The wife and I have had an offer accepted to purchase a home.
There's no need for a long intro here, nor is there a need for fanfare and victory celebrations or anything like that just yet -- it is what it is. We made an offer on a house we wanted, the seller accepted the offer, and our anticipated closing date is in about a week and a half.
Everything paperwork-wise is done at this point, and everything's wrapped up figuratively with a pretty little bow. We'll go sign the closing agreement, wire over the down payment, get the keys, and we'll be done. Two hours after that we move out of the apartment with hired movers that we're also paying a great deal of money to just to get it all done quickly and same-day. That evening, we'll be purchasing new furniture for next-day delivery. Over the course of the next week afterwards, we'll be scrubbing down this apartment and (thankfully) leaving it as a memory. Deuces, bitches.
The house itself is gorgeous, about 40 years old, and in a decent neighborhood. It's closer to my job and slightly further away from the wife's job. My upstairs "office" houses the washer/dryer as well as contains ample room for my stuff, including my favorite overstuffed chair that's currently in the living room of our apartment -- it's the only piece of our living room furniture we're keeping aside from the storage ottoman, which will also be in there. The wife has her own craft room/office as well, and our master bedroom has a walk-in closet almost the size of our current kitchen. We're quite happy with the place.
With this comes a lot of work and tasks both large and small. Large tasks are the moving itself, as well as all of the cleaning and packing (which we haven't done a lot of yet, and will monopolize pretty much all of our free time for the next three weeks, roughly. The smaller tasks are numerous and time-consuming as well, such as getting all of the utilities transferred to the new place, figuring out logistics of address changes and the like for official documents like driver's licenses, bank accounts, credit cards, etc etc, and actually setting up the new place once moved in.
To those ends, for the past few weeks (read: since we knew the house was ours), we've been gutting this apartment as much as possible -- a trend that we know will continue on a more amped-up scale now that our timeframe for the move shortens more by the day. I've been especially brutal with my own gutting of this place in getting rid of everything I own that I don't actually need to keep. I have to be brutal to myself because I own a lot of shit. When I first moved to Omaha from Kansas, I took so many things with me that I thought I would want to keep forever, only to find them in boxes years later and look at them like "what the fuck was I thinking?"
This time around I'm not doing that.
With a very everything must go mentality, I have systematically been going through my possessions and sorting them out -- keep, sell, donate. As such, I have sold almost my entire comic collection, almost every video game and/or system I've had or collected in the past 25 years, and every book, CD, tape, movie (DVD and VHS), and magazine that isn't essential. For the essentials I have purchased four 100-CD wallets and stored them all, tossing the cases and therefore saving an ungodly amount of storage space.
Tomorrow will mark the fourth (and hopefully, final) Saturday trip to Half Price Books, who has purchased the bulk of my stuff from me. It will also make our second and final trip to Gamers, the used and vintage games shop here in town, to sell the remaining game stuff I will be parting with.
In these trips over the past few weeks, I've made $400 or so in cold hard cash, bills-in-wallet cash, money that has gone to groceries and some other essentials so that we can save as much of our paychecks as we can. A down payment for a house is no fucking joke, friends -- it'll basically bleed us dry for a bit, and if it makes it easier for us in some small (or large) fashion, I don't mind selling most of my stuff to get it out of this place and make it less to move.
Plus, 95% of this stuff has literally been sitting in the apartment in boxes, whether in closets or in corners or on shelves.
"I don't want you to sell anything you'll regret," Daisy told me last weekend, very seriously.
"It's fine," I told her. "I don't think I'll regret any of this. It's all just stuff. It's things I've collected that I have no more use for whatsoever. I've been an adult for half my life, but I've never really been a grown up. We've been married for going on five years now and we've bought a house. It's time to grow up."
