Today we took the kids over to the new house and we set up the Christmas tree there and decorated it. In an empty house, which felt a little odd. But it was a nice bright day, and most of us were in good moods, and the house looked pretty even though it was empty, and William set up his phone to play us Christmas music. And later when we DO move in, the tree will be all set up and we’ll have pretty Christmas lights the very first night.
This task was part of our effort to do for the kids something we’ve noticed working for us: the more we go over to the new house to do little tasks there, the more it feels familiar and comfortable and Ours. It’s like getting a newborn, and every time you do a quick wash of that baby’s hair under the faucet, the baby is more Yours. So we decorated the tree at the new house as a little acclimating activity. And Paul has been sending the kids on little errands whenever they’re there: “Oh, can you go around and open the back door for me?” “Hey, can you bring this over to the barn?” They’re starting to feel comfortable finding their way around.
Also, having the tree up and decorated reduced my Moving Stress and Christmas Prep Stress by one notch. This morning (“morning”) I woke up after less than four hours of sleep, wide awake and absolutely STEEPED in queasy adrenaline, and one of the things I was panicking about was getting the tree up. Now the tree is up. I wonder what will wake me up tomorrow morning (“morning”).
(I have not been sleeping well. I keep dropping things: as I was loading the dishwasher I dropped a bowl, which didn’t break; then I tried to add another bowl, dropped that one, and it hit the first bowl and broke it. Then I was making pasta and dropped the whole salt-shaker into the pasta water. I am as touchy and weepy as if I were first-trimester pregnant. I get weepy if anyone is nice to me. I get weepy if I THINK about getting weepy.)
The seller mailed us a house-related bill that was sent to her but is ours to pay, and it was postmarked from her address on Tuesday, and we received it yesterday (Saturday), and it is due tomorrow (Monday) or else there will be 12% interest. The bill was sent to her in October. This means my plans for tomorrow have to be 100% re-prioritized: the most important thing is seeing if I can handle this in person since her last-minute mailing of the bill to us means there is no time to handle it by mail. “Maybe her mail took six weeks to be forwarded, and then she sent it on to us right away?,” suggested Paul tentatively into the storm roiling darkly around my borders. I am trying very hard to come up with better Coping Thoughts than that one, to tell myself a story about how this situation does NOT mean our seller is deliberately being terrible to us. Maybe she was injured, or ill, and her mail sat waiting for her for six weeks while she recovered, and the MINUTE she was back home she saw the bill and was HORRIFIED and got it into the mail to us THAT VERY DAY. Maybe she sent it way back in October to her financial person, thinking it was her own bill to pay, and the financial person is the one who held it up; or maybe the financial person bounced it back to her immediately but she didn’t realize she was supposed to send it on to us. Maybe one of her kids handles her bills and that kid had a life crisis of their own and couldn’t get around to it as promptly this month, and we’d be so sympathetic if we knew the whole story. Maybe the problem was with the bill-sender: maybe they were supposed to send it to us to begin with, and that was the mistake that caused all the confusion. Maybe there is some other way in which the seller did the right, good, well-intentioned thing and it was purely accidental that we were hit with this stress grenade in our mailbox.
(I remember this feeling from the post-partum stage. Everything can be fine one minute, and irredeemable the next minute. My baseline stress level is set so high that a SMALL stressful thing knocks me out of the park. My skin feels sunburned. I snap at everybody for nothing. Paul tries to pet down the worry wrinkles on my face. I am getting a glimpse of what I’ll look like in ten years.)
The movers have been successfully booked for this coming week. We reserved three guys and one truck. It’s not a chain; it’s a private company. From Yelp reviews, we know to expect one guy (the owner) and two slouchy, young, but relatively competent assistants. Beyond that, we have no idea what to expect in terms of anything. We are not having them move boxes, just furniture. But the furniture includes a washer, a dryer, a stand-alone freezer, a treadmill, some workshop things. We’re having them take the new oven from our old house and swap it with the old oven from the new house. How long will all of that take? Three hours? Eleven hours? One hour? WHO CAN SAY. (By any chance, can YOU say? Like how long approximately does it take three guys to move all of a family’s furniture-but-not-boxes to a house five minutes away, plus move one oven back to the original house?)
Paul was over at the new house today and said he absolutely heard mice. For sure, heard mice. We already knew mice were HIGHLY LIKELY (and in fact it has been a thrill to contemplate getting a Barn Cat), but it feels a little different to know for SURE that the house has mice, and to suspect that the house could in fact be BRISTLING with mice. Mice who EVEN AS WE SPEAK could be turning all my beautifully-packed boxes into mouse-nest fodder. The seller far away, thinking brightly about how glad she is to be rid of this DISASTROUS MOUSE-INFESTED HOUSE.
