We took possession of our new house on Friday morning after a flurry of phone calls and visits to the bank and to the lawyer's office to sign everything, including the bridge financing between our West End house and our Transcona house. Because I was performing on Friday night, we didn't head straight there after work. We'd gone over on Monday to meet with the sellers and pick up the keys and garage door opener. They weren't ready to move yet and the house was in total disarray so it seemed a lot smaller than we remembered from our last (and only other) visit in November when we bought it. However, on Saturday morning, when we'd showed up with paint brushes in hand, the house was empty and we spent about an hour running up and down all the stairs in disbelief that the house is now ours, at long last!! We'd gone to Home Depot and picked up paint to cover over the faux plaster look in the master bedroom and the orangey-yellow of the "office", a colour I particularly didn't like (But Brendon liked it). We thought we'd picked some really different colours, a deep plum for the accent wall of the master bedroom, and a mossy grey-green for the office (Behr's "Semi Sweet" and "Sage Grey"). But when we got them to our West End home, we realized we'd picked the *exact* same colours as we already have in this house. Our chocolate brown and teal master bedroom in the old house is now brown and lemon yellow in the new house. Our white and grey bathroom in the old house will now be white and grey office! Oooops!
No matter, the painting went quickly and I had another performance Saturday night at the Roller Derby bout at the Convention Centre. We did final touch up, some unpacking (mostly kitchen stuff and anything breakable) and cleaning today before rushing home to catch Canada's gold medal victory over US in hockey. Woo hoo!
Moving day is next Saturday!!!
Sunday, February 28, 2010
Saturday, February 13, 2010
Hiring movers
Because we're taking nearly all the appliances and March is a finicky time of year, we decided to splurge and hire movers instead of risking life and limb (and lower back) to move the stove during an ice or slush or rain storm or whatever Mother Nature will throw at us. I went online and found three moving companies that most people in Winnipeg have heard of. I contacted all three and the first one emailed back immediately with a quote of $550 for our house. Sight unseen but based on the square footage and moving date. Further investigation into this moving company revealed that they have millions of dollars in unsettled lawsuits from across Canada from disgruntled clients, and have their Better Business Bureau title revoked because of the sheer number of complaints. And people from work have had terrible experiences with them trying to rip them off, demanding cash payments before unloading their stuff, destroying their personal items etc. Okay, so they're out.
Next two companies came to the house wearing company uniforms, gave us their business cards, discussed insurance options, packing options, and had a checklist to mark off what all we have to move. Their quotes came in within $50 of each other, nearly $800-ish. Moving company #2 has moved many of our friends and co-workers so they have a better word-of-mouth from people we trust.
Company number four is where things got uncomfortably weird. They put a mailer in our mail box and I figured for the sake of interest, maybe a smaller company would be cheaper and just as good. Well, not so much. I emailed back and forth with the boss (Let's call him W) to arrange a time for him to come to the house. That time comes and someone shows up at the back of the house. His name starts with a G, not W. And he doesn't have a company jacket, or anything at all to indicate which company he's with. He does, however, have Gov't of Canada business cards (which all look the same so we both instantly recognized that he's a fed, not a mover. He explained that this is a side job, which we didn't buy. No one, especially not a fed, chooses to move people's furniture on a weekend for kicks??). He brought a notepad, just a standard Staples 8x10 notepad and wrote down a list of everything we owned. He started asking really weird questions like "how old is that laptop? Wht's the value of that guitar? Do you have any other electronics aside from what's out? Those bikes look pretty expensive..." AWKWARD!! We couldn't wait for him to leave, and once he did, we both realized that he never asked when we were going to move. Seems like an obvious question to ask, you know, to make scheduling easier?? We're still convinced that G's going to rob us when we're at work. Either way, they came in a over $900 so aside from it being completely unprofessional and creepy, they were too expensive.
Next two companies came to the house wearing company uniforms, gave us their business cards, discussed insurance options, packing options, and had a checklist to mark off what all we have to move. Their quotes came in within $50 of each other, nearly $800-ish. Moving company #2 has moved many of our friends and co-workers so they have a better word-of-mouth from people we trust.
