moving: uprooting

We showed the house for three days and by the end of the third day, we had four offers in hand.  It was overwhelming to be in the position of choosing who would get our house.  Unlike the languishing love letter I had offered as a buyer, I wanted to remain completely impartial in our decision.  I didn't want to know about the potential buyers and was glad we didn't receive letters.  We just went with the highest bidder.  They also wanted the fastest closing date, which was great for us.  We had already mostly moved out and didn't want the hassle of two properties to extend through the summer.  We closed on the sale of our old home in less than three weeks.

I spent those weeks digging up perennials and moving them to our new house.  Pictured above is a voluntary asparagus the Brett and I named "Shaq" because he was so huge that it took both of us to pull him up!  I also split and moved the irises that my grandma gave me when we moved into our first home, and the rose bush I planted in memory of her.  Rhubarb, strawberries, and bleeding hearts were transplanted, too.  I wish I could have taken my cherry and apple trees! 

Even though it's only a short distance away, it was still hard to let go.  As we dug things up and planted them at our new home, I told the kids moving is hard, even for plants.  Nobody likes being uprooted and in takes a while to get used to our new environment. But little by little, we will start to feel more settled into our new home and our roots will start to grow again.  

Last day of 6th grade

Last day of 7th grade

Last day of 8th grade

Last pose in front of this house!

moving: just when you think it can't get any worse...

The plan was to do a few things in the new house before we moved in, then move in, then fix up a few things in the old house, then list it for sale.  Our goal was to do this is 3 weeks.  Things didn't really go according to plan.

First dinner in our new house, at our folding table

We closed on our new house on a Friday.  Brett was with us and the other two were in school.  We had done our walk-through Thursday night and everything looked as expected.  I was bringing in cleaning supplies when Bryan called me to the basement.  There was a puddle.  We notified our realtor and the previous owner apologized for not getting the gutters cleaned out.  We cleaned up the mess and cleaned out the gutters.  Problem solved...

Ready to paint Brett's room

We wanted to get the bedrooms painted before we moved in.  We were also planning to get new carpet installed the first week, so we got right to work that weekend.  We got the owner's suite and boys' bedrooms done.  

Official moving day

We were still sleeping at our old house and planned to move the POD (our beds) on Monday.  Again, it was Bryan, Brett, and I on Monday that went over to work on the new house.  The other two were at school.  My parents were expected to arrive to help us move.  Bryan went down to the basement and called me down again.  This time it was not a puddle, it was a lake!  It had rained heavy over night and the sump didn't kick on.  The entire utility/storage room and Brett's bedroom had water covering the floor.  (Had it been one more night, a ton of our stuff would have been in the storage room.)

Bryan got to work in fixing the sump pump and putting in an emergency backup while Brett and I cleaned.  My parents came to the rescue.  Brett's flooring is luxury vinyl plank (LVP), so they pulled it all up, keeping it in order, dried it out, and reinstalled it.  This set us back a few days, as my parents had come planning to help put new LVP on the main floor.  We were also having new carpet installed on the main and second floor at the same time.

But that's not all!  On Monday night, we all slept on mattresses on the floor in our new house. (My parents had their RV parked in the driveway of our old house.) On Tuesday, Reggie and Lydia went to school again while the rest of us worked on the new house.  There was a track meet after school.  All 3 kids were in track.  Lydia usually does the 800M and the 1500M, but when I checked in with her at the track meet, she said she decided not to do the 1500M because she "had a sore throat".  I thought that was weird, so when we got home, I found our covid tests and had her do the test after her shower.  

I was in the bathroom with her.  I put the drops on the test and it IMMEDIATELY showed a positive result.  She covered her face with her t-shirt while I escaped past her and told her to go in Bryan's little office (which literally had nothing in it).  Her bedroom light was broken (of course!) so I didn't want to set her up in there.  The rest of us tested negative (including my parents) and I brought her a mattress, bedding, and clothing.  And that's how she spent her first few days in our new house.

Painting Lydia's room

I wanted my parents to go home, but they refused.  So we pressed on.  Mom and I painted Lydia's room, and Dad and Bryan put the light fixture from our bedroom in there, and a new one in our bedroom.  Then they got to work on putting new LVP in the dining room and the room where the guinea pig's cage would go.  Simultaneously, we had a painter painting the two-story foyer in our old house. 

