We did it. We bought a new house and sold an old house. All papers have been signed; all keys have been relinquished; all money has been duly remitted. The process sucked, but the end result was worth it. Moving is always stressful, but this move was especially stressful, due to a seemingly endless stream of over-promises, under-deliveries, and straight-up gaffes made by various parties throughout the process. They say if you want something done right, you have to do it yourself, and, boy, did we just go through a month of living that adage.
To wit…
I already mentioned in my last post how the settlement company instructed S’s dad to wire an enormous (for us) sum of money to the wrong account. That was the ur-fuckup. Surprisingly, however, that settlement company ended up being one of the more competent parties we dealt with throughout our move. The manager took responsibility, repeatedly apologized to us, said that were she in our shoes she would've been “appalled,” and did her best to make things right by personally ensuring the money was ultimately wired to the proper account and paying all fees associated with the multiple transfers. She also gave us a dozen eggs from her personal chicken coop, which might sound silly, but we actually go through eggs extremely quickly, so it was a very useful gift, and more importantly it demonstrated that she understood our anger. That’s a key, often-omitted component of atonement: acknowledging the aggrieved party has a right to be aggrieved.
******
The woman at the moving company could have learned something from her. Here’s the story with that. We had a box spring upstairs in our old house that couldn’t fit down the stairs. We brought it inside by hoisting it through a big window in a sun room that no longer exists (it's now an extension of the kids’ room). We knew that there was no way to get it downstairs without breaking it into pieces. We explained this to our coordinator at the moving company, and she said it was an unusual request, but they could accommodate us for an additional $150 fee. Okay, fine.
When the moving crew actually arrives, however, and I point out the box spring, they have no idea what I’m talking about. A series of phone calls ensues, and the upshot is that the box spring doesn’t get moved that night (Friday). Instead, we are told somebody can come out Monday morning to do it, free of charge. That’s cutting it really close, as we are closing Monday afternoon, but we agree to it.
I’m not feeling confident about the arrangement, so I decide that night to get it down the stairs myself. I won’t be able to dispose of it, but if I can at least get it downstairs I will feel a lot better about things. That way if the moving company flakes again, I can call GotJunk or somebody and they can easily come get it.
So, around 8:00 pm Friday night, armed with a hammer, a box cutter, a roll of duct tape, and pint of Baskin-Robbins chocolate and peanut butter ice cream, I go back to our nearly-empty house alone and get to work. Within a few hours of back-breaking (and bed-breaking) labor, I have created a precarious, but beautiful, bundle of wire, nailed slats, and duct tape. I’m able to get my worthless work of art downstairs and out to the front porch.
The next day, I consider calling GotJunk to have them pick it up and be done with it. But I decide to stick with the plan and have the moving company pick it up – it was their mistake in the first place, and obviously I don’t want to pay to have it removed if I don't have to. So, it sits on the porch for the weekend, and then late-afternoon Monday, I go back to the house to wrap up a few things (we’ve closed, but the buyers don’t close until the next day) and it’s still there. I’m beyond irritated. We were told it would be gone in the morning, and it’s now 4:30 pm. I leave a curt (but respectful) message on the coordinator’s voicemail, she calls me back, and after a series of texts ensuring me somebody is coming in fifteen minutes, somebody does eventually come – at 6:30. Whatever. It’s done. I’m satisfied...
Until we get the bill and I see she’s added $100 for removal of the box spring, with a note saying, “We discounted by $50, since we didn’t do the break-down.” I’m beyond livid at this point. I write a sternly worded email, and I then I call her, and she’s like, “Oh, hey, how’s going? How's the rest of your move?” as if nothing happened. She does eventually drop the box spring fee (per our original agreement), but it’s like she doesn’t even get why I’m pissed, which is the most annoying part (acknowledgement, remember). But the thing is, I think this woman is just a space cadet. She doesn’t mean any ill-will. She’s just out there -- super disorganized and flighty. She also didn’t tell us that our bunk bed wouldn’t be reassembled until a day after it was delivered (which was actually a big inconvenience for us), and she forgot to include a charge in the original estimate, so we ended up owing more than we initially thought. We might have been able to dispute it, but I was too worn down to try, and S was preoccupied with much bigger financial matters (see below). At least we know who not to use if (god-forbid) we move again.
