We sold our house!

Around late August of 2015  I started mentioning “Secret Future Plan” (SFP) on my personal twitter. SFP actually started a month earlier when, while kayaking with my mother, she mentioned that we could probably sell our house and get something more suitable to us.

When we moved into the Crossroads House 17 years ago, we had a lot of requirements (school districts, handicapped accessibility for my grandmother, spaces for everyone to keep out of each other’s way with our very busy lives). It’s a great house, but it no longer suited us so we decided to sell.

In order for us to sell the Crossroads House, we had to do some patch up. You know that to-do list of stuff you’ve been meaning to get to but never do? We had to actually go through that list and do it, plus have all of our financial ducks in a row. We took two years to get the house ready to sell. Painting and updating and so on takes both time and money, so we didn’t rush it.

Over the last three years, the Crossroad House has been on the market. We’ve gotten lots of offers, but usually they weren’t the right kinds of offers. We even had the house sold at one point, but something fell through in the final weeks of the sale. We took it off during the holidays too, since we didn’t want to fuss with that. Why it took so long to sell is easy – it’s a weird house. It has four bedrooms, but they’re all in different parts of the house. One bedroom is the whole second floor, what was once an attic. My bedroom and a second kitchen is in the basement. The other two bedrooms are on the main (first) floor, but are on opposite ends of the house, connected by the double parlor. The doors to the basement, that floor’s bathroom, the attic bedroom, and the backyard all connected in the small main level’s kitchen. All within walking distance to an elementary school, middle school, and the town’s high school. It’s a great house and way more spacious that it looked from the outside, but it’s not great for a family with little kids. It’s definitely more suited to teenagers or adults.

In 2019, as mentioned, we had the house sold. Then two weeks from closing, the sale fell through. We were absolutely crushed. We had already rented a new house to move into and had started packing. Literally the only thing that cheered us up was that Halloween was around the corner and I could go all out with decorating like I usually do.

We knew the next year, this year, was going to be it. Tons of little signs, included the tragic death of one of our Halloween decoration dragons, told us as much.

Then spring 2020 hit. We put it back on the market in early February, but the COVID-19 pandemic started soon after. About a week and a half after everything started to shut down in my area, we get a call. The buyer had been watching for a while and wanted to see the house. We had stipulations, of course. Masks, gloves, don’t touch anything, etc. Then the state shut own and no one could travel in from another state. We had several other buyers after that, some even with offers, but none were really serious.

Then the new owners came in. They saw the newly uploaded 3D model of the house and wanted it before they even saw it in person. They love it that much! The closing was the end of July and we’re all so happy that the couple that bought it love the house and are looking forward to putting their own spin on the house.

Of course, moving isn’t just signing over a house. We had to pack 17 years worth of stuff – including thousands of books. We were already partially packed, honestly. We had decluttered for house showings. But there was still a ton of stuff to do. The week before closing my Mom and I WORKED. We put in fourteen hour days for an entire week during a heat wave carting out box after box after tote after boxe. We got rid of a lot of stuff and threw a spur-of-the-moment yard sale on two separate days. The day before last it was a hundred degrees with nearly matching humidity and we ran around donating various things and making an unplanned trip across the state to Connecticut where someone was willing to host our ladder and kayaks for a while. We’d carry boxes over to fill our condo’s living room only to come home and put it all away after a long day of working in the heat and sun, so the landscape of the condo was constantly changing. My brother and uncle were amazed. My cat Kiki was angry and spent much of the time I was home ignoring me. (She likes the new place, she just didn’t like that I wasn’t there.)

I’ll certainly miss the old house. It was spiritually quite wonderful and it had a ton of room for everybody to spread out in. There’s a lot of memories and a lot of things we’ll miss.

So what’s next?

Well, we’re taking a month or so off to just relax and unpack. We still have some boxes that need putting away or to be put into storage, Tetris style. After that, we’re onto new horizons. Our condo is a temporary location only. We have plans for after this, but I don’t want to talk too much about that right now.

How does this affect This Crooked Crown? Well, I think it’ll actually help. Having to be constantly cleaning or having my work routine interrupted to do house showings was a pain in the ass. I can mark, to the day, where my beautiful and productive work routine crashed into the house selling nonsense and shattered. I’ve spent three years working with half the energy I’d normally have. Now I don’t have to worry about that. I can go back to doing my own thing without needing to make the house look like a magazine shoot.

I’m going to take it slow and build up This Crooked Crown again. We were doing well and helping people before. I’d like to do so again. I have a lot of projects that I can get back to now and now I’ve the mental space and emotional energy to dedicate to thoughtful posts once again.

If you’d like to support the cause, you can drop a coin in the tip jar or become a patron. I’m slowly by surely moving my Etsy and Storenvy shops here, so if you bought something in those places and want to see it here, shoot me a message (form below) and I’ll see what I can do. Otherwise, wander around the shop section and see what I’ve got for sale. Readings, spells, and more. Physical items, like charms, will be added as I make them since I had to cut back on my creating while we were selling.

Anyway, it’s good to be back! Thanks for your patience and let’s try and make 2020 a little bit better, hm?

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