Key day. That glorious day when we’d finally get the keys to our shiny new house. We had a grand plan for key day. It was a good plan. A well thought out plan. The universe and its perverted sense of humor of course had a different plan for us.
THE PLAN: The keys to the new house were going to be locked in the garage and we’d get a text with the garage door code when the house was ready for us. Kris would pack up the barbeque, our bed and the dogs and meet me at the house when I got off work. He’d grill us some steaks to be eaten over the sink, and we’d have dessert I picked up from Papa Haydens on my lunch break. We’d get one quiet night in our fabulous new house before we started the actual move. It was supposed to be a brief, romantic evening.
THE REALITY: Just before heading to the new house with the packed up car & trailer, Kris called the cats inside. Coming inside when called has been a daily ritual for these cats since they discovered the magical sunny land of Outside. Nac decided, for no reason we’ve ever figured out, he didn’t want to go inside. Sure, sure, he’s a cat, so of course he picked the worst time to be randomly inconvenient. I think Murphy might have been giggling nearby and enticing Nac into teasing runs with tasty metaphysical treats. Kris spent an hour trying to bring him inside for the night instead of driving to our shiny new house when the text came in.
On the other side of town, I left my desk right at 5 super excited to head over to our house. I got in my car at the top of the parking garage and quickly discovered that the employee gate was broken. Everyone (employees and guests) had to go through the single pay-gate. This caused a fantastic 20 minute parking-jam which I have never seen before or since and left me quite literally trapped in the parking garage. 10 minutes in I stopped being angry and just started laughing while I beat my forehead against the steering wheel.
I somehow arrived at the house first and it felt like Christmas morning. I opened the garage, retrieved the key, unlocked the door, and found the cleaning crew manager was still there. The previous owners had very kindly hired a crew to clean the house from top to bottom so everything would be spotless when we took possession. They didn’t have to, it was just a really thoughtful gesture. It went a little… wrong though. Somehow, the crew had shattered a ceiling light fixture in the living room. I like to imagine they were having a lightsaber fight using their brooms and someone jumped to avoid a low cut by a mop and accidentally speared the light fixture on the upswing. In an attempt to repair it, they’d run to home depot, bought a replacement and installed it before I arrived…but it really didn’t match the other fixture. They were both glass, attached to the ceiling and had brown as part of the color scheme, but that’s really all they had in common. Accidents, happen, they’d done what they could. I was trying to hold on to the Christmas feeling when she showed me the refrigerator.
The fridge had no main shelf. When they removed the shelf for washing, it had slipped out of her hands and shattered on the kitchen floor. Of course no one in town had a replacement, so they’d already ordered it and it should arrive soon. Sometime in the next week soon. Did I mention that Smart guys family was going to stay with us for the week of the move to help? So 6 adults, 1 toddler and 6 dogs with an only partially usable refrigerator during a heat wave was … problematic.
Looking into the future 24 hours: We discovered they’d cleaned up the small glass pieces with rags that they’d rinsed in the kitchen sink. Filling the drain with hundreds of tiny bits of tempered glass just the right size to cause the garbage disposal to seize. My mother in law and I spent 2 or 3 hours over the next couple of days slowly pulling out shards, moving the manual bar, grinding glass, pulling out more shards, over and over and over until it finally worked.
The cleaning crew manager was so distressed by what had happened that she insisted on cleaning the window sills of the entire house to make up for the inconvenience. No, that doesn’t particularly make sense, but she really felt she needed to make it up to us. While she cleaned, we unloaded the first batch of stuff from our cars. When we finished, she was only half done and we were so hungry that waiting for the bbq to heat up was no longer a safe option.
Instead, some very patient friends took us out to have dinner at a neighborhood place: I remember that the food was tasty, but couldn’t tell you what I ordered. I remember a margarita glass the size of my head, but I don’t think it was mine. There was salsa, so there were probably chips…. For all I know our whole group was abducted by aliens and flown to Costa Rica for and intergalactic dinner on the beach. Dinner was tasty, our friends were very kind. Probably no aliens were involved.
When we arrived back home at our shiny new house the manager was gone and the window sills were in fact very clean. We rambled around the house opening things, flipping switches, poking buttons and closing things for an hour or two. We were so tired that I was half convinced that someone was changing the location of the light switches right after I left each room. That’s not true. I was completely convinced something was changing the location of the light switches right after I left each room. Those switches didn’t stop moving around until we’d been in the house for a couple of months.
We fell into an exhausted heap on the futon and laying there, in the dark, queued the inevitable ridiculous panic attacks that punctuated the night. “This house is huge and weird and not our home and.. and.. and…” zzzzzzzzzzz “Oh my god, where are the water shut offs, what if a pipe spontaneously detonates tonight. We won’t know where to turn it off! The house will fill up with water and we’ll drown!” zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz “Was that sound someone breaking in? Did I lock the door? Doors? How many doors to the outside are there? Do the locks on them work? Did we actually try the keys in all the locks? What if the neighbors still have keys to this house? We’re going to be murdered in our sleep by the serial killer next door!” zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz “Did I just hear a squeak? Was that a mouse? Rats? Have racoons figured out how to open the basement window? Do raccoons carry rabies or hantavirus? I don’t think they carry bubonic plague. Please don’t let that squeak be an opossum. They’re cute until they smile, then they look like Satan’s favorite pet. How do I find a pest control company at 3am?” zzzzzzzzzz “It’s going to be 102 tomorrow while we’re moving. Do we have an air conditioner? Is it electric or gas? What if the family moving out broke a gas line and didn’t realize it? Are there smoke alarms? Do they have batteries? Wait, gas is CO, do the alarms in this house even check that? My inlaws are going to find us dead and cherry red in the basement tomorrow… huh, wouldn’t have to go to work tomorrow if that happened.” zzzzzzz
Like it always does, dawn eventually happened, light came streaming through the strange new windows and most of the worries drifted away. Well, they drifted away after I checked every dark corner by cell phone light for critters and water.
Stay tuned for Episode 2: The weird stuff is past us! Moving in is going to be easy! Hahahahahahahahaha #Facepalm
Loved the ‘first night noises’-so true!