Company number four is where things got uncomfortably weird. They put a mailer in our mail box and I figured for the sake of interest, maybe a smaller company would be cheaper and just as good. Well, not so much. I emailed back and forth with the boss (Let's call him W) to arrange a time for him to come to the house. That time comes and someone shows up at the back of the house. His name starts with a G, not W. And he doesn't have a company jacket, or anything at all to indicate which company he's with. He does, however, have Gov't of Canada business cards (which all look the same so we both instantly recognized that he's a fed, not a mover. He explained that this is a side job, which we didn't buy. No one, especially not a fed, chooses to move people's furniture on a weekend for kicks??). He brought a notepad, just a standard Staples 8x10 notepad and wrote down a list of everything we owned. He started asking really weird questions like "how old is that laptop? Wht's the value of that guitar? Do you have any other electronics aside from what's out? Those bikes look pretty expensive..." AWKWARD!! We couldn't wait for him to leave, and once he did, we both realized that he never asked when we were going to move. Seems like an obvious question to ask, you know, to make scheduling easier?? We're still convinced that G's going to rob us when we're at work. Either way, they came in a over $900 so aside from it being completely unprofessional and creepy, they were too expensive.
Saturday, February 6, 2010
House is sold!
We spent the entire Christmas break getting the house ready for showing, which meant taking down personal items, cleaning cleaning cleaning and repainting all the nicks and dents in the walls. We listed the house on Comfree on January 9th and the first request to see the house came the next morning while we were cleaning it. Of course, we turned down his request (he was in his truck parked in front of the house... creepy), but we got another call that night from someone who lived around the corner. He and his wife and parents came by the house and offered us over listing price. We were really excited and told him to go to a lawyer and write the offer on paper. They came back again the next day, again offering us over asking, but didn't seem to understand (despite 4 phone calls back and forth) that we wanted an offer written by a lawyer and not a personal cheque for the entire amount. He got really hostile towards us and accused us of trying to rip him off, rather than realizing that we wanted a legally binding document and not a verbal agreement. Silly us!
Every day after that, we were showing the house 3-4x per night to different people. The first and second people through on Monday came back twice to look again and bring family by for their opinions. The third couple brought an offer to purchase with a price we liked so we called back to the other people who were going to write up an offer and told them that we're going to take this offer. It was rather hard to make those calls and disappoint the other people, but we really liked this couple, liked the offer and it was more than we'd expected to make. (In hindsight, we should have listed the house for $160k or more because it would have been pretty easy to get that... oh well, hindsight's 20/20 eh?). We accepted their offer and had to wait 10 days for them to get their financing arranged with the bank. In the 10 days that we waited, we had 14 other people sign our "Call Back" list so if the financing fell through, we had other people waiting in the wings to swoop in and take our house. Sweeeeeeeet.
So their financing was approved and the house is sold after 6 days on the market. We're now packing up and getting ready for the move. Kitty's really enjoying playing in all the empty boxes and spends most of her time jumping in and out of them and investigating the growing piles of boxes in the basement.
Every day after that, we were showing the house 3-4x per night to different people. The first and second people through on Monday came back twice to look again and bring family by for their opinions. The third couple brought an offer to purchase with a price we liked so we called back to the other people who were going to write up an offer and told them that we're going to take this offer. It was rather hard to make those calls and disappoint the other people, but we really liked this couple, liked the offer and it was more than we'd expected to make. (In hindsight, we should have listed the house for $160k or more because it would have been pretty easy to get that... oh well, hindsight's 20/20 eh?). We accepted their offer and had to wait 10 days for them to get their financing arranged with the bank. In the 10 days that we waited, we had 14 other people sign our "Call Back" list so if the financing fell through, we had other people waiting in the wings to swoop in and take our house. Sweeeeeeeet.
So their financing was approved and the house is sold after 6 days on the market. We're now packing up and getting ready for the move. Kitty's really enjoying playing in all the empty boxes and spends most of her time jumping in and out of them and investigating the growing piles of boxes in the basement.
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