Month: December 2019

Warning: The following contains material that may be offensive to some people; even males. Reader discretion is advised. (Too late for some who’ve read this far.)

We’re planning to move!

(Male chorus) ‘So?’

It means we must downsize. Which means we must get rid of most of our crap.

(Male chorus) ‘What’s so difficult about that? Couple of LCBO boxes and you’re done.’

To ye who have no plans to move (but should), let me clarify your fuzzification. We’ll start, where I was directed to start, with a descent to the great unknown – the furnace room. This seldom penetrated posting measures a mere 8 feet by 12 feet. Apart from the furnace and the hot water heater, it permanently stores two interior doors that belong to the house but, at sometime in their life, were deemed expendable but not throw-out-able. Fortunately, they are arranged as shelves so they help absorb rather than add to the clutter.

Now for a survey of an eternity of smart buys:

• A 4 drawer metal, bomb proof filing cabinet that safely kept paper bills and receipts for 40 years.
• A steamer trunk that kept nothing but was deemed interesting.
• Door wreathes: the committed interior designer could rationalize that 2 outside doors (front and back) times 4 seasons require 8 wreathes. We have 15.
• Going back to the doors that act as shelves: they hold 9 pieces of luggage (sometimes I don’t get to go). Why so many, you ask? Well, we’ve been on many trips, haven’t we, and what typically happens is spouse #1 decides:

‘We need new luggage for this trip.’

‘Why?’ cautiously rejoins the other spouse.

‘Well, what we have just won’t work on this trip,’ clearly clarifies spouse #1.

Never-giving-up-spouse #2 counters, ‘Just curious, but what is there about luggage that makes it non-workable?’

‘Well, for a start, they’re too heavy and the most up-to-date luggage is lighter.’

‘How if we stick with the heavier luggage and just not pack your make-up kit?’ ventures spouse #2 while exiting right.

• A child’s car seat bought at great expense and used once¹The number of items we’ve bought and used just once and then  stored for another day, which never came, is currently at 2,104 by visiting grandchild. A child’s car booster seat bought at great expense and used once when said grandchild, who by this time had outgrown the child’s car seat bought at great expense and used once, visited us a second time.
• Set of golf clubs (well they have to be kept warm in winter, duh)
• Two book cases holding no books but harbouring lots of I’ve-no-idea-unopened- stuff with dust on it.
• Unliftable tub of driveway sealer; semi-liftable tub of driveway filler, a two-handed jug of driveway liquid crack filler. By the time master spouse gets around to doing something about the driveway, above items have solidified.
• Rubbermaid tubs, the big ones, the needs-two-to-lift big ones holding:
  • Indoor Christmas decorations; enough for two homes.
  • Two sets of Christmas tree lights (Bubble lights could come back.)
  • 7 sets of outdoor Christmas lights of which 2 sets work but they’re not the same colour.
  • Dishes for Party o’ the Summer. Make us an offer. Free delivery over $40.
  • One size fits all New Year’s Eve tiaras, top hats & noise makers. Happy to bring and leave with an invite.
  • Children’s toys for children up to the age of 2. Ryo is 13; Shea 6 and Brady a mature 2.5.
  • Sons’ crap that they’ve shown no interest in until now, ‘Don’t throw that out!’

Now comes the fun part, you don’t part with most of it. ‘Oh look, the mock plastic ash tray that aunt Gladys gave us, I know just where that will go in the new place.’

Your eyes glaze over, you want to sit down but there’s no room. You’ve eliminated 12.57 percent of the crap from just one room and you’re moving into a place that’s 42.8 percent smaller than where you live now. And there are 10 more rooms to go. Each room with a closet²And for every closet there are shelves, racks, drawers… that you’re afraid to open.

‘So,’ concludes the by now uncomfortable but still all-knowing-male, ‘Thanks for the heads-up, I won’t move.’

But you’ve got to move, guys, or they’ll move you; ‘Can he hear me?’ (shouting) You’ll love Sleepy Acres!’

You’ve got to get off the couch and make sure that gutless wooden tennis racket gets to that special person you promised to remember. You’ve got to get off the couch and make sure your treasures stay with you and not get swept away in the shredder. What about your first edition copy of, ‘Principals with principles,’ (a light read) and the priceless, ready for framing, Crokinole Life Award – Senior Section (CLASS)? Which you graciously accepted while giving the crowd the finger (‘to admire’ is understood – ed.).

Indeed. But don’t despair. It can be done. It must be done. Off you go. I’m off, too. Off to tackle the garage where I put all the stuff I didn’t know what to do with from the furnace room.

When we last left our intrepid male mover, he was off to the garage to see the things that Caesar doesn’t want and should be rendered onto Caesar’s recycle bin. Not much, as it turns out. But other challenges were afoot.

