House Move.....Part 1

There are times you just want to forget.  This last house move was one of those.  If it could go wrong, it went wrong.  So get comfy with a cup of tea/coffee and get ready for a long and miserable story.......

The move was scheduled for November 15th.  The people who bought our house closed on theirs on October 30th and they went down to Florida to their winter home.  They were flying back up on November 20th (around that time) to move their stuff out of storage and into their new home; our old home.

It had been hectic prior to this, as we went to Britain in September, came back and sold our house, and then had to find a house for us to buy.  We then had to pack up our house and sort out all the logistics of it all.  Luckily this was not our first move and I knew how to pack up the house and sort everything else out.  Still will say did find it a lot harder this time, I think due to us getting a bit older.

So fast forward to November 15th.  We had decided to rent a truck to move the stuff from the garage to save us some money.  Dh and son would do that and we booked a truck a couple of weeks prior to the move.  Son would pick the rental truck up as it was close to his house, drive down to our house (30 minutes away) and dh and son would pack up the garage all before the movers arrived at 11 am.  Son goes to pick the truck up to find that there was no truck for us?  After much waiting son is sent to the middle of nowhere to pick up another truck, drives down and they get the garage packed up.

Movers arrive half an hour late, but there are four of them and two trucks?  We were only paying for one.  Very energetic group, one young kid who was like an energizer bunny.........or he had been drinking multiple energy drinks, who knows?  Another guy who looked as though he should have retired but turns out to be just over 50..........so I guess he had, had a hard life.  Another guy who was a millionaire and had numerous properties and a business..............you are not the only one who is thinking then why are you working moving furniture..................he reckoned the boss asked him to help out and he was doing it as a favour for him???  The leader of the crew, who was a very nice guy.

They start packing the house up.  I had packed the boxes, put colour coordinated sticky notes on each box indicating which room they were for at the other end.  In big bold red letters, wrote FRAGILE on boxes that they needed to be careful with.  Put arrows on boxes indicating which way up where applicable.  Shrink wrapped a number of pictures and other things.  I have done this a few times packing up a house.........remember all of this paragraph as it will all come into play in Part 2 of this story!!

The movers finally finished up at 4 pm, just as it started to snow!  One of the movers co-workers was retiring, and as their office was just around the corner from where we were moving we said go to the retirement do and we'll call you as soon as we close on the new house.

We closed on our old house around 2 pm-ish so that wasn't a problem.  We were just waiting to close on our new home.  Called the lawyer and they kept telling us it hadn't closed, so went down to the office to see what the hold up was.  

The next part of the story I'll skip the details and just tell you want the outcome of this was.

Our old house closed at around 2-ish as I said before.  The lawyer was instructed to wire transfer the money for the new house to NOT ONE of the main banks in Canada, a smaller one which they did.  The main banks in Canada tend to have longer opening hours, not this one the lawyer wired money too, they closed at 5pm, so it turned out the employee who should have pressed the button to accept our money went home without doing that.

So where did that leave us.  Well it left us with hundreds of thousands of OUR dollars floating around in cyber space.  Due to that we COULD NOT close on our new home, we were homeless😭 and hundreds of thousands of dollars missing from our lives.  Our lawyer and the lawyer for the new home, agreed we could have the key to the new home, as long as we didn't make any structural changes (😲)overnight until we closed on the house the next day.  As they did agree that the money was out there just not in anyone's pockets.

By this time it was 6pm.  It had been snowing steadily for the past couple of hours.  We were exhausted and so we called the movers and asked if they could store our furniture overnight and deliver it the next day.  They agreed and charged us an extra $250 for the pleasure.  Son parked the van with the garage stuff in his driveway.  We spent the night at their house, which luckily is five minutes from our new house.

The kicker in all of this; NO ONE would/will take responsibility for this.............

Part 2 tomorrow.