My entire adult life has consisted of moving from place to place, living alone or with someone else, dragging along all of these physical mementos of my past with me to each one. Aside from a few very important sentimental items here and there, all of it can be sold, donated to charity, or otherwise disposed of at this point. I'm turning 36 this year. I've worked in a corporate job for over four years, and have been married for almost five (as mentioned above). There's no longer much of anything I own that I can't part with if necessary. For example, there's a lot of clothing I've had for ten-plus years that I only wear occasionally, if ever, and that's only if I still fit into it. That all went to the purge, as I call it, for donations to the Salvation Army.
As an aside, I've probably mentioned here before in the past that I'm not a huge fan of the Salvation Army for a number of reasons -- for one, they aren't the kindest to our gay friends and family members, and the wife and I have a lot of those. For two, their very church-based, Jesus-y mission statement doesn't mesh well with me, a lifelong atheist. But, and here's the thing -- they do a lot of good charitable work to help people, regardless of whatever agendas they have...and they will come to my home to pick up donations. Any donations. That's a big plus.
As an additional aside, the Disabled American Veterans (DAV) doesn't do pickups here in Omaha. I checked. Those people have been my go-to charity for many years now, but they just don't really have a presence up here like they do in Missouri and Kansas. That is unfortunate, really.
So, over the course of the past two years or so, every few months I've scheduled a pickup appointment with the Salvation Army for donations, in order to get rid of a lot of useless stuff around the house, stuff that I should've gotten rid of when I moved up here from Kansas, but y'know, hindsight 20-20 and all that. Each time I've gotten a tax receipt, which the wife may or may not use when I provide it to her for when she does the taxes (I'll never know, she handles that). However, in the past six months or so, they've been here three or four times, as I have donated about 2/3 of my wardrobe to them. I'm encouraging Daisy to do the same during this move, as we'll be trying to get rid of all we can, and truthfully she wears the same 25-30 outfits for work anyway and not much else. How do I know this? I do the laundry. This is why I was thrilled to have the washer/dryer in my new office in the new house.
"I want to get everything but the essentials all packed up this weekend," she told me.
I looked at her and tried not to roll my eyes, as doing this would mean she'd not sleep at all, and neither would I. Like, at all. For a guy who's constantly sleep deprived anyway this personally sounds like absolute hell. I love Daisy very much, but I've also been awake since 7:30 last night (it's almost 1PM now), and have packed/assembled maybe five or six boxes today. I haven't showered, I have eaten one meal, and I'll have to sleep at some point tonight too, of course. Tomorrow is my last day off of my "weekend," as I have to work Sunday overnight, which means I'll be sleeping all day Sunday. My work schedule is not a good one for an undertaking such as this.
Still, we moved everything out of my house in Kansas in the span of about 36 hours, and that was by ourselves packing up a U-Haul. Granted, we both had fewer things then, but the house was larger than this apartment and we were doing it all with just the two of us (we had no choice). But at the time, I was also unemployed and had all the figurative time in the world as I had just finished teaching for the semester and was leaving the state.
This is part of why I'm trying to purge everything possible from this apartment. Screw it, if we don't use it, it goes. Despite that I am sure Daisy will find ways to not part with a lot of stuff, as she is much more sentimental than I. Some of it I can understand, of course -- I have two t-shirts I've owned for over twenty years, purchased from a long-closed head shop in Rehoboth Beach, Delaware on a beach trip there back in the 90s. One is an Iron Maiden shirt and the other is a KMFDM shirt. I will never get rid of either one. Here's a picture of me wearing the KMFDM shirt last week:
Also pictured: cat, chair, Grateful Dead tapestry, and my punk rock haircut.
Yeah, last weekend I got my hair done in a sort of wide mohawk style, completely shaved on the sides all the way up to the long part on top. It sort of makes me look like a pineapple, but fuck it. Even in September, it's still 90 degrees in Nebraska.
Now that I've said that, of course, it'll be in the 40s next week -- you watch.
Anyway, that's about where my sentimental attachment to certain items ends. I sold my Sega Genesis, which was my first game system I got as a Christmas present in 1994, and thought nearly nothing of it aside from a "well buddy, it was a good run, go have a game with another friend."