It seems today that you can’t sell your house, your lovely home, with your lovely objets d’art and prints of Elvis and have your lovely objets d’art and prints of Elvis on display.

We knew the routine in general but not to the extent of the militant stager. Looking back, it must have been difficult for her to even enter our place. Any one can read lips that clearly enunciate the unbelievable, ‘Oh my God!’

I was hoping for an executive summary: ‘Make it neutral; make it light; make it roomy.’  And then leave.

I wasn’t ready for:

          ‘ Change the wallpaper.’

          ‘ Hide the piano.’

          ‘ Move that piece of someone’s mid-century furniture.’

          ‘ Paint that room.’

          ‘And why is it so dark in here?’

‘Well’, I muttered (sotto voce) in defense of the last observation, ‘for a start, it’s fall, overcast, late in the day, there are curtains on the windows so the neighbours won’t see us running after each other naked, the army surplus store was out of searchlights and this custom home used real wood instead of drywall.’

And that’s just the first room she’d entered.

Now that she’d thrown realistic expectations out the stained glass window (‘Can they be removed?’) I started punching back.

‘I was thinking of going modern and covering the natural exotic wood flooring in the dining room with used shag carpeting in a sort of calming, off-colourish shade.’ Followed by, ‘and adding some joie-de-vivre to the living room with an Andy Warhol Cambell’s mushroom soup can unsigned print propped by the fireplace,’ all this presented with a designer’s pseudo-studious pose of one arm horizontally supporting the elbow of the other that lightly fingers the cheek.

OK, so maybe the puce throw should be thrown out and, granted, the oil painting of uncle Egbert in full battle regalia (Boer War) over the mantle could be retired but it was the minutiae I wasn’t ready for, ‘And take down the knife rack.’

Pause with me, dear reader, as I try to paint a picture where a knife rack in a kitchen kills the deal.

‘Well, we love the place, well maintained, right size, separate drive, double car detached garage, beautiful fully landscaped back yard, all the latest mod cons, air-conditioned, so close to good shopping and fabulous schools, good services, parks, low taxes, quiet and neighbours our age with cars we recognize. We’re prepared to put in a bully bid and meet all your conditions … wait a minute … is that what I think it is? Let me get a closer look. ‘There’s a knife rack in the kitchen!’ Herbert, grab your shoes, don’t bother to put them on, we’re outta here.’

As an aside, I was tempted to add a warning label to the knife rack: may contain asbestos and/or knob-and-tube wiring.

So we give lip service to the stager’s recommendations: push around the clutter, hide this and that to some unremembered spot, haul grandma’s beloved and well used bench to the garage, vacuum, chase cobwebs, only use one toilet, remove the curtains, stop running after each other naked, eat standing up, unload our accumulated no-resale-value crap to Value Village (False advertising?) and polish the knife rack to an all time lustre all in time for the photographer.

This house could now be used to promote a third world country’s fund-raising drive to eliminate austerity. Each room is bare of any sign of life, any sign of taste (good or bad), any sign that humans had once graced this space in the last hundred years. And to illuminate this wasteland in all its God forsaken lack of glory, the photographer insists, ‘Turn on all the lights.’

The photographer politely reserves judgement as he clicks from room to room; he knows the pictures go for retouching plus he has liability insurance.

So now we await the glossies displayed on the real estate agent’s web-site and expect to wonder how the place we inhabited these past 40 years looks so unrecognizable.

But this frozen-in-time tundra doesn’t now go away. There’s a least a week of not finding anything. First there’s the agents’ open house; then (hopefully) the prospective buyers’ positive analysis. Until you agree to what the market wills, you’re conditioned to forever hanging your keys on the just-removed key rack and then picking them up off the floor.

But selling is the name of the game. If a strategically placed bowl of highly polished granny smiths on a never-before spotless, clutter-free kitchen counter gets a heart to flutter who am I to claim, ‘Fake news!’

How’d we do after all this? (To be continued)

Where were we? Oh yes, how’d we do after the staging?

Well, let’s not get ahead of ourselves, shall we? When we last left our emasculated male mover, he was bracing for the onslaught of people who couldn’t wait to see this rhinestone in the roughage, so to speak.

Here’s the process for those of you still caught up in an immoveable state. You sterilize your home and then you wait. Wait for someone who wants to walk barefoot through your Shangri-la;. He/she’s first steps are to their agent who, in turn, completes the journey with a call to our agent waiting on the horizon. Or someone steps right up to the front door sans agent (more about egregious commissions later). Lost yet?

And lo and behold, it happens; somebody wants to cross the moat to your castle. ‘Bravo, done,’ you enthuse. ‘Not so fast,’ I defuse. Let’s assume it’s 9:00 a.m. (That’s IX on your staged clock.) You’ve had your caffeine hit and have thrown on some questionable attire (Do the socks match the pants or the shoes? How ‘bout don’t wear socks?) When the call comes through, it could be for a 10:00 showing that morning. Yes, you have to re-sterilize your home and move out within the hour.