(When I do sleep I have stress-dreams. Here I am, back in high school and I can’t find my locker. Here I am in public, and I am not wearing pants. I am driving and I can’t find my route and there are no brakes and the road is icy. I am trying to get to another floor of this building, and the only way is to haul myself through this awkward system of hatches. I am in an elevator and it keeps lurching and sinking nauseatingly, and I can’t remember what floor I want.)
The last time we dealt with mice was in THIS house, when we had an indoor/outdoor cat who liked to bring us LIVE gifts, which resulted in a brisk reconfiguring of the various species population levels of our house. First I bought Mice Cubes: humane traps which very successfully caught mouse after mouse—but I kept releasing the mice into our yard and I suspect they were coming right back into the house (and/or being escorted back in by our cat), because we weren’t noticing a decrease in Signs of Mouse.
Then I acquired three Victor Electronic mouse traps. It’s been awhile, but what I remember is that for the first week or so I had to check the traps several times a day, and I performed multiple mouse funerals per day. Then I only had to check every few days. Then we stopped having Mouse Signs.
With a larger house, including a barn, and with indoor-only cats now, we are not sure which techniques we’ll use. Electronic mouse traps. Cat flaps, so that our cats can get into the unheated areas of the house/barn; perhaps one or more of our cats will turn out to be skilled mousers. Or maybe NO cat flaps, plus a barn cat, so that the Mouse Remains will not be brought into the house proper. Or maybe TWO barn cats, for company and teamwork.
I know the answer to your question! We moved in June to a house that was five minutes away and hired a local company to move just furniture (no boxes). The company brought three men to do the work.
Overall, the movers arrived a little after 9AM. I walked the main person through our house and pointed out everything that needed to move. Then they had everything (furniture, elliptical, washer/dryer) loaded onto the truck by 11AM and had everything unloaded by noon.
I’d estimate you’re looking at about four hours, including some extra time for oven swapping.
I am in the midst of end-of-semester grading for six (6!!!) writing-intensive college classes and I have been a giant ball of weepy stress. This post right here just calmed me more than anything else has. Commiseration… and also at least I don’t have mice? Thank you, and good luck.
Swistle, I have never been one of the first to leave a reply. Yeah me! I am supposed to be ordering my Christmas cards, but it is taking too long for my photos to upload to Snapfish. I am trying not to become frustrated as this was my night to de-clutter my dining room, and that will not be done. First off – you will have a barn? I did not realize. So cool! Second, sorry about your lack of sleep. That is my biggest pet peeve. I am one who struggled to turn my mind off at times I high stress, so I can relate. I hope it gets better. Thirdly, that bill coming to you so last minute is just rotten. Why wasn’t the seller more on top of it? I mean you came up with several scenarios, but regardless – it sucks. Finally, MICE!!! NO!!!! I see the kids’ new role at the new house to run around and set as many traps as they can. Good luck!
Moving is the worst and I have done it something like eleven times as an adult and I am still alive. You can make it through this and you will.
Also I once had mice in my garage (five moves ago) and I announced loudly one afternoon that I was going to buy traps so they should move along if they understood English. And then I bought traps and never caught anything and never saw any more mice or evidence of mice. So try that.
I love this story. I will do several rounds of public announcements, in case some of them are sleeping/away.
Mice! I can help with the mice! Get some peppermint oil and douse cotton balls with it. Lots of it. SO much so that it smells like a candy cane forest in your house. It burns the mice’s nose and they vacat. I’ve used it in my apt in NYC and my friend’s place in VT. It’s the best thing I’ve found.
Essential peppermint oil, like you’d use in a diffuser or for DIY bath oil, or culinary peppermint oil, like you’d use in baking?
We have mice, too.
I did this treatment a month or so ago for ants! I didn’t know it worked for mice, too. It’s the essential oil you need to get and your house will reek. Some family members will like the smell (kids) and some may not (me), but it was the only thing that worked for ridding the house of ants.
This does not help with the stress or dealing with the actual situation at hand, but my immediate reaction to the bill situation was that it is SO plausible that it was one or a few cockups with lawyers or realtors or the post office, rather that anything nefarious. Possibly because we deal with more than our share of those situations and I can’t think too much about the level of incompetence of people I entrust with important things and/or large sums of money or I fall into despair.
One thing that I do find helpful in stressful times with clear dates (or in the case of childbirth, clear ENOUGH dates) is to remind myself, “This time next week [or whatever], I will be on the other side of this insanity/pain/worry.”
…are you sure that however your BOXES are getting moved isn’t causing more stress than any control/savings OKAY I WILL BUTT OUT NOW
The happy news is that the boxes are already over there! Paul and the kids have been moving them nearly as fast as I can pack them. There’ll be a few more, but mostly what’s left now is what’s in drawers, and we’re planning to just take out the drawers and move them full.