Amazingly, this wasn’t the most annoying or costly hitch in our moving plans. That would be a leaky shower head. We redid the entire master bathroom of our old house before we moved into it eight years ago. We went with a handyman S knew previously, and that turned out to not be a great move. He’s a good guy, trustworthy, but he does some shoddy work, truth be told. In the case of our shower head, it started leaking relatively soon after installation, so we had a plumber come out to fix it, but it wasn’t a real fix, because S's handyman didn’t build in an access panel to the pipes (like I said: shoddy), so the best the plumber could do without removing a large section of tile was a low-rent jimmy-rig that resulted in the the cold handle being able to be twisted completely off and the hot handle being able to spin around and around forever. To shut off the hot water you had to move the knob to this perfect spot, and then don’t touch it, lest you bump it off the spot a tiny bit and it start dripping. It wasn’t ideal, but it did work…
Until the day before we were supposed to close, of course. Our agent came to look at the house Monday before the buyers were to do their final walk-through the next day, and he told us that the shower was dripping. I came out to try to stop it, but the magic spot was gone. So, I called a plumber and was given a time-window of 2:00 pm – 5:00 pm. He finally came at 6:45. (It was a race between the moving company and the plumber. The moving company won. I lost, because I had to wait for them in an empty house. On the plus side, I got some push-ups in.) The plumber looked at it for about ten seconds, and then said he needed to more or less replace the entire thing, and that he needed to cut out the tile to do it, and it would be $1,100, and he wouldn’t replace the tile.
I called our agent, and he basically told me, “Sucks… but you gotta fix it or give the buyers some money to fix it.” I called S and we went with the latter option. We ended up agreeing to credit the buyers $2,000 off the sales price – the extra $900 to replace the tile. It was way more expensive than it should have been, in my opinion, but it got us past the finish line. S and I were leveraged to the hilt, so it would have been pretty foolhardy of us to quibble over a small (relatively speaking) amount of money.
I’m more annoyed at myself than at anybody else for this one -- I should have just given the plumber the go-ahead to do the proper fix, when he came out years ago. (Actually, we should have had somebody else do the original remodel, but I didn’t know better at the time.) That’s one thing I’ve learned about home repair: The cheap way is often the much more expensive way down the road. Oh, as an extra little knife-twist, the plumber told me he would email me the estimate, but he never did, so I had to call his company and get somebody in the office to send it to me. It’s a small thing, but it’s yet another example of somebody not doing what they said they would do.
Speaking of which... our proceeds from the sale were supposed to hit our account first thing Wednesday morning, and they didn’t come until 4:30 pm. Our agent and S each contacted the buyers’ settlement company several times throughout the day and kept getting blown off. S stuck with it though and finally talked to somebody of import at the company, and the transfer went through shortly thereafter. It's unclear to me when we would've gotten paid if she didn't make a stink. The thing is, it was the settlement company who told us the transfer would come through first thing in the morning. Had they not told us that we wouldn't have expected it, and we wouldn't have been upset when it didn't happen. It's like they got the adage wrong: Over promise and under deliver. Well, they weren't alone.
That was our move.
Until next time...
To wit…
I already mentioned in my last post how the settlement company instructed S’s dad to wire an enormous (for us) sum of money to the wrong account. That was the ur-fuckup. Surprisingly, however, that settlement company ended up being one of the more competent parties we dealt with throughout our move. The manager took responsibility, repeatedly apologized to us, said that were she in our shoes she would've been “appalled,” and did her best to make things right by personally ensuring the money was ultimately wired to the proper account and paying all fees associated with the multiple transfers. She also gave us a dozen eggs from her personal chicken coop, which might sound silly, but we actually go through eggs extremely quickly, so it was a very useful gift, and more importantly it demonstrated that she understood our anger. That’s a key, often-omitted component of atonement: acknowledging the aggrieved party has a right to be aggrieved.
******
The woman at the moving company could have learned something from her. Here’s the story with that. We had a box spring upstairs in our old house that couldn’t fit down the stairs. We brought it inside by hoisting it through a big window in a sun room that no longer exists (it's now an extension of the kids’ room). We knew that there was no way to get it downstairs without breaking it into pieces. We explained this to our coordinator at the moving company, and she said it was an unusual request, but they could accommodate us for an additional $150 fee. Okay, fine.
When the moving crew actually arrives, however, and I point out the box spring, they have no idea what I’m talking about. A series of phone calls ensues, and the upshot is that the box spring doesn’t get moved that night (Friday). Instead, we are told somebody can come out Monday morning to do it, free of charge. That’s cutting it really close, as we are closing Monday afternoon, but we agree to it.
I’m not feeling confident about the arrangement, so I decide that night to get it down the stairs myself. I won’t be able to dispose of it, but if I can at least get it downstairs I will feel a lot better about things. That way if the moving company flakes again, I can call GotJunk or somebody and they can easily come get it.
So, around 8:00 pm Friday night, armed with a hammer, a box cutter, a roll of duct tape, and pint of Baskin-Robbins chocolate and peanut butter ice cream, I go back to our nearly-empty house alone and get to work. Within a few hours of back-breaking (and bed-breaking) labor, I have created a precarious, but beautiful, bundle of wire, nailed slats, and duct tape. I’m able to get my worthless work of art downstairs and out to the front porch.