‘Not possible you say,’ quivering at the thought. ‘Correct,’ we respond equally quivered. So how do you do it?. Follow the bouncing ball dear viewer:

• Start with the house in pristine condition
• Wherever you go, you do not leave a trail; you don’t cover your tracks, you pick them up. For example, you’re watching TV, and you’re tired of Judge Judy dispensing wisdom, you start to drag yourself away but first you:
  • Pick up your wine glass; the wine bottle; the screw cap; the pliers, the serviette with the mature joke and the well named Crumble Crackers.
  • Dab at the wine stain using the now really off-colour serviette.
  • Retrieve your socks
  • Close the window; on second thought, leave it open, you took off your socks
  • Put the chair, the ottoman and the 3 remotes back to where they were when you entered the room. Correction: hide the remotes in the drawer.
  • Fire up the vacuum cleaner.
• Repeat wherever you go

It’s now around 9:15 and you’re ready to leave the house (you have to, by the way, home owners are persona non grata; they could screw the sale), ‘The fridge needs ice.’

But before you leave the house:

• Turn on all the lights. This really hurts; it’s the sunniest day of the year and there are no curtains, remember? This convoluted idea had to be hatched by a real estate agent who also sells electricity part time on commission. In our case, turning on the lights makes the basement the brightest room in the house.
• As you back down the drive you realize you hadn’t planned on where to go to kill time.
• We head for Giuseppe’s Discount Furniture Emporium and Swim up Grappa Bar.
• Turn on your cell phone! OK, but why the urgency? Cause when you’re later at Starbucks spending $ 22.26 for two coffees and 2 wraps (as an aside, a student is sprawled beside you consuming no coffees and no wraps but a lot of internet.) somebody else could want to see your place at 10:30 and then you couldn’t go home.
• $112.57 later (the cost of killing time consuming food and the house consuming all that electricity from leaving the lights on – even the piano light gets to shine!) you head home at 4:30 and plan a dinner that can be made and consumed and cleaned up in 13 minutes cause (wait for it) somebody could want to drop by.
• Of course, while this is going on, you can’t really use your place; you’ve hidden all the things you use every day so drinking out of the bottle and eating out of the box is now proper etiquette.

So how’d we do after all this? (drumroll)

Somebody wants to make an offer! ‘Yes!’ you shout, ‘but I thought we’d agreed to wait till Tuesday to review all the offers?’ (‘All’ is the operative word.)

This is a shut out game; a push, if you will. ‘We’ll buy your house, a touch over asking, no conditions, your closing date but we want to push you to accept it right now and not wait for all those overly generous offers coming on Tuesday. Whatta you say?’

‘Aghhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh …’

The throb of bouncing the pros and cons back and forth numbs the brain. All the negotiating skills you learned in cubs abandon you, ‘I’ll give you a frog for your silver yo-yo.’

Do you consider this offer or wait till Tuesday? If Tuesday is a bust, can you go back and beg? For less? You decide to play the pushing game back; you ask for some more. They nudge back; give a bit, but less than some more.

You start to sweat; it’s fall, you never sweat in the fall. You stand shakily on shaky ground. You forcefully ask for what you want, ‘How ‘bout a little more?’

The phone rings.

They agree. The dog has caught the car; we’re moving.

Moving day is closing day, January 31^st. It never dawned on me to move on any day other than the day you sell your house.

Your friends tell you, your real estate agent tells you and your lawyer tells you, ‘Don’t move on the day you sell your house.’ The reasons are many with the principal one being the deal might not get done.

Money has to change hands on closing day and in most situations you need the money from the sale of your house to pay for the house you agreed to buy. In turn, the buyer of your place needs the money from the sale of his place and so forth and so on. This domino effect can pile up and this pile up can induce gridlock among the lenders and during the registry process.

Even the minutiae loom large. You may have to book the freight elevator (if you’re moving into a freight elevator situation) and you should get out of your place promptly; it’s similar to checking out of a hotel room by 3 p.m. Finally, you have to clean your place. While all this is going on, of course, the movers are still tossing boxes you carefully labelled ‘fragile.’ Oh, and on this particular day, it was minus 15 degrees Celsius¹To those still in the Fahrenheit ages, we’re talking 5 degrees. Yes, that’s ice underfoot the movers. Yes, that’s aunt Lily’s ming ashtray they’re playing hockey with during their break..

And lest we forget, you’d probably like to paint the odd room where you’re moving to and that goes on better if said room(s) are empty. And before you move why not take a minute to see that everything you ignored when you did the 30 second tour of the place on open house day works.

So the typical plan is to overlap the purchase of your new place with the sale of your present abode; carry two properties for a couple of days or so. But why would you do that, I ask myself, what could go wrong?

