July 1, 2006: Packing Up Geneseo

Even though we were totally exhausted from the long drive last night Dominica and I had to get up around seven thirty this morning to get started on getting the house ready to sell. What a depressing project to be stuck doing at last minute’s notice after a long drive arriving late at night on a holiday weekend! We were not looking forward to today. Being tired going into it is going to make it extra difficult.

We managed to get a fair amount of work done right away in the morning. The house was a total disaster when we arrived as it has been for months. When I took the new position in New Jersey we had so much stuff that had to be done right away that everything just got stacked in the living room and the dining room and the office and left there. And both Dominica and I have been so busy whenever we have been in Geneseo that cleaning, packing, sorting, or whatever have been non-options. Now that is all catching up with us.

Sara and Jeremy came over around nine to help out with the project. Jeremy was sent out to work on the gardening and Sara did cleaning and DVD sorting and packing. One of the big things that we wanted to do was to empty the house of everything valuable that we could before people starting coming to look at the house. The CDs and DVDs were the big items that needed to be moved because they are easy to pocket and there are the type of things that a few could go missing and you wouldn’t be able to verify that for months or years – especially when we are moving three times probably this year. So Sara’s big job was to take the list of movies that we believed that we had and to go movie by movie on the list finding the movie in the basement and putting it into a box marking down what box it was going into. No small project!

I made a run to Walmart to get some necessary supplies for the moving, namely cleaning supplies and nineteen big plastic storage bins. I also picked up Failure to Launch which was on sale and the only interesting looking movie that released this week.

Shortly after Sara and Jeremy got started working dad came over with his “new” Mercury Grand Marquis that he purchased this week. The car is perfect for moving our stuff. What good timing. We were able to get his car loaded up almost immediately and he made a round so that we could load the car up again. Art and Danielle came over a little after eleven. They jumped in and helped with the house preparations. Danielle helped Min with projects upstairs and Art helped me downstairs. Art also changed all of the locks on the house as well as installed a handle on our screen door in the garage. If only we had so much nice stuff when we actually lived in the house!

Art, Danielle and Jeremy took off at one thirty to play some Call of Duty. Dad, Min, Sara and I did lunch at the Omega. All in all dad did three trips with his car loaded with stuff. That helped a lot. The garage would have been packed to capacity if he hadn’t been making runs back and forth.

At two our real estate agent came over to check out the house and get the paperwork in order so that we can sell it. She was very happy with the work that we were doing and felt that we were on the right track. She said that we should keep the theatre intact for the time being so that we could demo it for any prospective buyers who might want to buy the theatre with the house. So, as of today, the house is on the market for $174,900. The sign goes into the yard tomorrow.

Sara was the last one to go working until almost five. She managed to make it through the entire movie collection! What a relief that was. Dominica and I kept working until ten thirty. Then we decided that we were so exhausted that we needed to take a break so we took the one movie that wasn’t in the collection list yet and therefore wasn’t boxed, Failure to Launch and watched that in the theatre. It was very sad because there is a very real possibility that this will be the final movie that Dominica and I get to watch in the theatre together. We are really going to miss this theatre room. We don’t know if we will ever have an opportunity to have such a perfect room again. It was a major reason for us picking the townhouse that we did. The theatre is huge and a fourteen foot screen is just amazing. Now we don’t know what we will do. Apartments are not the best for home theatres. We might do something simple like getting the same LCD that dad has and going down to a small, compact system to get us by until we own a theatre space again. After twelve years of trying to get an amazing space like this we are giving it up after having it for less than two years. 🙁

After watching the movie which was pretty good we went back to work for about another hour. At that point there was still plenty to do but we were just too exhausted to keep working at it. We had to get some sleep. We wished that we would have been able to have gotten a lot farther than we did but there was just no way to do it over such a short weekend.

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