Transplant completed

We finally made the move from Philadelphia to upstate New York and it was a total drama - we got to Liverpool (northern suburb of Syracuse) on Tuesday night, June 20. However, we had found out a few hours earlier that we couldn't close on our new house the next day as planned because the seller thought the closing was still set for June 30th (the original date) and somehow our mortgage company never communicated the change. We had arranged for the moving company to store our packed truck overnight (for an additional fee), so that we could close on the new house in the morning and then meet the movers in the afternoon for unloading. Larry spent hours on the phone on Wednesday trying to find a reasonable solution somewhere in this mess, but after all that, he met our moving truck at a storage facility and watched them load our entire house into a 10' X 30' storage unit. Even the moving company guy felt sorry for us. After rushing to pack up everything by the 20th (10 days earlier than originally planned), we spent four days cooling our heels in the hotel (instead of just one night as expected). It was almost surreal. We spent the time getting to know the area, eating in lots of restaurants and swimming in the hotel pool. Luckily, our two cats settled in quite well to their limited surroundings, and of course the kids thought the whole thing was great fun (and to be honest, after weeks of packing non-stop, the break probably did me a world of good). We finally closed on our house on Friday, June 23rd, the absolute last day that our interest rate was guaranteed. The mortgage company waived their fee to compensate for the inconvenience. Then the second moving company moved our stuff in on Saturday, June 24th. It was all extremely frustrating and upsetting at the time, but now that we're in, it doesn't seem like that big a deal.

We've been a flurry of activity since we moved in, especially since Larry had to go back to work on the 10th. We had ceiling fans put in the bedrooms and had a fence put around the back yard (we promised Caleb we'd get a dog, but we haven't done it yet). We have found that there's a lot of stuff in this house (built in 1983) that has been done poorly - we've had to fix closets and shelves, and both the front and back doors have problems and even the garage door isn't working properly, plus there's some really odd arrangements with light switches (e.g., the switch on one dining room wall turns on the kitchen light, but the only switch for the dining room light is on the opposite wall). The joys of home ownership, I suppose, but our real estate agent told us this house was well-built, or rather, he said it was better built than some of the other houses we looked at. Maybe it is better than some in the area, but his comments raised our expectations, perhaps higher than was reasonable.

Mostly these things are annoyances, and hardly ruin the fun of having a larger house and a nice-sized back yard. The house is mostly set up, but of course there's still boxes to unpack and some reorganizing to do. After three weeks of doing nothing but packing our Philadelphia house and three more weeks of unpacking, I'm sick to death of it of it all. I've taken to running errands and other stuff to avoid finishing it (though of course that stuff genuinely needs to be done too). But at the same time, it's driving me crazy that it's not completely settled. Pretty psycho and yet probably typical.