So how bad was it? Well, for a start, fortune smiled on us. All the financial and legal hassles and the key exchange were dispensed with around noon. But the move was still moving at our old place. When the truck was finally packed and came unstuck from the snowbank (see footnote), I hustled my buns to the new place to direct the unloading while my wife and the cleaning person were left to meet and greet the new owners who are looking at their watches and mouthing the words, ‘Haven’t they ever stayed in a hotel room? It’s 3 p.m!’

Moving day takes about twelve hours and we didn’t have far to go. You try to force a smile at your new surroundings but you’re tired and hungry and surrounded by boxes that are precisely  labelled, ‘Stuff from the basement.’

But you showed ‘em; you can move the day you close!

Bears repeating, what could go wrong?

The scream is blood curdling. Not since Janet Leigh in Psycho has the world been party to such a fright. The curdling belongs to my wife and she’s in the master bathroom in the shower in our new abode.

This must be the first time I didn’t admire my wife while she was in the shower. There’s a distracting geyser of Old Faithful proportions coming from somewhere and pounding the 8 foot ceiling. I assume it’s the shower but once a modicum of calm surfaces I realize that the cold water tap on one of the sinks has blown its top.

Showing the male cool that the gender is famous for, I fit the tap back on and hold it as best I can which partially stems the flow and direct my wife to crawl under the sink and turn the shut off valve.

‘I don’t see any shut off valve,’ my wife, semi-calmly, reports back the naked news from underneath the cabinet.

Now I’m sure most male readers are rolling their eyes, ‘What do you mean there’s no shut off valve? Of course there’s a shut-off valve. Here, you try to hold down the tap and I’ll shut off the water.’

I crawl under the cabinet. Oh oh, she’s right. There…is…no…shut…off…valve. Now what?

‘Get dressed (I was tempted to say, ‘We don’t have a minute to lose, don’t bother getting dressed …’ ) and go down and get the concierge.’

‘Hi, I’m the concierge, oh my, I have a water key.’

‘How do you use a water key?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Is there a supervisor?’

A pause, dear reader, as I must mention that all this chatter is taking place while I’m holding back the dike and though I’ve been known to exaggerate on occasion, this was no fun day at the beach. To the condo’s credit, the system produces tremendous water pressure. Two-hands-on-the-tap-to-hold-the-tap-down type of water pressure. The water is now semi-directed into the sink but the floor is 4 bath towels deep trying to stem the equivalent of a spring run off.

Picture this, three lost souls in a bathroom with one of them holding a water key which looks like a piece of pipe of no known purpose at-the-ready pointing aimlessly at the ceiling. A key it does not resemble.

The supervisor arrives.

‘Hi, I’m the supervisor, oh my.’

We are now four lost souls in the bathroom with one of them holding a water key.

‘Hi, I’m a neighbour, oh my, give me the water key.’

We are now four lost souls and a found one.

‘See those brass discs on the wall? That’s where the shut off valves are located.’ Four lost souls peer at a corner of the bathroom vainly looking for anything that resembles a keyhole. And with that the neighbour pries off one of the discs, notes that everything is wallpapered over, but guesses at its centre and jams the water key through the wallpaper and into the wall and turns the water key.

The water subsides.

‘I’ve got to get to work,’ the neighbour announces and tosses me the water key. The concierge leaves, ‘Oh my.’

The supervisor leaves, ‘Oh my.’

Now, to be truthful, if I’d had a water key²Can’t make this up; the previous owner packed our water key. I wouldn’t have known what to do with it. And as I look around the condo, I realize a water key is also needed in the laundry room. And where the water key isn’t needed, shut off valves aren’t guaranteed to be there.

We called Paladin Plumbing  – ‘Have water key, will travel.’

We also talked to the condo hierarchy

‘‘Oh my, that’s awful,’ sympathized the admin manager, ‘but your condo is your responsibility.’

‘True,’ my wife parried, ‘but If Niagara Falls comes to visit us, it visits all of us and I think the condo should feel it’s their responsibility, too.’

So starting now, every new tenant not only gets the key to their condo but to their condo’s water and a tour of its force.

An addendum to, ‘What could go wrong?’  A chair we destined for our son in Virginia dropped a leg between here and there. Said leg surfaced many weeks later and is currently resting with us until either Virginia visits us or we attempt to cross the border. ‘Do you have any wood products to declare?’

So ends the ‘moving’ trilogy. From facing all the crap through the you’ve-got-to-be-kidding staging and finger-crossing showing to the eventual sale and then the move, we got from there to here. So was it all worth it? Well it took a four part trilogy to cover it all which is saying a lot. And yes, our new address has a gorgeous terrace which is usually bathed in all-day sunshine so things are looking bright.

With one small caveat: there’s a tap on the terrace.