OK. The moving saga.
26 Feb 2015 22:15![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
nwhikerI wrote it all up, so I figured I'd post it here.
Though I must add that today, Thursday, both cats are peeing blood again. FML, ya know? My poor sweet stressed out kitties.
OMG. OK, pop the popcorn and prepare to laugh.
Because OMG, this was such a freaking ordeal, I'll laugh about it... someday.
So. We've been waiting for permits for the remodel for over a year. Yawn. We kinda never thought it would happen. Then blam. Can you be out of your house in three weeks?
Ummm... We can. Yah. We can.
It may kill us, but we can.
Now, when we realised, in early January, that we might get permits soon, we figured they'd set a start date around March. Which would have been fine. But no, they wanted to start now-now-now-now, and quite honestly, we weren't about to say Wait! because of the fear that some other project would slip in before ours.
So first we have to find a house. Which is not self-evident, because short term rental. I had one woman say "We don't do that type of thing" in a tone dripping in condescension, as if I'd asked if they rented whorehouses or meth labs.
We finally found a place. Total rip-off on rent, BUT it's very close to our other place. The landlord -this is important- is Indian, and lives near St Louis. His brother lives around here.
We had a place to move, now we just had to move 20 years of accumulated CRAP to the new place. The idea was to pack anything we wouldn't need for 5 months into boxes, and store those in the ground level rooms, and just move in with the stuff we'd need for the next months.
Now during all this. Anne-Chloe has a her major writing research paper due and a gym meet. I'm taking a class at UW and I have the first draft of a paper due. Perry has a big take home exam. So we ended up piece-mealing a weekend of packing. I ended up writing most of the first draft of the paper by myself, it was a group project, since I figured that the NEXT weekend, I'd have even less time. That was the weekend of the 7th/8th.
Sunday evening, we notice that BamBam is peeing drips of blood. Monday morning, it's a trip to the vet for him. No infection, stressed out cat is the diagnosis. Great.
AC's research paper was turned in and the following Friday of President's Day weekend, we rented a truck to do the major move. We'd been hauling boxes over etc, but there was still A LOT of stuff.
I had school Friday morning, but -and I find this quite impressive- when I came back, AC and David had moved about half of the furniture into the truck. I helped as best I could, and later we got 2 hours of work out of Perry, but both moving the PIANO and everything out and in to the new places? Most of that was done by my spouse and my teenage daughter. :)
We moved the cats on Friday too. BamBam was still occasionally peeing everywhere, and the little brat peed all over my comforter that evening. I was NOT happy.
Saturday: move more stuff. A lot of stuff. We're all pretty tired by then. I managed to do a teeny bit of work on my group paper, but didn't feel too guilty about leaving it to one of the other guys since I'd done so much of the work for draft 1.
Sunday: move more stuff. We were getting to the bitter end, and we probably had a few hours left when Perry and I drove a load over. And found the house covered in bloody pee. It was the OTHER cat this time. She's 20, will be 21 in April, so that ended moving for that evening, and it was straight to the ER vet with her. Same as BamBam, no infection, too much stress. She got happy drugs.
We got everything out by Monday evening, totally exhausted. The kids were off school that week, so at least I had some help. We spent Tuesday in a stupor, only moving to run after cats mopping up dribbles of pee. Since the older cat is in kidney failure, her urine is pretty much water, so at least that.
We limp through the week. We still have boxes and bags of stuff all over, the kitchen cabinets are teeny tiny, and don't fit a lot of my stuff, but we'd started to get some organization in place.
And then. Friday. It's time to do laundry. Earlier that week, we'd run a short load through the washer and everything worked fine, so I put in a full load of stuff, and went to the Microsoft Store with David and Perry to pick up his replacement computer (easy painless process. He spilled tea on the previous one, we had insurance, they replaced it. It would have taken 3 days had we not been so busy and putting weeks between trips to the store. He had a loaner from school during that time). Anyhow, just as we were pulling into the mall, my phone rang.
