Leave This House!

I promised/threatened some house stories as we're preparing our new place to move in, and I'm keeping/making good on that. Today's story comes from day one, and is subtitled "Move Your Crap Out."

When we went over to our place on Saturday, for the first time it was truly Our Place, we were disappointed to find a lot of stuff still in there from the former owner. There was a stack of a half dozen boxes at the front of the garage. At least one random object was in almost every room. In some cases, they were the odds and ends you could imagine people accidentally leaving behind when they move: a bunch of cookie sheets in the drawer under the oven, a tiny cross pinned over the front door.

But then there were items you couldn't imagine had been missed. A vacuum cleaner just sitting in the middle the bedroom. A Pluto (as in Disney) bowling ball in the top of one of the bedroom closets. Two three-foot high stacks of Maxim magazines in the master bathroom. And the items that, if it were me, I'd be too considerate to leave behind. A stack of four tires in the backyard. A giant can of grease on a shelf in the garage.

Perhaps the worst of all was the basement crawl space, which had been forgotten about entirely. I could maybe understand how the previous owner had overlooked it, since he'd had the door to the crawl space completely blocked by a TV when he'd lived there. Nevertheless, we weren't thrilled to find inside an old television, computer scanner and other equipment, a wheelchair, a bunch of bad wire shelving, and more.

We had the former owner's phone number, and we were in the midst of figuring out the right tone for calling him when he pulls up in a rush in his truck. "I know, I'm sorry!" he's yelling as he hops out. He rushes for the boxes in the garage. We decide, fine, let him do his thing and we'll do ours.

Except that in less than five minutes, when we come back downstairs, he's gone. The boxes in the garage are too, but that represents just a tiny fraction of the crap he has still in the house. Needless to say, this puts a pretty big damper on the rest of our day. Our House doesn't really quite feel like Our House yet with this guy's garbage still in it, and we're reluctant to begin moving in too much of our basics -- painting supplies and such -- for when this guy shows up and probably has no idea what's his and what's ours.

But then, after a while, it becomes clear this guy is not coming back. So finally, frustrated, we decide to stop, grab lunch, and give him a call. As expected, he has absolutely no idea about all this stuff still in the house. I suppose he had a small army of friends helping him move the night before... and yet he didn't walk through and actually, you know, look at the place before he left?

He showed up a short while later and hauled away probably 90% of the remaining stuff, unsafely stuffing his truck in such a way that I'm certain half of what he did take fell out on the way to wherever he was going. But that's both as much patience as we were willing to have with him and clearly as much as we were going to get out of him.

I'll save this downer of a story by quickly saying that Sunday went much better. We had some help with both painting and cleaning, and while there's still plenty of both to be done, even the amount we finished really started to transform the place.

I'm looking forward to Wednesday -- trash day at the new house -- when we can perform a garbage exorcism on this guy's old stuff. "This house... is clean."