So yeah, we're moving and stuff has to go. And truthfully I can't wait to really dive in and start getting rid of stuff. Part of it will end up being replaced by newer, more exciting stuff. I am big on, ahem, as they say, retail therapy. Meaning, as much as I hate being a consumer whore, few things make me feel better than getting rid of a bunch of old stuff and replacing some of those things with newly purchased upgrades. My wardrobe is a good example of that; I've replaced a good chunk of the stuff I've donated with new stuff that fits better and I enjoy more. Mind you, a lot of it is still nerdy t-shirts and a bunch of hoodies, but again, fuck it.
We have to think logistically about a lot of stuff we take with us -- we have a much larger kitchen in the new place, but the bathroom doesn't have as much storage, there aren't as many closets, there's not a basement, etc. We have a garage, but it's small and won't have much more room for anything aside from the wife's car (my truck won't fit in it comfortably, for example, and we'll need room for a lawn mower and stuff like that too, etc). I'm not sure my office has a large closet aside from the washer/dryer area, and am not entirely sure it has a second closet at all, though I think it does. Getting all the stuff we have and want to keep over to the new house is one thing -- having somewhere to put it once we get it there is quite another.
While all of this is going on, I should note that Hurricane Florence is pounding the Carolinas right now, and my parents have been forced to evacuate back home to WV until it all subsides -- who knows if their beach house will remain standing when they return. Living in the midwest with the threat of tornado season is one thing -- hurricanes are quite another.
Mind you, we haven't really had any tornadoes to speak of in the Omaha area for a few years now; oh sure, we'll have the occasional watch or warning when one gets fairly close, but truthfully they talk big game about tornado season up here and rarely anything exciting happens. Same went for when I was living in Kansas for five years; nothing came closer than about 20 miles or so from my house. I experienced much worse weather living in Missouri -- hell, I experienced worse weather in West Virginia when I was living there.
A little over a year ago -- almost a year exactly, in fact -- Daisy and I visited West Virginia to see friends and family, including my grandmother, who was at the time in her last three months of life. We didn't know that then, of course, but we knew it would be the last time we saw her alive.
While cleaning, I found the birthday card she sent me last year. She sent it to me less than three weeks before she died, and it is the last written anything I received from her, or would receive from her.
I haven't really written about my grandmother's death here because I'm not sure I've really processed it yet. She died in January, on a cold Sunday morning shortly before I went to bed. She had turned 90 four months before, so it's not like she was young. She left me her newspaper clipping collection in her will, which I told my extended family and estate executors they could do what they wanted with; there was no need to send them to me out here in Nebraska. I do not regret this decision, really. Instead, I asked them to send me my grandfather's prosthetic leg if they could find it while cleaning out her belongings.
I'm weird like that.
Regardless, my aunt told me if they could find it, it was all mine.
She was buried on the hill in the town cemetery next to my grandfather, who had been laid to rest there in 1982. I did not attend the funeral. The family understood. I'm not sure my parents did, but the rest of the family did.
So yes, I'm still processing it somewhat. I now have no living grandparents. My parents are both rapidly aging as well, as are Daisy's. At age 35, I'm finally buying a house with my wife. I guess this means I am indeed a grown up now. Which I think, really, is the entire point of this post overall.
Next up after the house is to sell my truck and to get a new(er), reliable vehicle and to get a job working on dayshift, something that's far, far different from what I do now (so I don't end up eventually hanging myself).
As I've mentioned in the past, this year has been a year of self-betterment for me. I've lost close to 40 pounds since the beginning of the year, and I have begun the transition to an entirely, or mostly, vegetarian diet. Not vegan, mind you, but vegetarian. I want myself to be healthy, I want more energy, and I want to be able to live for a long time.
Heh, imagine that, me saying that I want to live. Clearly there's something wrong with me.
As I told Daisy, if you would've told me ten years ago that at age 35, I'd be a vegetarian with a mohawk who sold almost all of his comic books and video games, well...
More to come.
