Saturday, September 23, 2023
The Annals of Selling and Buying and Moving II
Like everyone else, I don't know how many years, months, days, or hours I have left to live. What I do know is that I'm unexcited about spending many of them wrapping dozens of pieces of wall art and glassware in bubble wrap and packing them in boxes, sorting through 34 years' accumulation of "stuff," packing multitudes of boxes with some of that "stuff" and getting rid of some of it, and digging into cupboards and cabinets and shelves that have been left alone for a very long time. Here I am, however, spending my hours doing exactly that. And spending even more time writing to whine about it.
I wrote in early August that we intentionally shot ourselves in the foot by selling our house (to my son Elliott and his wife Martha) without having any place to go. Now we do. Hence the sorting and wrapping and packing. So we're recovering from our self-inflicted wound.
We looked at perhaps 15 or so townhouses with our excellent and helpful realtor, Kelly Hudick. One that I might have liked, and that Kathy *did* like, was too far out. We had a difference of opinion on how far out was "too far." I did not want to move to one of the farther-out suburbs; that was less of a factor for Kathy. In another case she was willing to buy a unit but my reaction was "meh."
As August flowed into September, we began to get (a) depressed, (b) anxious, and (c) alarmed. And I think Kathy was beginning to get annoyed with me for being so picky. We were running out of time: we couldn't keep Elliott & Martha out of their house for months on end after they closed on it on October 6 and we have plane tickets to Florida in January. We certainly didn't want to extend our housing search until next spring. We weren't there yet, but the word "panic" crossed my mind on more than one occasion.
The market for what we were looking for—one-level townhouse living—had essentially evaporated. (We wanted one-floor because of advancing arthritis in Kathy's knees.) Oh, there were places available, but there was a reason they were available: next to a busy and noisy freeway or thoroughfare, overpriced for what you get, or odd floorplans. Then there were the ones in our price range that had twice the square footage of the house we're moving out of. We looked at a couple of those and joked that we'd have to buy a lot more furniture. That did not seem rational. We're supposed to be downsizing, not doubling our living space.
Our realtor has a program that
automatically sends listings once her clients set the parameters (price, size,
garage spaces, bedrooms, etc.). I assume this is now standard in the industry.
Each day we received listings; sometimes we would ask her to schedule a
viewing.
We included single-family homes as an option in the algorithm and viewed dozens of them online. None of them appealed very much, and suburban homes sit on larger lots and have huge lawns ("huge" in comparison to city lots). We finally got rid of *all* the grass at our house a few years ago, and had it re-landscaped so it is all mulch and perennials, and going back to having to take care of a lawn was not inviting nor is having a lawn ecologically sound.
Kathy found a townhouse in Minnetonka that didn't appear on our realtor's list. Kathy pointed that out to Kelly. Kelly observed that the one she found was a split entry: up a half-flight of stairs to the front door and then a half-flight up to the primary living area or down to the lower level. The entrance from the garage is on the lower level, so one must go up two half-flights of stairs to reach the primary living level. We had ruled out stairs to the main living area. Based on the photos, Kathy said she'd like to see it anyway. I agreed.
We viewed it on a Friday—we were the first ones to do so on the first day it came on the market—and made an offer, the asking price, that same day. The owners' realtor told Kelly that they—the owners—would like to complete the scheduled viewings the next day. We were sure that another buyer would come in and make a higher offer, so we'd have to decide how high we would go on a counteroffer. As a result we were in suspense all day Saturday and had resigned ourselves to being outbid.
We—along with Elliott and Martha, who also encountered it—really do not like this counteroffer practice. You make an offer, the seller's agent tells your agent that someone else makes a higher offer, and you get the chance to respond. You have no idea what the higher offer was, so you must guess how high to go to prevail. I asked Kelly if an unscrupulous agent might tell a potential buyer that there was a higher offer when in fact there was not. She acknowledged that it could happen, and we agreed that in any profession there are bad apples. So the entire process is annoying.
We were at a social gathering on Saturday night. Our realtor sent us a message that the owners had accepted our offer. We exulted. And we felt great relief: We didn't have to contend with an unknown higher offer and we were done with the housing search, assuming all the usual next steps went as planned.
The place we are buying is *very* different from our 1931 bungalow. The house has small-ish rooms divided by walls and doors. Even though we opened it up some when we remodeled in 1997, it still has the characteristics and space allocation of a 1931 bungalow. The townhouse has a huge room (with a vaulted ceiling, making it seem even larger) that combines living room, dining room, and kitchen, with the last in the center. The kitchen area—it isn't a "room"—has a very large island, with the stove top set in it, so anyone cooking can look to the right to the living area or to the left to the dining area (and the screened porch beyond).
