jducoeur

Hmm. Okay -- movers or not, I think we're going to need some assistance here.

Specifically, we're looking at two critical days. The first is this coming Sunday (Nov. 27th). We're renting a van this weekend to drive down to NJ (assuming my cousin is going to be there to open her garage for us). We're going to pick up a Big Mucking Rug and some other stuff, and come back Saturday. Since we're going to have the van anyway, we're going to brave the horror of IKEA on Sunday morning, and pick up a zillion bookcases. We would dearly love to get some help unloading that load -- it's a lot of heavy boxes, and we're going to hurt ourselves if we try to get it all into the house by ourselves. That would involve rendezvousing at the new house at about 2pm Sunday.

The second will be the Box Moving Day. I think that the smart thing for us to do is ask people to help us move a zillion boxes on Sunday, Dec. 4th (the day after Snow Ball). That will be a typical Carolingian Moving Company day -- we could use lots of people helping us load from the old house, and unload into the new one. This will only be relatively small boxes and minor furniture, though -- the big and heavy stuff will be dealt with by the movers on Tuesday. Frankly, this may be the real move: the new bed should be in the new house by then, so we'll probably just live out of boxes for the intervening days.

So we're mostly looking for folks able to help with heavy but manageable stuff this Sunday, and looking for any and all help on the following Sunday. If you can help, please drop us a note: we'll send directions and keep you in the loop for the exact timing. Thanks!

This afternoon's entertainment was spending nearly my entire net worth for the privilege of paying large amounts of money to a bank for the rest of my life. But beautiful Coeur Croisé, aka Crossert Manor, is now ours. We've already moved in the first carfull of boxes (which looks gratifyingly lost in it), and begun the negotiations of precisely what goes where. After all the legal pain, now we get the fun part.

Exact date of the housewarming is still under discussion (msmemory has already run one poll, and will probably run another soon), but expect it in January or February. One of the main purposes of this place is to feel able to entertain and hold meetings again, and we're quite looking forward to it.

(Party! Partypartyparty!)

So last night's entertainment / project was the initial window-shopping expedition to IKEA. We figured (correctly) that a Thursday evening after the initial week wouldn't be quite so loony. (Those not in Boston have been spared our IKEA Madness: the new store has been the main topic on the nightly news for the past month.) As it was, I would describe it as busy, but not unpleasantly crowded. Of course, given how mammoth the store is, "busy" still requires quite a lot of people.

Overall, the place lives up to its billing. (I'd never been to one before.) The furniture is consistently inexpensive while usually managing to not feel cheap. Nothing was quite as nice as the bedroom set that we were really taken with at Jordan's, but almost everything was better than the cheap stuff there.

The variety is good, although not quite as much so as it appears at first glance. Much of the store is made up of showcases -- sample rooms laid out in different ways -- and the same pieces get reused over and over again in them. In particular, the bookcases and storage solutions we were mostly looking for showed up repeatedly, albeit in different colors and combinations.

We looked at a number of different product lines pretty closely. I was mildly disappointed by the Gorm storage systems, which really do feel a tad cheap. (Of course, they're remarkably inexpensive.) The modular desk line (Gentry? something like that) wasn't bad, and we'll need to think about whether it works for the corner of the great room. The big win was the Billy bookcase system, which suits us extremely well: highly modular, with options to fit almost any room, and several different colors that should work for specific places in our house. The main question seems to be how many of these we will buy, and in what combinations.

We grabbed dinner in the IKEA restaurant, which matches the rest of the store: very low prices (just a hair over fast-food level) and not dreadful food. The Swedish meatballs were competent (which is more than I can say for many restaurant meatballs), the gravlax wasn't bad, and the Daim torte rather tasty.

The store is laid out as essentially a giant maze, which you wend your way through from beginning to end; we managed a quick but not rushed skim in about 2 hours. It ends in the warehouse where you pick things up (most of their furniture is packed flat), which is truly monumental -- comparisons to Raiders of the Lost Ark were in order.

Conclusion: nice place to shop. We probably won't buy our key furniture items there (none of the sofas looked even remotely interesting), but it seems like the place to go for much of the ancillary stuff...

Hmm. I get the feeling that I've sort of dropped off the face of the earth as far as dance practice is concerned this month, but this week is more of the same.

So far, things are going well (knock on wood) on the house front -- it could yet get fouled up, but I have some reason to believe that we will own a new house by the end of Monday, and move on the 6th. All the relevant parties seem to agree that we're closing on that day, and the money is supposedly in transit to me. I'm at that classic "autocrat the day before the event" stage where I'm fidgeting because I've run out of things I can do to make this all go better.