We got Lydia's bed and piano set up for her and she was able to move into her bedroom on day 4 of her quarantine.  We were still testing negative, and she still tested positive though her symptoms were better (I don't know if there's science to this, but the result took longer and was more faint).  My parents left on Sunday (Mother's Day!), and we allowed Lydia to emerge from her room with a mask on Monday. Lydia was required to stay home from school and school activities until day 11, which meant she missed participating in honors band and her spring concert.

Mother's Day with our covid + daughter

That next week, Bryan and I continued to work in both houses.  I still had the dining room and two bedrooms in the old house to paint.  Reggie was going to school and Brett was doing home school and helping us with projects.  We were still dealing with some seeping water along the stairwell from the basement to the garage.

Finally time to take a walk in the park by our house

And then we had another big storm.  Brett was a church, Bryan was at the old house, and I was home with Lydia and Reggie.  I thought we should check the stairwell, and this is what I we found:

A water feature!

We used all the towels we could find and then used old blankets, rung them out, and used them again until Bryan and Brett got home.  Despite me telling him not to, Bryan went out in the storm and cleaned more gutters out!

That weekend, we had new flooring put in the old house and Bryan's parents came to help us clean up the yards and shampoo carpets in both houses.  The floorer damaged our freshly painted walls.  We had no time to wait for the company to come back to fix it.  Bryan's parents stayed an extra day to homeschool Brett so I could clean and repair walls. The last step was staging, which we hired done and we managed to make our goal of listing on May 19th.

May 19th was going to be the last track meet.  Brett and I went up to the hosting school and were looking for the field and Bryan was shortly behind us. Reggie and Lydia were on the field ready for the meet to begin.  Another storm blew in and this one brought heavy, large hail!  Reggie and Lydia scrambled to their bus for cover, Brett and I were stuck in the van in the parking lot, and Bryan was only able to pull over. We were pummeled with hail for several minutes.  It was so loud!  they canceled the meet and after some confusion Reggie and Lydia found us.  When we got home, there was still hail on our deck.

But no water in the basement...

moving: the hunt and the kill

Not happy with the direction our school district was going, and being denied intra-district enrollment, we decided it was worth a move last fall.  We did our research and narrowed our search to two, or maybe three, preferred high schools in the metro. After Christmas, the official house search began.

I don't think I need to tell you that it's a crazy housing market.  We purchased our first house in a seller's market in 2004.  Our second house was a foreclosure purchased in a buyer's market in 2011.  This spring with the pandemic, low supply and high demand of houses, and low interest rates with rumors they would climb, calling it a seller's market was an understatement.  We quickly learned there was no time for a second look, no time to think, no room for contingencies, and "list price" was in reality the starting bid.

The standard course of events was a house would come on the market on Thursday, they would show it for 2 or 3 days, and have multiple offers on the table by Sunday.  There were houses that had multiple offers or sold before we could even schedule a showing. This being our third house purchase, we were particular, but knew we wouldn't get everything on our wish list.  

In real estate, they say there are "3 L's" - location, location, and location.  For me it was location, lot, and layout. The lot was the hardest part, as ours was abnormally large and private, and it was unrealistic to hope for similar within the geographic parameters. We didn't want a huge upgrade on the house but were hoping to go from 4 bedrooms to 5 so we could have a designated guestroom, and the layout needed to make sense for our season of life.

We looked at about a dozen houses before we came to one that checked off enough boxes to put in an offer. I had gathered that the homeowners were probably around our parents' age, and they were the original owners of this custom-built thirty-year-old home.  It was more than a piece of property to them.  I asked our realtor if I could write them a letter.  He suggested it be handwritten.  

We got the house!  We were told it wasn't the highest bid.  Our realtor was shocked we got the first house we put on offer on!

Location: Not only is the house within the boundaries of our preferred high school, its less than a mile to walk or ride a bike through a park to get there!

Lot:  The lot is a generous city lot with mature trees but not ideal for gardening or privacy.

Layout: We didn't get 5 bedrooms, we got 6! There are 3 on the second floor - the owner's suite, Lydia's, and a small bedroom we are using for an office for Bryan. The main floor has a bedroom we set up as a guestroom.  Across the hall is a 3/4 bath, so guests can have their own shower.  The main floor also has a cook's kitchen, roomy living areas, and a big closet for all the kids' gear! The basement has a nice teen hangout layout with a game room, a 3/4 bath, and two bedrooms for the boys.

