Ordinary Life: Heading, East!
Part Two
Reality was slowly sinking in: we bought our Forever Home. And it’s way back in New York. We’re moving to New York! became an inside joke we would say to each other at least once a day in bewilderment.
We had a closing date of November 10th, 2021 that we had to be in NY for. That meant we had about six weeks to pack what we would be taking, sell or give away the rest, find a property management company to oversee the renting of the home we were living in, find and approve a renter, all of that mess.
We would also need to arrange for a cross-country moving company to transport what we wanted to take with us. We would need to arrange for a vehicle transport company to take my partner’s car back East. I decided to sell my two-wheel drive truck to a good friend, so we were down to one car and we didn’t want to deal with towing it behind the RV all the way from California to New York.
We decided that since we had three feline housemates to travel with us, hotels/motels wouldn’t be a good fit for the trip, and we would instead rent a one-way RV. That also meant arranging for nightly stops where we could park the RV. We decided to book KOA RV spots based on how many miles we thought we could cover each day. I made some calculations based on the max speed we wanted to drive the RV and how many hours we would want to drive.
Each day of those six weeks was spent making all of those arrangements, staged and planned out based on their necessity and response time, packing/selling/giving away, and still maintaining our day jobs.
The cost of moving your stuff across the country was an eye-opener. For even a small three-bedroom, two-bath home with a very small garage wood shop and a few things in storage, the cost would be somewhere in the neighborhood of twenty-two thousand dollars with a reputable mover. So we had to make some hard decisions on heirlooms and try to find a cheaper mover. Let me just say… if you are ever faced with the prospect of moving across the country, just sell nearly everything you can possibly let go of, and repurchase where you land. You will save yourself a whole lot of money and headaches. Lesson learned.
The mover we went with seemed like a good deal and had decent ratings/reviews. But, from our experience, we learned that the moving industry is not regulated, and finding recourse to hold any of them accountable is nearly impossible. Read those contracts carefully. Very carefully. Most don’t accept any responsibility for damage to anything that is breakable, even while their contracts state that you are only covered if they do the packing. Anything glass that they packed? Not covered. I won’t waste too much time on the specifics of our own experience, but we had to just throw away mugs, dishes, fix a curio cabinet’s door glass, repair my gang box (a large rolling tool box), etc., with no legal recourse that wouldn’t be a gamble with more money.
Our selected moving company ended up just being a broker (some of the national moving companies are, too) who contracts out the actual loading of your belongings to a 2nd party, and it was an entirely different 3rd party who delivered it to our new home.
During the drive to New York, we were keeping in contact with the movers, our employers, and the law office in New York handling the purchase. The movers were the only ones to ghost us about half way through the trip. They stopped returning calls and when we would call, we started being sent straight to voicemail. We didn’t even know if our stuff would actually arrive. (It eventually did, but a month to the day that it was supposed to; they were supposed to only be a day behind us. Before we were sure that would actually happen, we had to buy some furnishings and kitchenware.)
Due to a death in the law office handling the title side of things, the lawyer there had to push back our signing date by a week. Everything was planned based on that signing/closing date. Everything.
We crossed the state line from Pennsylvania into New York on November 8th, and stopped for the night at a KOA near our realtor’s area. That was the worst of the nights, by far. It was the only non-KAO stop, it was cold, there was only an electrical hookup, and the advertised facilities were actually shut down for the winter season already. The next day began the hunt for a place to stay for the next week until we could finally do the signing and receive the keys to our new home.
Thankfully, our realtor had a cottage on their property that we could stay in for the week. We would be able to work remotely from there. It was our home-base over the next week as we had to drive up to Rochester to turn in the RV and pick up a rental car for a few days until my partner’s car would arrive. It was a cozy little cottage overlooking a large pond.
The scenery was quite beautiful. The weather had held out long enough for us to settle into the cottage. Then it started to snow. Our first snow in New York!
Speaking of the scenery, as we crossed into New York from Pennsylvania, the weather was perfect, the trees were turning, and we were in love with it all. The changing of the seasons is such a thing to behold. Definitely not something we experienced where we lived in California.
Over the course of the week we would be waiting, we explored the local area. Our first dinner out was amazing. The prices were below what we were used to in California, and the portions larger. We were loving our new home state. Sure, the property taxes are much, much higher, but real estate prices are lower, unless you are living in the larger cities, of course.
Soon enough, the signing date arrived, and we had the keys to our new home; our Forever Home.
The last couple of years have provided their own trials and tribulations, but we don’t regret jumping in head first and each problem we faced, such as a broken heating system, a driveway redo, trying to acquire the needed winter tools, in the middle of winter during supply chain issues, taught us valuable lessons and have made us all the better, and better prepared, for it.
Seeing the trees turn in the Fall, the first good snow of the winter, hiking up through our backcountry, the friends we’ve made, the projects we have planned, all combine to help us realize how amazingly blessed we are. We wouldn’t trade this amazing home for anything. It is indeed, our Forever Home.
This is no ordinary life.