Our house is a very very very…

…fine house, although the two cats are both inside cats so won’t be in the yard. Nor can I honestly say that life used to be so hard…

I can’t honestly say that I need to explain the absence of posts hereabout, since (one way or another) there’ve been more than my two-posts-a-week goal. I already explained the absence of new content for C&I three weeks ago, but gave y’all two chock-full issues of research results instead–and even that post follows up an earlier one.

Notes along the way

So this is just a progress report, with luck progressing toward a return to new articles of some minor merit.

We now own a 45-year-old house, in generally excellent condition (although the roof may be iffy), in a beautiful neighborhood in Livermore, California. We’ll start trundling stuff over there on Monday, and expect to begin sleeping there on Thursday, 5/14–and to be entirely out of our old house on Monday, 5/18.

For two or three hours yesterday, technically, we didn’t own a house. That’s the period between the recording of the sale of our 55-year-old house (in excellent condition, but in need of some remoding) in a beautiful neighborhood in Mountain View, California, and the recording of the purchase of the Livermore house. (We’re “renters” here for the next 9 days or so, part of the purchase agreement.)

That’s the good news. The bad news, which was making both of us crazier than usual on Wednesday, Thursday and particularly Friday morning until about 1 p.m., is that we were supposed to be non-homeowners for two full days. That is, Mountain View was supposed to close escrow on May 5, with Livermore closing on May 8. And with sellers in Livermore waiting for the funds so they could in turn purchase another house…

Apparently, the bank lending funds to the buyer of our old house left something out of the stuff they needed from those buyers… Given the stories we’ve heard about deals falling through at the last minute, we were, how you say, stressed. All the more so when 10 a.m. Friday came and went and the funds still hadn’t been wired… (After everyone else gets a chance to delay, it’s up to the county to actually time-stamp the grant deed as being recorded: The title insurance company won’t wire the funds from the sale until that happens.)

So yesterday, until about 4:30 p.m. (when *our* purchase, rush-delivered, was time-stamped, thus closing escrow), we were really up in the air, with phone calls and email going back and forth among several real estate agents, three title companies, us, and probably others we don’t know about.

It shouldn’t be this hard. There should be–there are–checklists of what needs to be done.

Oh, and don’t get me started on the “paperless revolution” as it applies to California real estate deals. I don’t even want to measure all the papers we’ve had to deal with; I’m pretty sure we’ve signed or initialed at least a hundred documents in all. I know we’ll be getting CDs from both agents with copies of all the papers…and, to be sure, my Gmail account probably has 200+ megabytes of PDFs related to the move, including the PDFs-from-fax we received, printed out, signed, then scanned back in as PDF and attached back to email. That saves time, but still generates paper… (I say “California” because, at least in Santa Clara County, the disclosure documents are so extensive and there are so many other documents. I’m guessing some states and counties aren’t quite so cautious.)

In the long run…

It will all be worth it. Ask me in about two weeks… (A week to move, a week to settle in and unpack most of the boxes.) We just finished tagging all the packed boxes with the rooms they’re going to…and realized just how much we really have already packed. (60-70 boxes, maybe?) There’s still a fair amount to go…

Meanwhile, I am so far thoroughly impressed by my second experiment in Andersonomics:

  • Ratio of people who’ve seen the first half of The Liblog Landscape via C&I to those who’d purchased copies: Roughly 10:1–and that ratio will certainly increase.
  • Number of additional copies sold, now that people can read (most of it) for free and are thus encouraged to pay for the real book: Identical to the figure for Academic Library Blogs and Public Library Blogs combined! That is…zero, so far. (But it’s early yet. That number could easily double or triple in the future.)

2 Responses to “Our house is a very very very…”

  1. jessamyn says:

    Congrats on the move. My sister had a similar nail-biting last few days before her house sold. I am glad it’s all settled.

  2. walt says:

    Thanks. Now, when the move’s actually complete… (We’re in pre-moving-van “how many trips back and forth make sense?” mode. Interesting how, in our last move with a 20-30 minute drive each way, we could justify going back and forth multiple times a day. But for this move, with a 40-minute drive each way, we can’t. Of course, we are 11 years older…)