It was Anne-Chloe. Water ankle deep all over the ground floor. Which is where ALL OF OUR STUFF IS STORED, along with the piano. CRAP. We're about 30 minutes away, we head home, David talking AC through basic diagnostics(she determined it wasn't the drain, so he was able to get her to put the machine on spin and stop the situation from getting worse.) I was driving, I had Perry call my MIL, who lives 10 minutes from us, to see if she could go over and help AC. No, she's playing taxi for SIL again. Never mind. We'd manage on our own.
Anne-Chloe, btw, dealt with the situation perfectly. Except for not putting on shoes when wading in, she did everything right, and when we got home, she'd managed to get a good amount of the water up, mitigating damage.
In a stroke of absolute luck, and thanks to the three pallets we had a lot of our stuff on, our only loss was a futon we were planning on tossing anyhow, and one rug got wet and will need to be seriously cleaned. Water wasn't quite ankle deep, but probably an inch or so in areas.
The landlord's floor, otoh? Not so great. We finally get in touch with him, and he sends his brother over, with a dehumidifier rented from Home Depot. He and David rip up the laminate flooring, there is water under pretty much everything. Friday evening is long. On Saturday David moved all our boxes from one room to the room that had been dried, ripped up the rest of the flooring, and got the second room drying.
At that point, we're exhausted and I'm irked at how much my spouse is doing. The landlord admitted they hadn't checked the washer and when David moved it later, and looked more carefully, he found loads of rust raining from it. Sigh.
Still, it could have been MUCH worse.
Sunday, we got back to the mall to finally confirm the computer for Perry.
We got back, had dinner, and Linnea -who'd eaten out with friends- came to tell us that she hadn't seen BamBam for quite a while.
Huh. Let's search for the cat.
It's quickly obvious that the little brat is AWOL, he probably escaped when the landlord came to pick up the dehumidifier. CRAP.
We spent a few hours searching. We made lost cat posters. AC went to bed in tears, he's her special baby. David and I drove around putting up flyers.
I got home and started getting a craigslist posting. David got his sleeping bag ready. We'd left BamBam's food in the garage with the door barely cracked. I posted my ad, David went down to sleep in the garage hoping that the bait would attract the cat and-- He opened the door to the garage, BamBam is in there, clicks the garage door down and the cat is back and trapped.
I deleted my craigstlist posting, and we head around the neighbourhood AGAIN to remove all the flyers we'd just put up. We got to bed at 2am, at 4am I was woken up because the cat had peed on my bed and it soaked my side of the comforter. Again, kidney disease, so very dilute, I spray it with Nature's Miracle and attempt go get another 2 hours of sleep.
So that was our move. It's been freaking exhausting, and that's not even mentioning all the crap about a fuck up in the house plans, and some unexpected changes there.
We stopped the cat's happy drugs today and she's back to using the litter box, so hopefully that's no longer an issue.
The new place is fine, it'll work for the time we have to spend here. I still have crap all over the place because last weekend was spent mitigating flood and not settling in. It'll be fine, though.
And dear heavens, next time we move, back into the other place? WE ARE HIRING PEOPLE. This college move is crap when you're no longer in college. The whole damn move cost us $208, including the truck, packing paper, and tape. We can afford to pay to get someone else to move the crap next time, damnit!
Though I must add that today, Thursday, both cats are peeing blood again. FML, ya know? My poor sweet stressed out kitties.
OMG. OK, pop the popcorn and prepare to laugh.
Because OMG, this was such a freaking ordeal, I'll laugh about it... someday.
So. We've been waiting for permits for the remodel for over a year. Yawn. We kinda never thought it would happen. Then blam. Can you be out of your house in three weeks?
Ummm... We can. Yah. We can.
It may kill us, but we can.
Now, when we realised, in early January, that we might get permits soon, we figured they'd set a start date around March. Which would have been fine. But no, they wanted to start now-now-now-now, and quite honestly, we weren't about to say Wait! because of the fear that some other project would slip in before ours.
