Closing Day

We finally CLOSED on this house today.  30 minutes and 200 pages of signatures and poof!  Our house officially belongs to someone else.  

Good gosh! I feel like this has been the longest "getting out of a house" process in the history of ever!  I know that I have this obsessive need to document every emotional shift and every temperature change, and that no one can take a breath in this house without it showing up in a blog post, but holy cow! I'm even sick of house posts, so I'm sure you must be.  This is the last one...about this house at least.  

Our original closing date was Wednesday, May 18th (two days ago) but there was some hold up on the buyers' end and they needed to bump the date to Friday, May 20th (today.)  

A few of us are handling this move really well and are excited for the adventure that awaits.  You know, blank slate, new house, new friends, etc.  A few of us are a little overly anxious to completely sever all ties here and would like to be gone...um, yesterday.  A few of us have been sad and have wanted to cling to this place and these people a little longer because well, I LIKE THEM.  And a few of us are not at all happy about the reality of moving and have turned into fire breathing dragons.  When we found out about the change in closing dates, Craig and I thought maybe a couple of extra days in the house and maintaining the same daily schedule through the week, instead of rushing off to 17 days of hotel life, would be good for the dragon-y types in the family.  So Craig transformed into scoutmaster mode and dragged out just enough air mattresses, sleeping bags and camp chairs so we would be  as comfortable possible living in a house with no furniture for three days.  

It turns out that living in a house that once looked and felt like this...

...but now looks like this...

...isn't as delightful as you might think.  It was actually pretty depressing.  And I thought all the life had been sucked out of my house when I took the pictures off the walls...

For the last three days, our lives have looked like this...dull, boring, grey, lifeless... 

...which has been unbelievably depressing, but also kind of a blessing in disguise.  I realized while we were hauling everything out of the house and into the cars for the last time this morning that I actually felt really ready to give this house to the next owners.  I love this house and I have loved every minute that we've lived in it, but without all the furniture and the life breathing into it, it's not really the same.  And I don't know that I would have felt that way without the last three days of house drudgery.  

So as we drove out of the driveway for the last time and went to that closing this morning, I shed a couple of tiny tears but only for a minute, and then I was just ready to move onto the the next phase of this adventure.  

Bring on 14 days of hotel life...fire breathing dragons and all!