When my daughter moved they just wrapped the dressers in that movers plastic wrap and moved them in one full swoop…
Yay! Surely you mentioned the gradual moving of boxes earlier and I’d forgotten. DECEMBER, Y’ALL. :)
Is the barn connected to the house? Is the barn sealed enough that a cat in the barn can’t get outside? I have so many questions but they only relate to the cat situation!
My mom likes having my cats visit occasionally because she’s convinced they leave their kitty pheromones around and scare off any potential mice invaders. So get those cats over there as soon as the moving-escape-risk is over!!
The barn is connected to the house. We’d need to add a cat-flap so a barn cat could come and go.
I can’t even tell you how much I want to see photos/floorplans/ideally both(!) of your new house! I have no idea why I feel so invested, I simply do!
I would be terrible with barn cats – they would immediately simply be more family pets.
Amen on the photos. I live in a place where having a barn and property inside a town, walkable to things, is hard to picture!
Come and go into the house? Or come and go into the barn? I’m having trouble picturing a cat-flap into a house, but I live in the Canadian cold.
Come and go between the barn and the outdoors.
We have had mice for about year (that we know about– probably they’ve been here longer). So far the humane catch-and-release traps and a less humane cat have reduced their numbers from their peak (based on sightings and droppings), but not eliminated them. I take them about a block from the house and over a creek to release them in the woods. I am always teetering on the edge of using lethal traps because we can’t get rid of them. But they’re so cute when I see them close up in the traps, I can’t quite do it (yet).
I am going to try that peppermint oil trick.
You’re so brilliant to have set up your tree at the new house, great idea! One tiny word of advice (learned the hard way!) about switching out stoves…check to be sure the old one at the new house isn’t hard wired into the floor/wall. If so, it will require an electrician to disconnect and install an outlet. It’s a quick and easy fix but was an unpleasant surprise when we bought a new stove! Good luck with everything!
I know our local humane society usually has outdoor/barn cats they’re looking to re-home. Which is maybe what you already had in mind, but figured it was worth a mention.
You might try plugging in a few of the Riddex electronic pest repellers on the side of the house near the barn. I was skeptical but the only time we’ve had a mouse in the house was when ours quit working and I didn’t bother with another one. We live next to a field and definitely have mice in the attached garage but not in the house.
Also – the movers will be fast. And it will be amazing to watch and so worth it.
I’m not going to say too much about the mouse situation that existed at our house when we bought it, but– between removing/replacing the attic insulation (nesting up there, ugh), pest-blocking every crack and crevice, and getting a couple of professional companies involved, we are currently at about 6 months with nothing caught in the indoor/garage traps. It’s been expensive. If you can clear out anything that’s actually living inside and you do a good job of blocking them from getting back in, you may be in decent shape.
And re: the movers: 3 pro guys will be really fast. If they gave you a time estimate, you can expect it to be accurate. My guess would be 4-6 hours, depending on how many boxes you have.
Re: mice. We get them every autumn (but not this year! WOOT!) and the kill traps get rid of them pretty efficiently. We don’t have cats (I’m allergic), and I’ve never tried the peppermint (but I totally will next time).
I vote that you put a cat flap between the house and the barn, no cat flap to the outside. Put a kitty litter box in the barn, to encourage visits and also to get their smell to permeate out there.
Barns and barn cats really bring a lot of memories back for me! I grew up out in the middle of nowhere in SD and we had a barn. But I think our barn was bigger and more…open than an attached barn. Like, there were open windows and wide-open doors and cracks everywhere. You couldn’t keep a cat in our old barn if you tried. So our barn cats were, you know, autonomous. They were outdoors cats but of course they stayed in the barn at night for the shelter and warmth.
But I’m starting to think this barn is probably a lot cleaner and better organized and more weather-tight than our barn was. How cool!
The local animal shelter in my area has a special “Barn Cat” program. These are cats that are not house cats, but are still adopted out for barn cat purposes. They’re generally at least a year old, and neutered/spayed, but not the most human friendly. It may be worth looking into to see if there’s a similar program near you that can get you a cat or a pair of cats to help with the rodents. The cats also decimated the local chipmunk population.
We had a barn growing up, and the barn cats were working animals, not pets. Sure, they’d sometimes let you pet them and they’d want to be fed, but they wouldn’t have been comfortable in a house. We had house cats too, who were indoor/outdoor cats, and there was the occasional territorial cat battle. We found out quickly that they could not be all males, because someone would get run off. We had females in the barn for the longest time, while the indoor cat was a male.
