Brooke here:

August was interesting.  I didn’t want to mention this online (aka: daring strangers to find where you’re keeping the unattended stuff), but we haven’t been living in the Jarrell house.  See, we had this great idea.  We’d buy the Jarrell house and do the major repairs while still living at our old house and showing it to potential buyers.

This was a sensible plan. The local real estate market has an eighteen month surplus of available homes.  However, being that we did not want to wait eighteen months for our old house to sell, we gutted and refitted the holy schnitzel out of it.  I repainted almost every square inch, refinished the kitchen, and installed tile floors; Brown redid the ceilings and every possible sink, faucet, and fixture.  There were days where I’d be working in my office and look up to see him taking the toilet out for a walk.

We finished the renovations at the beginning of July, and we were optimistic that we would be in the Jarrell house by Halloween.  Christmas at the absolute latest.  In the interim, we would spend our weekends doing the major repairs.  Money would be tight, but we don’t have dependents and were willing to take a short-term risk to achieve a long-term payoff.

This plan worked for almost exactly a month.  On August 5th, we were shocked to hear that we had a reasonable offer.  Sure, they wanted us out by the end of September, but that was manageable!  It would push up the timetable on the Jarrell renovations, true, but this was better than we had hoped and we’d find a way to make it work.

On August 9th, the buyers changed the timetable.  They wanted the house at the end of the month.  We had twenty-two days to pack,  move, and renovate.  And Brown and I had exhausted our vacation time earlier in the summer.

So some of the projects were rotated out of the roster.  Pool repairs?  Not a priority, gone.  A new emphasis on storage and laundry and bathrooms, and Elizabeth volunteered to help save our butts.

It has not been fun and we have had to keep reminding ourselves that the three weeks of extremely hard work was because we were very, very lucky, but it’s over.  Today was closing day.  There’s still a massive list of projects to do and all of my fish are in furious buckets but the stress?  That massive headache-inducing stress that’s been clawing at the back of our eyes?  Over.

We are home.

Now I pass out.