Sold!

So, it's official, our house is sold!  After being listed for 3 weeks, we got two offers, and accepted one of them about a week ago.  We had the inspection last Thursday, and today we got the final paperwork from the buyers.  After the inspection, the only thing that the buyers want us to do is have the furnace and air conditioning inspected and cleaned, and I got a few quotes for that today and it looks like it'll cost under $100. So we're very excited.  The last week or so since we got the offer on the house, we have been hesitant to celebrate since it wasn't finalized yet, but now it seems like everything is pretty sure to work out.

Although the closing date isn't until mid July, it looks like we are going to move before then.  (We were originally planning on moving the last week of July after Michael takes his big board exams in Florida, but since the buyers want to close on the house in mid-July, we decided to move as soon as Michael is done with work here so he will still have a little time after we arrive in San Diego to do some heavy-duty studying before his test.  This will also work out better, I think, because Camden starts school on August 1st [the other boys will start on August 20th, but Camden's Spanish immersion school starts a few weeks before the rest of the district to give the kids a little extra time to adjust to a new language], so it will be easier on him to have a few weeks to adjust to a new place before starting school, rather than driving all the way across the country then immediately starting at a new school, in a new time zone, and a new language).

So, the new plan is for us to leave either on June 29th or 30th (Michael's last day of work is the 29th, and he is currently scheduled to have the afternoon off so we could potentially get in a few hours of driving that evening, but you never know with his work schedule if he'll really end up getting off that afternoon or not, so we'll just wait and see on that).  We're hoping to make a short stop in Milwaukee, and then to make it to Utah to visit family there by the 4th of July.  It'll be nice to see Michael's sister, Mel, and her family before they move to Texas this summer, and to visit with our grandparents and maybe get to see some of Michael's cousins.  Plus, with stopping in Wisconsin and Utah, that should break up the long trip a bit -- we looked it up, and it will be about 45 hours (that's just driving time -- not including all the stops for bathroom breaks, gas, meals, and finding motels along the way).  45 hours of driving time with 5 kids and a dog in a minivan is not my ideal description of a dream "vacation," but at least if we get to stop and make a couple of short visits to friends and family, that should make it a little more bearable.

And it's nice that we're moving in with my parents when we get to San Diego, because we'll have a place to stay while we save up for a down payment on a house.  And it'll be really nice that we can just arrive and Michael will be able to go off and devote a lot of time to studying for the rest of July -- if we were moving into a house or apartment a lot of time would have to be devoted to moving in, getting furniture and supplies for a new place, setting up utilities, etc.  But with this situation Michael can go straight to studying and the boys and I can get settled in too.

So now it's time to get busy!  Yesterday Michael and I reserved the moving truck, the little tow trailer that we will use to tow Michael's car behind the van, and we looked into storage units in San Diego.  Michael has also been trying to find a little time today to look into the best options for switching his flight to Florida for his test from the one he already purchased that leaves from here, to a new flight leaving from San Diego.  Now that everything is pretty much finalized with selling the house, we can relax a bit and allow the kids a little more freedom in the house -- while we were attempting to keep the house as perfectly clean as possible while showing it, the kids weren't allowed to go into the study, downstairs bathroom, kitchen, dining room, or basement at all, so we're still going to try to keep the house clean, but it'll be nice now that the kids can have a little more independence again with being able to do things like get their own food from the kitchen, help with doing the dishes, and play in the basement playroom again.  Plus Brax gets to come back in the house again!  (Our poor puppy has been living in the garage/back yard since we returned from San Diego in March so we wouldn't have to deal with him shedding in the house at all).

Now I need to get motivated to finish packing the rest of the items in the house that we didn't already pack when we de-cluttered the house to sell it (mostly that will mean packing the decorations that we used for staging the house, since almost everything else that hasn't been packed yet is the stuff we still need to use every day).  And we are planning on selling lots of our furniture again before we move -- it's just not worth it to pay to move a $25 garage sale couch across the country.  So we'll be keeping the beds, the dressers and night stand in the boys' rooms, the rocking chair that we got for our wedding, the digital piano, one leather couch, the garage freezer, and the dining room table, but everything else will go.  So that means I'll be spending some time on craigslist.  We also need to go through our freezer and pantry and plan out our meals for the next month so we can try to use up everything we have before we'll need to empty and defrost the freezer before moving day.  Then we'll have all the normal little moving details -- filling out change of address forms, getting copies of all the family medical records to take along, stocking up on some little games, coloring books, and special toys for the long car ride with the kids, etc.  I can't believe we'll be moving in just one month.  There's definitely lots to do, but we are so excited to have our final big move and to get to a place where we plan to settle down after all these moves over the last 9 1/2 years of our marriage.