Just a bit over a year ago my wife and I made a very big decision. By nature, neither of us are very adventurous, we are pretty cautious.
After years of planning, preparing, and waiting, we were finally ready to move from our life long state of residence and head south. Both of us are retired from full time employment, although I do some EMS related consulting. Our children are adults and our son has a family of his own.
Both live in the south and neither are moving back. One of the realities of getting older is that at some point we will need support at some level in some way. That was also part of our calculations, but not the entirety. We had tired of the actions of the politicians in our state, including importing illegal immigrants and bestowing largess on them. Largess paid for with our tax dollars.
Given that we were both raised in our former state, had gone to school here for the most part, worked and raised our kids here, it was not a frivolous decision. It wasn’t even an easy decision although we made it rather quickly.
In May of last year we made the decision that the house was ready to go on the market, that we were ready to sell it, that we were ready to move away from all that we had known. Some of our friends had moved, some were gone, others were planning to move and so there was little to tie us down here.
We found a realtor who was well experienced and did a good job selling the house, calming our nerves when things glitched, and helping us get top dollar for our house.
On the other end, and this was nerve wracking, we were trying to buy a house remotely. We flew down in June and met our realtor in Texas. He came well recommended and he too did a great job guiding us through the different, but still complicated of buying a house.
All the while, we were sorting, selling, donating, throwing out, gifting, 43 years worth of collected “stuff.” The “spirited discussions” Mrs. EMS Artifact and I had over this part of the move put the most stress either of us experienced in almost 45 years of marriage.
At one point we had a well qualified buyer for our house and based on accepting her offer we made an offer on a house in Texas which was also accepted. Then, our “buyer” pulled the rug out from under us be reneging on the deal. Which meant we had to cancel our offer because there was no possible way we could carry two mortgages with no ideal when we would be able to sell our house.
This was when our selling realtor came through like a champ. She reassured us that she could relist the house and find a buyer quickly. And she did. That brought a new problem because the new buyers had a month to get out of their current residence which had been sold out from under them. Our time frame for moving moved from seven weeks to three and a half weeks.
Did I mention how stressful the sorting, selling, donating, throwing out, gifting, 43 years worth of collected “stuff” was? Our dial just went to 11. We mostly got it right, but some stuff that we should have tossed was brought with us where it was tossed in Texas. Some stuff that I tossed, should have come with us as I’ve had to replace some of it.
The good news, and it’s important (for me) to remember that this story has a happy ending, is that we found a house we liked at a good price and we sold our “old” house for enough to pay cash plus have enough money left over to make some repairs which the home inspection on the new to us house revealed would need doing sooner rather than later.
On the Texas end the problem was that the sellers couldn’t be out of the their house before mid November. As a result we spent five weeks living in long term hotels. Not bad, but cramped. We used Homewood Suites in two states and the staffs were very good.
What happened to our belongings and furniture you may ask. Well, most of our existing furniture was left behind in one way or another. What were taking along with clothes, kitchen stuff, towels and linens, tools, parts, and all the other stuff went into storage at the moving company.
The first big day came, selling the house. Unlike the last time in 1980, nothing was done in person. All documents are signed on line via Docusign or whatever it’s called. The checks were paper though. Buying in Texas is a completely different process than in our old state. Lawyers are generally not used in most of the south. There are title companies that handle the paperwork and money transfers. A side note, I don’t know what those commercials about how easy it is to steal a title are about, but our title was over twenty pages long and required multiple pages be signed and every page be initialed. It required witnesses and it also required the title company representative to stamp it with her state required seal.
Once we notified the moving company that we had a place to move in to, we had to wait another week for the truck to make its way south. That happened just after Thanksgiving.
In the meantime we moved a small amount of belongings into the house, I set up the WiFi and cable TV equipment. We set up an account with an electricity broker, established a water, sewer, and trash account with the city. We started getting familiar with our city and where everything was. There is a Lowe’s and a Home Depot across the street from each other and less than a mile from our house. That came in handy.
The morning of the move in, as if we didn’t have 1,000 things to do, our main sewer line backed up. I was lucky because the plumber that I called in a panic came right out, identified the problem, and made a temporary repair.
After all that was done, it was time to register vehicles and get our driver’s licenses. We needed to do that before the New Year because property tax exemption applications must be filed by then or they will be delayed a year.
Everything got done, but everything is a process. As Mrs.EMS Artifact said one day “It’s easier to think of Texas as a different country than just a different state.”
So, here we are ten months later. All of the repairs have been done to the house, we’re officially Texans, we see our lovely daughter and her boyfriend frequently, I’m a Texas licensed paramedic and we’re settled in. Both of us have met new people and some will become friends. I finally realized that the friends I have can never be replaced, but it’s always good to make new friends.
It wasn’t an easy process, but it was clearly worth it. The only lasting (maybe) effect is that my Thyroid Signaling Hormone (TSH) is up a bit. Reading about it, it seems that one of the causes can be stress.
I wonder how that happened? My new Primary Care Physician isn’t overly worried about it and it’s likely it will return to normal.