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In October, we got a rather rude awakening, when Kimberly had a few major health problems spring up rather surprisingly. And piling major health problems atop preparing a move to Hawaii and preparing a house to be sold ... isn't a good combination.
So, there was less done than expected in October, which wasn't great as we zero in on the end of the year (but more on that momentarily).
And, we actually have some fear that our plans to move on January 1 may be spoiled, depending on Kimberly's needs and health when we get there.
But at least things have been looking slightly up in the last few days. Thanks to a great surgeon, we figured out a plan for Kimberly's immediate needs, trying to schedule the less invasive surgery first, and then the more invasive one right on its heels if it's needed. And Kimberly already has a date for the big surgery, in early December (which theoretically leaves her flight-safe 2-3 weeks later). And she just got some new test results that show her kidney and liver numbers returning to normal (for her), which was big huge problem #2, and it's now gone, and looks like it might have been caused by some of the stress put on her organs from the other tests that doctors have been running.
So, there was a big speedbump in October, and we'll be continuing to work on it for the rest of our time in California, but hopefully we're getting it under control.
So what did we do?
We dealt with a lot of logistics.
The shippers came back with a good quote, and after some back and forth ... I think maybe I finally have a contract waiting for me in DocuSign with the right info? (I didn't as of early this week, but DocuSign says the contract was updated on October 30.) We should be shipping our stuff out mid-December.
We got together with our real estate agent and spent over two hours (no exaggeration!) filling out forms. We're talking about listing in mid-January.
We picked a stager and I have a contract I need to send back to her this weekend too.
Our stager gave us new TODO items (sigh!). So we are getting a quote to paint the entire interior of the house, because the stager said that's more important than staging. We should have that early next week, and it's going to be another large chunk of money that we hadn't planned to spend. (As I told Kimberly: I never knew that selling a house was so expensive!) And she wants us to replace a vanity and some light fixtures and some curtain rods.
And, I made appointments with house and termite inspectors for next week. And I expect we'll get more TODOs from them.
We also had another major exodus from the house: 8 Fenton MacLaren fixed-shelf bookcases went to Uhuru. And they had enough trouble getting the 8-foot bookcases out of our upstairs rooms, that I was pretty glad we had them do so. (Basically we'd been holding onto these because our realtor last year thought that our stager might have interest in them, and our stager said nope, so as soon as she said that, we could pull the trigger on ousting them, because we don't want to drag them to Hawaii, and in fact would prefer to get built-in shelves that fit more organically with the house.)
Moving these bookcases out required finishing the clearing of them, however. For the most part, I'm done packing at this point, because I've done the more delicate books and games that packers might not deal with well and our shippers will now do the rest. But, this took some extra effort. So my 120 boxes at the end of September have jumped to 131 at the end of October.
So for November:
I'd really like to have a few sessions in a car with a trained driving instructor; and we need to get the cats into the vet to test out drugs.
And there are contracts to finish: the stager and the shippers. And we'll need to decide on painting when we get a quote, and after that put together a schedule for after our departure in January to include: cleaning, painting, more cleaning, window cleaning, staging, and then the house going on sale.
And there is stuff to do in the house: repair a vanity lamp; replace a vanity; get new light covers; get new light bulbs; get a few curtain rods.
And if we can manage to schedule it, Kimberly's first (and hopefully only) surgical procedure will be this month.
Whew.
So, there was less done than expected in October, which wasn't great as we zero in on the end of the year (but more on that momentarily).
And, we actually have some fear that our plans to move on January 1 may be spoiled, depending on Kimberly's needs and health when we get there.
But at least things have been looking slightly up in the last few days. Thanks to a great surgeon, we figured out a plan for Kimberly's immediate needs, trying to schedule the less invasive surgery first, and then the more invasive one right on its heels if it's needed. And Kimberly already has a date for the big surgery, in early December (which theoretically leaves her flight-safe 2-3 weeks later). And she just got some new test results that show her kidney and liver numbers returning to normal (for her), which was big huge problem #2, and it's now gone, and looks like it might have been caused by some of the stress put on her organs from the other tests that doctors have been running.
So, there was a big speedbump in October, and we'll be continuing to work on it for the rest of our time in California, but hopefully we're getting it under control.
So what did we do?
We dealt with a lot of logistics.
The shippers came back with a good quote, and after some back and forth ... I think maybe I finally have a contract waiting for me in DocuSign with the right info? (I didn't as of early this week, but DocuSign says the contract was updated on October 30.) We should be shipping our stuff out mid-December.
We got together with our real estate agent and spent over two hours (no exaggeration!) filling out forms. We're talking about listing in mid-January.
We picked a stager and I have a contract I need to send back to her this weekend too.
Our stager gave us new TODO items (sigh!). So we are getting a quote to paint the entire interior of the house, because the stager said that's more important than staging. We should have that early next week, and it's going to be another large chunk of money that we hadn't planned to spend. (As I told Kimberly: I never knew that selling a house was so expensive!) And she wants us to replace a vanity and some light fixtures and some curtain rods.
And, I made appointments with house and termite inspectors for next week. And I expect we'll get more TODOs from them.
We also had another major exodus from the house: 8 Fenton MacLaren fixed-shelf bookcases went to Uhuru. And they had enough trouble getting the 8-foot bookcases out of our upstairs rooms, that I was pretty glad we had them do so. (Basically we'd been holding onto these because our realtor last year thought that our stager might have interest in them, and our stager said nope, so as soon as she said that, we could pull the trigger on ousting them, because we don't want to drag them to Hawaii, and in fact would prefer to get built-in shelves that fit more organically with the house.)
Moving these bookcases out required finishing the clearing of them, however. For the most part, I'm done packing at this point, because I've done the more delicate books and games that packers might not deal with well and our shippers will now do the rest. But, this took some extra effort. So my 120 boxes at the end of September have jumped to 131 at the end of October.
So for November:
I'd really like to have a few sessions in a car with a trained driving instructor; and we need to get the cats into the vet to test out drugs.
And there are contracts to finish: the stager and the shippers. And we'll need to decide on painting when we get a quote, and after that put together a schedule for after our departure in January to include: cleaning, painting, more cleaning, window cleaning, staging, and then the house going on sale.
And there is stuff to do in the house: repair a vanity lamp; replace a vanity; get new light covers; get new light bulbs; get a few curtain rods.
And if we can manage to schedule it, Kimberly's first (and hopefully only) surgical procedure will be this month.
Whew.