One of the provisions of purchase agreements that appears to be standard (maybe it's state law?) is that the buyers have the right to have an inspection. We had one done. There were a number of minor issues that we'll need to deal with but a big one jumped out at us: the AC unit dated from the 1980s. Everything I read on the web said that these units have an expected life of 15-20 years and should be replaced at that point. We asked the sellers to replace the unit even though it is working now; after a little back and forth, they agreed to pay half the cost of a new unit. We thought that was OK. We didn't tell our realtor or anyone else that this wasn't a deal-breaker; even if the sellers refused to replace it, we'd buy the place anyway and do it ourselves. All we knew was that we were not going to rely on a 40-year-old AC unit and have it break down in the middle of a heat wave next summer! We had already preemptively replaced the AC unit at our house a couple of years ago, even though it also was still working, because it was 23 years old.
I had always told Elliott that I planned to go out of this house on a stretcher, mostly because I couldn't face the prospect of cleaning out the house after so many years. (After I met and married Kathy, I didn't tell that joke any longer because my demise would mean that *she* had to clean out the house.) He has now dodged that bullet. I didn't. Rats.
So cleaning out the house we are. As many friends have advised, those in our position should toss, donate, or sell much. In the words of one, "you've got to be ruthless." We usually donate what is usable and toss what is not, in the normal course of attempted "decluttering," but there is just too much stuff that is usable and has at least modest value, and we're grandchildren of the Depression, so Kathy spends her hours putting items on Facebook Marketplace. She's had remarkable success at selling. What won't sell, or doesn't have much value but is still usable, she puts on Facebook's "Buy Nothing" site: the rule is that anything offered on the site must be free and people just have to pick it up. What doesn't sell goes on "Buy Nothing." What I like about that alternative is that we're reasonably sure things are going to a place where the items are wanted and used. Better than a landfill and probably better than a used-goods store such as Goodwill or the Salvation Army, where they could sit for weeks and *then* be discarded.
That said, I'm sure that I'm not getting rid of enough. (And it is clearly more me than Kathy; she has the ability to be ruthless that I lack.)
I have 8 attractive china coffee mugs, for example, designed in the style of Charles Rennie Mackintosh, that I really liked when I bought them in Scotland 17 years ago. Now no one drinks coffee at evening gatherings so they never get used.
I only saved about 20 (!) of the different salad plates that I either inherited (my great aunt collected high-end china salad plates) or picked up at interesting places during travels; the other dozen or so are going on Buy Nothing.
I have perhaps 20 framed photographs of parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents (all 8 of them!), and wedding certificates, plus family bibles from the 19th century and files of correspondence from family members back to the 1910s. And about 40 photo albums, of our lives (i.e., Elliott and family) plus early family photos (from parents and grandparents) plus travel albums. In the case of the latter, Elliott will likely want the ones he's in; the rest will ultimately go in the trash, I am sure. But after I'm gone.
I'm at least down to five bookshelves. I've given away as many or more books than I now own, but apart from sentimental attachment and the appeal of books as "expensive interior decoration," as Elliott puts it approbatively, there isn't any rational reason to keep (or move!) them. But I will. They give me intellectual comfort; I can convince myself I am—or I was—widely read (which I'm not, but we all have our delusions).
I could add a lot more to this itemization. . . .
One advantage of selling to Elliott and Martha is that we can leave much behind. There have been four pen-and-ink drawing prints hanging in our living room for probably 30 years (I knew the artist); E & M want those left where they are. Two chests of drawers in the basement can stay, as can (thank heavens!) almost everything in the garage. They'll get (with their consent) a set of Christmas dishes and a 12-place-settings collection of (fun) Hazel Atlas Moderntone cobalt blue glass tableware (produced from 1936 to the early 1940s). They're also taking various other pieces of furniture. The passing of the personal property has already begun 😊
I have jokingly advised friends to invest in any company that makes bubble wrap. I'm on my sixth roll of it. Kathy's entrepreneurial spirit, however, has meant we have had to invest zero in boxes. She put out a call on Buy Nothing for moving boxes; we've picked up several dozen from different people who are getting rid of them (all within a few blocks of our house). It's hard to predict, but we may have more boxes than we need!
I'm sure that I'm grossly over-bubbling the glassware; professional movers could do it more efficiently and effectively. But I really did not want to pay people for the dozens of hours it's taken to wrap everything.
Some might say that we are premature in packing because we do not close on our townhouse until October 20 and do not have movers scheduled until the 24th. Everyone we have talked to, however, has told us to start early and work steadily on it. So we have been. The drawback to this sage advice is that we are, as Kathy observed, "Boxes R Us." Our normally rather tidy house now has boxes everywhere, packed and not yet packed.
It seems that by default we have decided to have no more dinner guests. My back-of-the-envelope calculation suggests that I've been host in this house for between 350 and 400 deck or dining room gatherings, with Kathy also a host (and chef) the last 12 years. We'll resume entertaining in November!
I will have lived for 34½ years in this house, or nearly half of my 72 years. Never would I have imagined that that would be the case when Pat and I moved in in early 1989. On to the next phase of life! With a bigger kitchen.
Now, let's just hope nothing goes awry in Elliott's & Martha's closing on the house and Kathy's and my closing on the townhouse. All the signs thus far tell us that everything is going along smoothly.
At some point I will return to other topics.
Warmly—
Gary