So first we have to find a house. Which is not self-evident, because short term rental. I had one woman say "We don't do that type of thing" in a tone dripping in condescension, as if I'd asked if they rented whorehouses or meth labs.
We finally found a place. Total rip-off on rent, BUT it's very close to our other place. The landlord -this is important- is Indian, and lives near St Louis. His brother lives around here.
We had a place to move, now we just had to move 20 years of accumulated CRAP to the new place. The idea was to pack anything we wouldn't need for 5 months into boxes, and store those in the ground level rooms, and just move in with the stuff we'd need for the next months.
Now during all this. Anne-Chloe has a her major writing research paper due and a gym meet. I'm taking a class at UW and I have the first draft of a paper due. Perry has a big take home exam. So we ended up piece-mealing a weekend of packing. I ended up writing most of the first draft of the paper by myself, it was a group project, since I figured that the NEXT weekend, I'd have even less time. That was the weekend of the 7th/8th.
Sunday evening, we notice that BamBam is peeing drips of blood. Monday morning, it's a trip to the vet for him. No infection, stressed out cat is the diagnosis. Great.
AC's research paper was turned in and the following Friday of President's Day weekend, we rented a truck to do the major move. We'd been hauling boxes over etc, but there was still A LOT of stuff.
I had school Friday morning, but -and I find this quite impressive- when I came back, AC and David had moved about half of the furniture into the truck. I helped as best I could, and later we got 2 hours of work out of Perry, but both moving the PIANO and everything out and in to the new places? Most of that was done by my spouse and my teenage daughter. :)
We moved the cats on Friday too. BamBam was still occasionally peeing everywhere, and the little brat peed all over my comforter that evening. I was NOT happy.
Saturday: move more stuff. A lot of stuff. We're all pretty tired by then. I managed to do a teeny bit of work on my group paper, but didn't feel too guilty about leaving it to one of the other guys since I'd done so much of the work for draft 1.
Sunday: move more stuff. We were getting to the bitter end, and we probably had a few hours left when Perry and I drove a load over. And found the house covered in bloody pee. It was the OTHER cat this time. She's 20, will be 21 in April, so that ended moving for that evening, and it was straight to the ER vet with her. Same as BamBam, no infection, too much stress. She got happy drugs.
We got everything out by Monday evening, totally exhausted. The kids were off school that week, so at least I had some help. We spent Tuesday in a stupor, only moving to run after cats mopping up dribbles of pee. Since the older cat is in kidney failure, her urine is pretty much water, so at least that.
We limp through the week. We still have boxes and bags of stuff all over, the kitchen cabinets are teeny tiny, and don't fit a lot of my stuff, but we'd started to get some organization in place.
And then. Friday. It's time to do laundry. Earlier that week, we'd run a short load through the washer and everything worked fine, so I put in a full load of stuff, and went to the Microsoft Store with David and Perry to pick up his replacement computer (easy painless process. He spilled tea on the previous one, we had insurance, they replaced it. It would have taken 3 days had we not been so busy and putting weeks between trips to the store. He had a loaner from school during that time). Anyhow, just as we were pulling into the mall, my phone rang.
It was Anne-Chloe. Water ankle deep all over the ground floor. Which is where ALL OF OUR STUFF IS STORED, along with the piano. CRAP. We're about 30 minutes away, we head home, David talking AC through basic diagnostics(she determined it wasn't the drain, so he was able to get her to put the machine on spin and stop the situation from getting worse.) I was driving, I had Perry call my MIL, who lives 10 minutes from us, to see if she could go over and help AC. No, she's playing taxi for SIL again. Never mind. We'd manage on our own.
Anne-Chloe, btw, dealt with the situation perfectly. Except for not putting on shoes when wading in, she did everything right, and when we got home, she'd managed to get a good amount of the water up, mitigating damage.
