I've been wanting to get an update published for the last week or so. There's a lot going on, but it's kind of a mishmash, as you'll see.
For the last several weeks, we've been busy down in SoCal. Daughter Jill and her family, who were living in our condo in San Clemente, bought a place of their own. They are now the proud owners of a cute little condo in Trabuco Canyon. They are now only about two miles from Joe's work, and probably half the previous distance to Jill's and Madeline's schools. Two weekends ago, during a record-breaking heat wave, we helped them move.
Since they were moving out, we found a realtor to sell the condo. Actually, we are using the realtor that Jill and Joe used to find their condo. She did a great job for them and, so far, is doing a great job for us. She arranged for painters, new carpeting and cleaning; this saved us a bunch of time and work.
The condo listing went live yesterday. Raina, our realtor, tells us that they've got five showings scheduled through the weekend. We are hopeful that we can get it sold fairly quickly.
Getting our own house moving has been an exercise in patience. Right now, we are still waiting on finalization of the building permit to submit to the county. The key part of this is the Site Plan which, as its name suggests, shows where all the pieces are placed on the property. There's a lot of items that need to come together for the Site Plan.
From our perspective, it appears that little has happened in the last month or so. Our pleas for timing and progress are met with assurances that the work is progressing steadily. We can't tell if that's truly the case, or if the rate of progress is typical, or if there's a little bit of a "small-town" attitude toward getting things done in a timely manner. Just yesterday we did receive a draft Grading Plan, which shows the house and driveway sited on the lot. This is a big part and is, hopefully, indicative that they are getting close.
Here's the key part of the Grading Plan...
Why the frustration on our part? Timing. We've been told that the county is now taking 60-90 days to review and approve building permits. Additionally, the manufactured home people are now backlogged 90-120 days on building homes! The good news - we'll order the home as soon as the permit is submitted, so these times run concurrently.
After the home is built and transported to the site, it'll take an additional 45-60 days to assemble. So, do the math: worst case, we won't be in the house until 180 days from now... March 20th! ANYTHING we can do to speed things along will - just possibly - get us in the house before next spring.
Both of us are used to making things happen and getting things done. This inactivity is killing us, as is the dependence on getting others to do their job. Intellectually, we both know that we can wait. We're in a nice RV park that is very inexpensive for this area. We're only four hours away from two of our children...and in one of the most beautiful locations in California.
We can't just sit here for the next six months; we'll either go crazy or kill each other - or both! So, what are we going to do?
For starters, we've got some travelin' planned.
First, we're going to head to Ohio. When we left Ohio in 2018, we left a few keepsakes in a storage unit there. Our original plan was to go get that stuff after we got in our new house. Now, with all this time to kill, we think we'll go now. The weather's still good. Assuming we got in our house sometime around March 1, that's still a little early to reliably cross the Rockies; better to go now. Also, once we get in the new place we're going to be really busy... too busy to take a couple of weeks off to go to Ohio.
So, we're leaving here in early October, after leaving the dogs with Sherry, and booking to Ohio. We'll be in Cincinnati a couple of days and then load up a U-Haul trailer and haul the stuff out west.
After that, we're making plans to drive up to Seattle for a week or so at Thanksgiving. Heather and Dan just moved into a large four-bedroom house. We can stay there so we won't take the trailer. That'll save us quite a bit in diesel costs, plus we can drive so much faster we'll do it in two days instead of three.
We'd like to get over to Lassen National Park, here in California, and go on up to Crater Lake NP, which is just over the border into Oregon. Crater Lake gets snowed in pretty early, though, so that might not happen this year.