Three guys can ABSOLUTELY accomplish an in town move of a houseful of furniture and exchange ovens in less than a day. Totally reasonable. Make sure you know where you want the furniture to go in the new house, or at least on what floor you want it if there is more than one!
Barn cats…. the concept makes me uncomfortable. I adopted a stray barn cat this summer. I don’t know for sure she was a barn cat but I live on the edge of the country and someone on our Facebook community group reported her as a stray. I picked her up and in a week claimed her as mine. Brought her to the vet and she was not microchipped or spayed. She has tons of worms and parasites. I took her in and she has NEVER made a move to open doors or windows. She LOVES the warm, cushy indoor life. After I had her a week someone on Facebook mentioned that she hadn’t seen her barn cat in awhile and did I have her? Nope. I don’t. That is how Hattie got a home. *****I realize there are some feral cats who can’t live indoors. If you have a cat flap to your house I am also ok. But I live where it gets COLD- like -20 and I can’t imagine a cat in a barn when they can be snuggling by the fire.***
I would absolutely plan to adopt barn cats from our local shelter where they are knowledgeable about which cats qualify as barn cats, and about what barn cats need, and they can make sure we are doing what is necessary for the barn cats’ wellness. As I understand it, barn cats are cats that don’t want / won’t tolerate an indoor/domestic life, but can benefit from the shelter of a barn and the supplemental/oversight care of a caring-but-detached nearby family (as opposed to being completely unprotected/feral in the outdoors). They can’t come into the main living areas of the house without creating havoc with domesticated pets, but they don’t WANT to be indoors with people and domesticated pets, so it works out nicely for all.
It sounds like what you’re talking about is taking in a stray, which we have also done, but in that case she was compatible with indoor/domesticated living and so we took her in as an indoor cat (after getting her checked out and vaccinated and microchipped and flea/parasite-treated by a vet). I think what you’re uncomfortable with is the idea of an indoor/domesticated cat being tossed out into a cold barn to serve in the role of barn cat, which all of us would be uncomfortable with.
Yeah, I hear where you’re coming from because I live in Canada and it’s really cold in the winter and it boggles my mind to think that there would be a shelter that would allow a cat to go to a barn instead of a home. But there are lots of warmer places where I suppose this would make perfect sense, and even here the local farmers outside the city mostly do have feral cats in their barns. We had barn cats in our huge barn when I was a kid and I didn’t think anything of it because I was young and that’s just the way it was and in the 70s animals weren’t really seen as part of the family.
Also, the way the shelters see it, it’s not “barn cat vs. home cat,” it’s “barn cat vs. street cat.” They only designate a cat a barn cat if it would not want to be in a home.
I know that you love cats and will do your due diligence to find the proper cats for your home. I think some cats are meant to be barn cats and some( like my Hattie) are meant to be in a home. Plus I am sure you will make sure any barn cats are vaccinated/fed/spayed as necessary! No worries- I trust your judgement!
You’re right, though happily it is not left up to the adopters’ judgement: the shelters don’t allow any cat to be adopted that they have not already vaccinated and spayed/neutered, and they only adopt out a very select subset of cats as barn cats.
Please add me as a plus-one for wanting to see floor plans of your new home. I am fascinated.
About the invoice: around here, an invoice is only valid if it has the correct recipient listed. Judging from this: https://www.ionos.com/startupguide/grow-your-business/requirements-for-a-proper-invoice/ it’s similar in the US. Based on that, I’d give the place who issued the invoice a call and tell them that they need to issue a new invoice with your name on it, and with a matching corrected due date.
It could be that they refuse to do so because by not doing anything, your original seller has missed the time frame to dispute the invoice/have them correct the error, but I doubt it. If you indicate that you are more than wiling to pay the invoice once it’s been correctly made out to you and Paul, they’d have a lot more hassle by continuing to haunt the original seller about it. And people like to avoid hassle.
In any case you are not on the hook for anything here, because you can’t pay a bill you know nothing about, and you are not liable for late fees either. And it’s in your own interest to insist on a correct invoice, because afaik if it’s about house costs that money is deductible, but probably only if you can also provide a matching invoice in your names (at least around here that is a requirement).
It’s probably helpful if before the call, you try to mentally get into the head space of “they want something from me, so they better do what they need to to get that something” instead of “omg I am so worried because what if the money is late and then there’s the interest and I hope they let us off” because none of this is your fault. You are not calling them to get them to do you a favour but to help straighten something out that was messed up by people other than you. I found it helps when I first make sure that my mindset is right before I approach stuff like that, because the people on the other side often seem to pick up on it.
And by “approach” I mean “fret about and avoid the issue until it can be avoided no more, wasting a lot of life time on something that still won’t go away until I do something about it so why didn’t I do it right away”.