Last post of Houseaversary week! In case you missed it, be sure to check out our posts on how we almost missed out on even seeing the house, the offer process and the inspection. Today is all about closing day.
We used a quick closing date as a negotiating tactic in the purchase of our house. We closed in 30 days. Originally we planned to give our rental landlord two months notice, and have a month overlap to do some painting and move in at our leisure. Our landlord however rented our loft to the first people who viewed it, and they were able to move in a month early if we wanted out. We agreed as it saved us a months rent! The only problem was that we needed to move into our house on closing day. We were only moving two blocks south of where we were living, and we were moving ourselves using borrowed truck & trailer from Mom & Dad and the vehicles and muscles of friends, so we figured we were flexable enough to roll with it whenever we closed. Our lawyer and bank got us to pre-sign all the paper work a week before the closing, and we expected no issues. We loaded up the trailer the night before with all the boxes, and sat around drinking coffee waiting for the call from our lawyer.
The first sign that the day was not going to go as planned was when the furniture store called saying that they had delivered our new mattress set to the storefront. (We had requested the LAST delivery of the day, not the first.) The furniture store left the mattress on the front covered porch of the house (they were in big plastic bags). So not only was our brand new mattress sitting on the door of the house we didn’t have the keys for, but no one was there, and it was raining out. We couldn’t even take the trailer there and pick up the mattress, cause brilliant me had said to load the trailer TO THE BRIM the night before. We figured closing was right around the corner, so my Mom & Dad headed down there with the truck & trailer to park out front and make sure no crack heads took off with our new pillow top dream machine. Speaking of the new mattresses, the furniture company delivered them but not the new bed frame…so a very agitated Kristen spent several minutes bitching pleading her case to get them to pick up another frame from the warehouse in Brampton and deliver it that evening so that I would have a bed to sleep on (I was not going to put my brand new mattress on the floor thank you very much!)
Then I started to get antsy. I called and pestered our lawyer, who informed us that there was a problem with the sellers banking info. Apparently the seller wanted our bank to split up the money and send it to several different institutions. Our bank said hell no. If they needed that done, the money should have went to the lawyer in escrow and been split up by their lawyer. It wasn’t our banks job. So we waited, and waited, and waited some more… After lunch time rolled around I headed down to keep my parents company and keep watch while they stretched their legs and walked to a local coffee shop to get a cup of coffee and use the loo. Finally at about 4pm we got the call that we could pick up the keys. The problem now was that our lawyers office was smack dab downtown, and it was now RUSH HOUR. It took El Granto over an hour and a half to get down there, get the keys and get to the new house. Where it promptly started to really rain. Luckily we have amazing friends and family who lugged, and carried, and go soaked to the bone. We took a pizza break around 9pm, but didn’t make the final trip until almost midnight.
Then of course we needed a place to sleep…Exhausted and sweaty/rained on I insisted that we assemble the beds for both El Granto & I and my out of town parents who had come to help. So we allen wrenched and bolted, and eventually had beds built. At about that point in time we realized that we didnt have either a shower curtain rod not a bath tub stopper, so no one was even getting a nice hot shower that evening. We crawled into bed, and were promptly woken at the crack of dawn by the lack of curtains in the whole house.
So lessons learned kids: Dont move on the day you close. Hire movers. Don’t get furniture delivered on closing day. Label each box with not only the room its headed to, but whats inside it. Buy copious amounts of liquor for drowning your stresses. Make sure you have window coverings, a shower curtain and remember where you packed the coffee maker. Those are the keys to a smooth move.