Once the offer was accepted, it was time to get serious about packing and getting our other house ready to sell.  This consumed our April...

Bryan has my permission to shoot me if I ever think painting woodwork is a good idea again.

Bye-bye office/homeschool room.  Staged as a formal living room.

Bryan's meticulous packing of the POD

We closed on our new house on April 29!

Reggie's wrestling highlights

Moving knocked us off our feet for a few months, but we are finding our way into our new normal now.  I will share more about our move in the next post.

After his 2020 season being cut short and 2021 being very limited and disrupted, 2022 was almost back to the full schedule.  Bryan and I served as the directors of our club again.  For a few weeks in January, we only had one coach due to covid and complications of covid. It was all hands on deck, but we pushed through and ran a complete season.  We had more state qualifiers than any other season since the beginning of our involvement in 2016!

Our club is geared toward beginners. We stayed involved because wrestling is a struggling sport in urban areas, but Reggie got his start there and he has gained a lot from it.  Reggie didn't have a good wrestling partner (his skill and weight) in the program so he was more like a mentor.  So we enrolled him in another club (St. Paul Academy) for his own development.  

That meant that when he was also doing middle school wrestling, he had eight practices a week!  The middle school season was only seven weeks long.  His school had 3 kids sign up, so they combined programs with another school in the district.  That school had a covid outbreak and everything got cancelled for two weeks, so he only had three meets and went 6 and 0.

Reggie did four big individual tournaments.  Yellowjacket and Gopher State are open tournaments but they attract some of the toughest wrestlers in the midwest.  Because there is no qualifying process, seeding in the brackets is a lot of guesswork. In the Yellowjacket tournament, the seeding did not work to his advantage and he didn't make the podium.  

Gopher State was a little further into the season when he had found his groove, and the seeding was more accurate.  He won his first match against Caleb, sending Caleb to the consolation bracket.  He lost his second match to Tyce and went to the consolation bracket.  He won his way through the consolation bracket only to face Caleb again for 3rd place.  This time, he lost, and got 4th place. Tyce worked his way through the consolation bracket and landed in 5th. So over the course of the day, he won against the kid who got 3rd and lost against the kid who got 5th!  I would say they were pretty evenly matched! 

MNUSA State was the big surprise.  Within the MNUSA system, Reggie was grouped with kids who were older than him this year, and he struggled in the tournaments at the local level.  We almost didn't even take him to a regional qualifier tournament because we didn't expect him to qualify.  Our calendar made us decide to take him to one "for the experience".  Turned out, he won!  1st, 2nd, and 3rd qualified for state, but placing 1st gave him a better spot in seeding.

At MNUSA State, Reggie easily won his first match.  He lost his second match to the kid who ended up taking second.  His third match was against a kid (Parker) who lives in the metro and they had wrestled before.  Reggie won, which put him in the match for 3rd place.  His 3rd place match was painful to watch as he fell behind, nearly getting pinned in the first period.  He started the second period trailing 11-2, but made up some ground and went into the third period 11-12 (Reggie).  Reggie pinned his opponent in the third period, taking 3rd in the state!  The come-from-behind matches are the worst to watch at the time, but best to remember.  

The final progression of tournaments were the NYWA tournaments.  He started out qualifying for regions at the district tournament at Tartan.  At regions, similar to MNUSA, he had to place 1st, 2nd, or 3rd to advance to NYWA State.  He faced Parker again and this time Parker took advantage of a mistake and won.  Reggie placed 2nd, so he advanced to State but had a tougher position in the bracket as a result.

Reggie won his first match and lost his second match against William.  He won his next two matches.  Guess who he wrestled next?  Parker!  Unfortunately during their match, Parker came down hard and had to forfeit the match due to a suspected concussion. Reggie faced William again in the match for 3rd place and lost.  He placed 4th at NYWA State! (Caleb was also in his bracket and he took 2nd.  We would have liked to see Reggie wrestle him again!)

Normally this would be the end of his season, but he was invited to represent Minnesota as a member of Team Minnesota Thunder at the Heartland Duals in Omaha.  This was an excellent opportunity to network with other wrestlers around the state and get some good coaching.  Reggie was the 130lb. wrestler; Parker was the 120lb wrestler!