to do if your stuff doesn’t need moved to do it.

But we had no such luck.

So our purchase closing was set for last Thursday, four days before our selling closing the next Tuesday. Not ideal, but not terrible. Plus, we were able to wrangle up plenty of help for Saturday and expected to have everything moved in by that evening. Plus, we’d have Friday to at least do some cleaning before our stuff got there.

Well, less than a week before we were supposed to move, we got a curveball: there was a document mix up by the listing agent and, thanks to some byzantine rules, we were no longer closing Thursday. Alright, I figured, we’d close Friday and move everything on Saturday. We’d not get to clean first, but that wasn’t so bad. Except that we weren’t going to be able to close Friday. No, no. We were now closing Monday, just a little more than 24 hours from when we had to be out of our house we were selling.

Great. Grand. Swell.

Oh, and then there’s the little part about how since we’d now be moving Monday, we were going to have a heck of a time finding people with a free day to spare, since, you know, more people work on a Monday than a Saturday.

Perfect.

Thankfully we had the best real estate agents in the business on our side (Bill and Betsy West of Northwood — seriously, call them), and they were able to find us a moving company on short, short, short notice to get our furniture moved. The task of moving everything in boxes fell to the few family dedicated (crazy) enough to take off Monday to help.

So we get moved in. Or at least our stuff does. We knew going in that we’d not have water, because of a plumbing problem that needed fixed, and so we were staying with my wife’s sister, who also lives in town.

By Tuesday, with just one instance of water pouring from the third floor bathroom through the second-floor ceiling, we thought we had the water problems licked.

Oh, if only.

By Thursday we had another indoor waterfall, this time from second to first, with water thoroughly soaking the walls of our first floor bathroom. That problem is fixed — and we think, maybe, just maybe, we’re out of the woods.

The next day, when the heating guy comes to fill the boiler, everything seems fine — until we have water gushing — gushing — through the living room ceiling. A hole cut into the ceiling — oh, did I mention the painters had literally just finished the last coat on the ceiling right before it burst? — and that leak was fixed.

But before we were able to finish the painting in the living room — it’s been about 95 percent finished since right before we added our impromptu first-floor skylight — another (blessedly smaller) leak springs in the living room. That one was patched today.

So here I am, dear reader, hoping and praying that by the time you read this my wife and I will be finally able to unpack our things without fear of indoor flash flooding.

Otherwise, I might have to get a waterproof laptop to write next week’s column.

If you’d like to suggest, like so many others have done, that this is just the “joys of home ownership,” don’t. Otherwise, Brandon Szuminsky can be reached at bszuminsky@heraldstandard.com.