The next day, I consider calling GotJunk to have them pick it up and be done with it. But I decide to stick with the plan and have the moving company pick it up – it was their mistake in the first place, and obviously I don’t want to pay to have it removed if I don't have to. So, it sits on the porch for the weekend, and then late-afternoon Monday, I go back to the house to wrap up a few things (we’ve closed, but the buyers don’t close until the next day) and it’s still there. I’m beyond irritated. We were told it would be gone in the morning, and it’s now 4:30 pm. I leave a curt (but respectful) message on the coordinator’s voicemail, she calls me back, and after a series of texts ensuring me somebody is coming in fifteen minutes, somebody does eventually come – at 6:30. Whatever. It’s done. I’m satisfied...
Until we get the bill and I see she’s added $100 for removal of the box spring, with a note saying, “We discounted by $50, since we didn’t do the break-down.” I’m beyond livid at this point. I write a sternly worded email, and I then I call her, and she’s like, “Oh, hey, how’s going? How's the rest of your move?” as if nothing happened. She does eventually drop the box spring fee (per our original agreement), but it’s like she doesn’t even get why I’m pissed, which is the most annoying part (acknowledgement, remember). But the thing is, I think this woman is just a space cadet. She doesn’t mean any ill-will. She’s just out there -- super disorganized and flighty. She also didn’t tell us that our bunk bed wouldn’t be reassembled until a day after it was delivered (which was actually a big inconvenience for us), and she forgot to include a charge in the original estimate, so we ended up owing more than we initially thought. We might have been able to dispute it, but I was too worn down to try, and S was preoccupied with much bigger financial matters (see below). At least we know who not to use if (god-forbid) we move again.
[We have top men working on it right now.
Who?!
Top... men.]
Amazingly, this wasn’t the most annoying or costly hitch in our moving plans. That would be a leaky shower head. We redid the entire master bathroom of our old house before we moved into it eight years ago. We went with a handyman S knew previously, and that turned out to not be a great move. He’s a good guy, trustworthy, but he does some shoddy work, truth be told. In the case of our shower head, it started leaking relatively soon after installation, so we had a plumber come out to fix it, but it wasn’t a real fix, because S's handyman didn’t build in an access panel to the pipes (like I said: shoddy), so the best the plumber could do without removing a large section of tile was a low-rent jimmy-rig that resulted in the the cold handle being able to be twisted completely off and the hot handle being able to spin around and around forever. To shut off the hot water you had to move the knob to this perfect spot, and then don’t touch it, lest you bump it off the spot a tiny bit and it start dripping. It wasn’t ideal, but it did work…
Until the day before we were supposed to close, of course. Our agent came to look at the house Monday before the buyers were to do their final walk-through the next day, and he told us that the shower was dripping. I came out to try to stop it, but the magic spot was gone. So, I called a plumber and was given a time-window of 2:00 pm – 5:00 pm. He finally came at 6:45. (It was a race between the moving company and the plumber. The moving company won. I lost, because I had to wait for them in an empty house. On the plus side, I got some push-ups in.) The plumber looked at it for about ten seconds, and then said he needed to more or less replace the entire thing, and that he needed to cut out the tile to do it, and it would be $1,100, and he wouldn’t replace the tile.
I called our agent, and he basically told me, “Sucks… but you gotta fix it or give the buyers some money to fix it.” I called S and we went with the latter option. We ended up agreeing to credit the buyers $2,000 off the sales price – the extra $900 to replace the tile. It was way more expensive than it should have been, in my opinion, but it got us past the finish line. S and I were leveraged to the hilt, so it would have been pretty foolhardy of us to quibble over a small (relatively speaking) amount of money.
I’m more annoyed at myself than at anybody else for this one -- I should have just given the plumber the go-ahead to do the proper fix, when he came out years ago. (Actually, we should have had somebody else do the original remodel, but I didn’t know better at the time.) That’s one thing I’ve learned about home repair: The cheap way is often the much more expensive way down the road. Oh, as an extra little knife-twist, the plumber told me he would email me the estimate, but he never did, so I had to call his company and get somebody in the office to send it to me. It’s a small thing, but it’s yet another example of somebody not doing what they said they would do.
Speaking of which... our proceeds from the sale were supposed to hit our account first thing Wednesday morning, and they didn’t come until 4:30 pm. Our agent and S each contacted the buyers’ settlement company several times throughout the day and kept getting blown off. S stuck with it though and finally talked to somebody of import at the company, and the transfer went through shortly thereafter. It's unclear to me when we would've gotten paid if she didn't make a stink. The thing is, it was the settlement company who told us the transfer would come through first thing in the morning. Had they not told us that we wouldn't have expected it, and we wouldn't have been upset when it didn't happen. It's like they got the adage wrong: Over promise and under deliver. Well, they weren't alone.
That was our move.
Until next time...
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