In a stroke of absolute luck, and thanks to the three pallets we had a lot of our stuff on, our only loss was a futon we were planning on tossing anyhow, and one rug got wet and will need to be seriously cleaned. Water wasn't quite ankle deep, but probably an inch or so in areas.
The landlord's floor, otoh? Not so great. We finally get in touch with him, and he sends his brother over, with a dehumidifier rented from Home Depot. He and David rip up the laminate flooring, there is water under pretty much everything. Friday evening is long. On Saturday David moved all our boxes from one room to the room that had been dried, ripped up the rest of the flooring, and got the second room drying.
At that point, we're exhausted and I'm irked at how much my spouse is doing. The landlord admitted they hadn't checked the washer and when David moved it later, and looked more carefully, he found loads of rust raining from it. Sigh.
Still, it could have been MUCH worse.
Sunday, we got back to the mall to finally confirm the computer for Perry.
We got back, had dinner, and Linnea -who'd eaten out with friends- came to tell us that she hadn't seen BamBam for quite a while.
Huh. Let's search for the cat.
It's quickly obvious that the little brat is AWOL, he probably escaped when the landlord came to pick up the dehumidifier. CRAP.
We spent a few hours searching. We made lost cat posters. AC went to bed in tears, he's her special baby. David and I drove around putting up flyers.
I got home and started getting a craigslist posting. David got his sleeping bag ready. We'd left BamBam's food in the garage with the door barely cracked. I posted my ad, David went down to sleep in the garage hoping that the bait would attract the cat and-- He opened the door to the garage, BamBam is in there, clicks the garage door down and the cat is back and trapped.
I deleted my craigstlist posting, and we head around the neighbourhood AGAIN to remove all the flyers we'd just put up. We got to bed at 2am, at 4am I was woken up because the cat had peed on my bed and it soaked my side of the comforter. Again, kidney disease, so very dilute, I spray it with Nature's Miracle and attempt go get another 2 hours of sleep.
So that was our move. It's been freaking exhausting, and that's not even mentioning all the crap about a fuck up in the house plans, and some unexpected changes there.
We stopped the cat's happy drugs today and she's back to using the litter box, so hopefully that's no longer an issue.
The new place is fine, it'll work for the time we have to spend here. I still have crap all over the place because last weekend was spent mitigating flood and not settling in. It'll be fine, though.
And dear heavens, next time we move, back into the other place? WE ARE HIRING PEOPLE. This college move is crap when you're no longer in college. The whole damn move cost us $208, including the truck, packing paper, and tape. We can afford to pay to get someone else to move the crap next time, damnit!
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no subject
Date: 28 Feb 2015 18:28 (UTC)Given all your savings on this move, next time you can afford to hire the White Glove movers who also cater the after-more-meal with fine china and crystal.
:^)
no subject
Date: 28 Feb 2015 18:35 (UTC)The sad thing is that the real reason we didn't hire anyone is because we really didn't want to deal with people, ya know? We have a hard time with that. :P
no subject
Date: 1 Mar 2015 00:52 (UTC)I gave up the college-style moving years ago, because while it's awful ordering around 3 strangers in my house (and DH *always* finds a way to not be there when I need him to be giving orders so I can supervise the overall process), it's better than guilting DH's gamer friends or the kids into helping.
no subject
Date: 1 Mar 2015 03:29 (UTC)Yeah, we'll drug 'em up good next time. At this point, they're still peeing, and peeing blood, and that's not good. It's a pain to clean up, but the old lady cat is far enough along in kidney failure (common in older cats, and she's ancient at almost 21) that her urine has no smell, so at least that. Of course that means unless I see a wet spot, I can't locate where she's peed. Sigh. I feel like I live in a house with two crazy cats.
One of them is on Prozac. Maybe I'll steal.... but no. Stealing meds from the cat would be a terrible thing to do. :P
Yeah, next time, I'm hiring. There will be many a freakout about that, I'm sure.