Our house and all in it
When confronted with the decision to move abroad, one of the most overwhelming issues was, what to do with our home and belongings. Transporting everything to Europe was impossible. Not only did we not have an exact date or place to move into. Besides, homes in Europe are generally smaller than in the US, and our home was too big for just two people. One of our reasons to move to Europe was to downsize to reduce unnecessary expenses associated with fixing our big house. There were memories in everything we owned, from furniture to baby picture negatives that we simply had to let go. It all began to feel like, not just a new phase in our lives, but a completely new life. Under that assumption, disposing of all our belongings seemed less overwhelming. Soon, however, we will be selling our home and before that, everything had to go.
We continued to donate what we could, and our daughter took a few things she wanted for herself, including Ulla’s valuable organ (the musical instrument). As our target date of May 1st approached, we had to consider the time it would take to sell our home. For one thing, we had the believe that selling a property in California is better done in the spring. So we started to audition Real Estate agents on the 13th of March, to give ourselves plenty of time to sell our house by May 1st, our target date to move to Spain. As you would expect, the 3 agents we talked to said that you needed 45 days to sell and get to close the property by May 1st. We were put in a pressure cocker of our own making, without even having the certainty that Spain would open its borders by that date.
The nightmare of selling the house
In retrospect, there was no hurry, but Ulla and I are people of action and when we see a task in front of us, we’d rather act and correct course later, rather than wait for random events decide our fate. Soon we were second guessing our choice of agents, but not for what you would imagine. In less than a week, our carpet was replaced, our pictures were taken down, and a series of pictures we considered tasteless adorned our beautiful house. We felt it was no longer our home. Showings began a week later on March 20th. We were asked to leave the house for hours every day but in just one more week, on Saturday the 27th we accepted one of several offers, partly glad to see the process end, partly stressed for what we had gone through and with much trepidation for what was still to come.
In California is becoming quite popular to “stage” a home for sale, which means that your things will be removed and “neutral” furniture and decorations would be placed instead of yours. The rational being that this way, the potential buyers would feel that they could be entering their own new home, rather than your old one. I do not think that this was needed in our case, and removing a few personal nicknacks should have done the trick. Staging made us feel that we were out of the house, but we still had more than 1 month to go. Fortunately, the sale was quick, but we then thought that we took the offer much too soon, without the opportunity for sufficient showings. In the end we decided to let go of that because we had a price just a few months before would have been unheard of in our location.
We set the closing date to May 4th. But the biggest challenge was still ahead: dispose of our furniture and belongings of all sorts. For that we needed help. A simple garage sale would not do. This is why we contracted the services of an Estate Sale company. Was this a good idea? What alternative did we have? In the next part, I will reason why I think that donating it all to charity would have been better for us, and not just for being charitable.
