Back in the Mesa House for Last Time

17 August - 30 September 2017

After flying from Jacksonville we got back to Mesa on the 17th of August. It looked like a bomb had gone off in the house. We had left in a rush and while we were gone the painter had been shoving the piles of debris and furniture around to get at the walls. Once the inside of the house was mostly done painting of the outside of the house and the yard walls got underway.

We had lived in the house for a long time. While we had made a lot of improvements we had some to do items that were up to 15 years old. We continued to sort and pack and donate and move things to the storage unit. We also had a small 5 foot by 5 foot storage space beneath the condo in Scottsdale that we had kept separate from the rental. This was slowly becoming our place to stash spare tile and such from both properties and tools for maintaining them.

This went on for weeks. We made progress every day, but some days we identified more new items to do than we completed. We blew past the three week mark, which is how long we originally thought this would take, but we started getting potential tenants walking through. The good news was we got a tenant who wanted to move in beginning in October. The bad news is we now had a hard deadline for everything.

By mid-September Heather had completed most of the tasks on her list and was helping me with mine. We soon got to the point where she had little left to do and couldn't help me much with the tasks I had left. After some frustration with that we agreed that there really wasn't any reason for her to hang around and we arranged for a flight for her to El Paso so she could spend a week with her mother. I'd follow the next week driving the convertible, which we were selling to her brother.

The tenant wanted to use the weekend to move in, so we agreed that she could on Saturday September 30th. By the time I had made my final trips to Goodwill and the storage units, then some last minute cleaning, it was well after dark on Friday night. I gave up and inflated the air mattress again, sleeping until about 4a on Saturday. After a quick shower I packed up the last of my stuff in the convertible. There wasn't even room left for another passenger, so it's just as well that Heather was already there.

Now that we were done, the house was nicer than it had ever been. We might even want to live there again, someday. I locked up, closed the garage door, and drove away just as the sun was coming up.

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