That said, we're now staring at the enormous organizational job that needs to happen before we move: the huge number of decisions to make about what goes where, and what is and isn't being kept. That seems to require a few hours a day from us for the next several weeks, to get it all done. We've made enough progress that it the house is now getting conspicuously emptier (or at least, squarer), but that just drives home how much there is to do yet. So while we're maintaining a minimal social life (to keep from going insane), we're mostly focusing on packing.

Anyway, hugs to everyone at dance practice, and I'll be back as soon as possible. And please keep fingers crossed that everything goes smoothly for the next week. (In which case we may be able to start moving small and non-critical stuff over to the house on Thanksgiving weekend...)

It's been a busy week on the house front. Looking back, it's downright astonishing that, as of this writing, it's yet a few hours shy of a week since the first time we looked at Mill St.

The thing about having really good house inspectors is that they efficiently disabuse you of the notion that you have found The Perfect House, which you must buy at all costs. Mill St. went much better than Edmands Rd. did -- there wasn't anything obviously devastating. The house has been decently maintained, and is in generally fair shape. But the roof of the addition is going to have to be ripped off and reworked (obvious ventilation problems), and the Masonite siding is at the end of its lifespan (Mike Scaduto sniffily refers to the stuff as "cardboard", and explained that it was pulled from the market not long after this house was resided). So we're about to drop the offer price a bit to compensate -- we'll see if the sellers bite.

Mike pointed out a few structural issues that made him nervous, so I brought in Rene Mugnier, a structural engineer he recommended, to look it over. The conclusion seems to be that there are some issues, but nothing clearly devastating. The chimney is ever so slowly and majestically falling off, but that can be fixed for a reasonable amount of money. The main beam over the garage seems to be slightly insufficient, so it'll be another few grand to reinforce that. There is some ongoing settling and related minor foundation cracking, but that looks more like a mild maintenance nuisance than a severe problem. There are some other matters of concern, but it seems to be manageable.

So far, the deal's still on. If they accept the revised offer, we continue to run at high speed. In the meantime, today is another day of gradually packing up the house. We've finally begun to really empty out and move some bookcases, which goes a long ways towards making it feel like we're making progress...

I rather feel like we are conducting a long series of interviews. Lots of resumes pouring in, lots of slush pile to weed through, and a modest number of serious candidates to look at.
( Here are the ones we've looked at recently )

Summary: today was the house inspection. The deal is off.
( Details, including the most interesting house inspectors around )

As previously mentioned, we brought Susana on board as a buyer's agent a few weeks ago. Since then, she's been seriously earning her keep, pointing us at potentially interesting houses and generally kicking the moving project into high gear.

Well, one of the listings caught my eye as sounding particularly attractive. On Friday, I went to look at it, and was surprised to find that I liked it even more in person. So we went back again tonight with msmemory so she could take a look, and we continue to be quite attracted to it. A smidgeon expensive, but it has everything we wanted and a couple that hadn't occurred to us to look for. (Like an acre of land, most of it forested wetland, so it isn't adding to the price but provides lots of privacy.) The house just feels really nice. Walking into it is like shrugging on a well-tailored overcoat: from the kitchen to the family room to the basement, it fits us well.

It does, of course, have one snag: it's out in Framingham. We'd talked about location before, and established that anything out to about Framingham or Chelmsford was okay if the house was perfect. Well, okay -- now we've found a near-perfect house, so we need to decide if we're serious about that.

It's an odd psychological barrier, crossing 128. Framingham really isn't all that far -- maybe 15 minutes further out from the city -- but we've heard so many people talk about how far they think of it being that it gives us pause. One of the objectives for this house is to have a good place to start entertaining again (it's delightfully well-laid-out for parties), and there's an odd little fear that no one will make the trek out there.

Of course, it isn't very rational. Everywhere is far from somewhere -- this location is considerably closer to Waltham than, say, Dorchester is, and people go there all the time. Some of it is probably just habit: I've lived in Waltham for over half my life, and msmemory nearly as long, so the idea of moving a significant distance away and having to learn the ins and outs of a new area is curiously daunting. Up until now, the house-buying process has been very intellectual, but now that push is coming to shove, we're learning a bit about ourselves.

We'll see. First we need to decide if we want it. Even if we do, a host of things could go wrong. But one way or another, this project has now taken on a dimension of reality that it didn't have before...