Monday, June 14, 2010

Monday: the Day We Sell the House

 Greta and I hop on the train in Essex Junction at 9am sharp, and enjoy a leisurely 11 hr train ride to New Jersey. Erik is in Thetford, VT, about 20 minutes from our house, and finishes returns to the house to finish some last minute straightening up.  The closing is scheduled for 11am. I’ve already signed Power of Attorney papers—oh yeah—did that on Friday along with the other important errands.


Around 9:30am, I get a phone call from Rowan, our realtor, saying that the money wire hasn’t gone through, and they want to delay the closing until 1pm. Erik has a 6 hr drive to make to NJ, and now needs to make a detour into Queens, in order to pick me up in Trenton by 8pm.


About an hour later, Erik calls me with the following news items
·      The closing has been postponed until 1pm, but that’s ok
·      Uncle Tom, in Princeton, will pick me and Greta up in Trenton
·      He needs the extra time because the ammonia filled ziploc bag we were using to clean the stove-top thingies leaked on our butcher block table, and so the table top needed some sanding and possibly refinishing
·      The upstairs toilet had a leaky pipe, which leaked into the downstairs bathroom ceiling, requiring the ceiling to be opened up, and the toilet attended to by a plumber!
·      He would be meeting me in at the WRJ train station in 20 minutes with a car seat so Greta could safely ride with Uncle Tom.
·      He needed the extra time to pack, since we had so much crap to bring to Queens and then to MN, that fitting it all into the Subaru was going to require some very creative packing.


In the end, the closing goes down without a hitch, although our buyer is very nervous about the toilet leaking. Our realtor deposits our check, which essentially bounces a few days later, because the issuing bank required both mine and Erik’s signatures, and only had Erik’s. It is being mailed to us—to our PO Box in Wilder—meaning it will then get forwarded to us in Minnesota, but we have yet to see it.

Erik makes it through Queens and to the warehouse, drops off our multitude of treasures, and continues on to New Jersey. But not until he crosses the George Washington Bridge into NJ, misses the exit off the bridge, decides the best option is to cross back into NYC to take the bridge out of the city a second time, this time knowing when and where the exit is. Turns out, it is free to leave NYC on the GWB, but it costs you $8 to return back into the city.


He arrives in Princeton around 11:30pm, where Greta and I landed in a hotel room about 2 hrs earlier. Tika is relieved to be reunited with her whole family, as are we.

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