I am Losing My Equilibrium

I am sure there was an easier way to do this. We are now trying to get as much stuff in boxes that we can to take to the condo before putting the house on sale. Of course, that won't be til April, but since we are going to Budapest next week, we have to front-load the work.

Here is our sequence.

1.  Workers are now in the house to make renovations for house to sell.  We are here til February 29, packing up what will have to go before the house is staged.  Of course this stuff can only be stored in a few places (i.e., our bedroom), because work is going on in the rest of the house.

2.  February 29, we leave for Budapest,  March 1 to April 1, we try to leave all this behind, and have fun.

3.  Sometime in the last week in March, we will close on the condo.  This will be done via our broker.

4.  April 1, we arrive home after a long haul overseas flight, i.e., exhausted.

5.  April 2-7, we try to get as much stuff in the condo as possible so that the house looks good.

6,  April 8, we put the house on the market and hope for the best.

What is wrong with this schedule?  Well, I leave it to your imagination.  I am sure something will come up.  The challenge will be not to dwell on it.  Sure!

#BuyingACondo

#SellingAHouse

#LivingInChaos

I Am Stressed

I feel completely disoriented.  Our house is a mess.  Downstairs, we  have workers in almost every day: stripping wallpaper, prepping walls, applying plaster to ceilings, eventually painting, repairing electrics, removing carpet.  Upstairs, I am going through about 800 books, trying to reduce them to 300.  Going from 9 bookcases to 3, and that's not counting Tony's books, which is totally his problem!  I have gone through layers and layers of our and my parents' shared histories, reducing about 12 boxes of memorabilia to 6.  I have gotten rid of all kinds of clothes I no longer wear.  I am constantly organizing and throwing away. Next weekend is "Junk PickUp" for our neighborhood, when we can put anything out (except computers), and it will be carted away.  By next weekend, all the "stuff" from the garage, basement, and attic will be gone.

The house no longer seems ours.

Three weeks from today I am going to Budapest.  It seemed like such a good idea in December, before we had found even one condo that suited our needs. I plan to have a very good time and leave all this behind.  Definitely.

My current plan is to have everything weeded out before we leave.  When we come back April 1, we will own the condo.  We will then "stage" the house, by taking everything our realtor wants out of the house to the condo.  Directly after that, the house will go on the market, and we will then live in a denuded house, until it sells.

I am stressed.  I am excited.  But I am stressed.  I try in my mind to place our furniture in the condo,, but even with pictures and drawings and measurements, I can't figure out what will go where.  I am stressed.

I am also excited.  I know that by sometime this spring or summer, we will have achieved what we have been wanting for two years: to sell our house, to move into something smaller and easier to care for, and to live in Louisville in a new way.  Still I am stressed,


#BuyingaCondo
#Stressed
#Moving

More Condo

We went back to the condo today to watch while it was inspected.  Here are some pictures I took.  The unit itself is in the process of being packed up, so things are a little askew.  But you can get a sense of things.

The best part is the view.  And you have to imagine it when the trees get their leaves back!

The living room fireplace and bookcases.

The molding and door features.

Into the Dining Room.

Me excited!

Would that our house was so ready to sell!


#1400Willow
#BuyingaCondo

We Are Buying a Condo!

We have a contract on a condo!  Those of you who live in Louisville will recognize it as 1400 Willow.  And while it looks like a high-rise apartment building anywhere, it's actually located just across from Cherokee Park.  (Cherokee Park is in the Highlands, where we live, and is a Fredrick Law Olmstead Park, which is one of the reasons we so much wanted to stay in this area.)   We are on the eighth floor in the front, overlooking Cherokee Triangle and the Park itself.  It has several things we most wanted:  it's in a secure building (so we can just walk away when we go to Michigan in the summer or on other trips); it has an elevator (so we can live here even if our legs eventually give out); it's in the Highlands.

There are very few buildings that fulfill all these criteria, and we have been hoping since last May.  This is the first and only unit we've seen that checks all our boxes.  So we jumped on it.  We saw it on Monday evening the first day it came on the market, and by Tuesday afternoon, we had an accepted contract.  We still need to go through all the preliminaries (inspection, appraisal, etc.) but we foresee no difficulties.  Here are pictures from the listing service; remember this is not our furniture or style.

Entry Hall

Living Room. The back wall is all windows overlooking the park.

Dining Room.  

Bedroom

Kitchen

Breakfast Nook

Second Bedroom/Den

Eventually we plan to redocorate, but that's a bit down the road,until we have settled in (and our finances have some breathing room.)  We are up to our ears right now, renovating our house so we can sell it.  So we are going to wait til we've lived in it a bit.

I have never made such an important decision so quickly.  Tony and I usually belong to the Undeciders, senior level.  But given the absolute lack of anything else (and how much we really like this building), we uncharacteristically jumped right in.

#1400 Willow

#BuyingaCondo