Charm City Confidential: Two Tons of Fun.

It really is a viscous cycle.

The number one question on the minds of the Realtor's and our friends has been: "When are you moving?"

I wish we knew.

Today I hosted Florence, the moving company estimator.  It is Florence's job to look at everything we own and decide how much crap we have and how we move it to Baltimore.  She doesn't work for our moving company, but works for the Columbus affiliate.

She arrived on time and over the yaps of small dog's introduced herself as "Flahnce".  I thought her teeth slipped, but she assured me that while it's spelled FLORENCE, it's always been pronounced as "Flah-nce".

Our house is a hair over 1,400 square feet and I have owned it since 1992 and its jam packed with stuff, quite literally.

After an hour of walking, talking and pointing what we need to keep, and what we need to store, Flahnce announced that that we would be moving a staggering 10 tons of stuff to the new house.  Twelve if we owned the Weather Girls CD "Two Tons of Fun", which she said was a little moving industry humor (SNORT!)

"Did I hear you right?  Are you saying we have 20,000 pounds of stuff?" I asked.

"When you bring it in it comes in piece by piece.  You have no way of knowing how much your stuff weighs until something like this happens.  And think about this - your mattress came into the house weighing it's production weight, but I can guarantee you that its leaving at least 25 lbs. heavier in dust mites and dead skin cells."

Ewwww!

"And look at me!  I used to me a 98 lbs. chick on the dance floor of the disco in the 1970s.  Now double the weight and I didn't pack it on in one night.  It's a spoon full of sugar here, a taco there and over 30 years it all adds up."

There was a consolation prize, though.

"You're getting, with your Oldsmobile," which is shipping in the van, using a '53 foot trailer, so you stuff gets it's own 18-wheeler!  That makes the actual move simpler because we don't piggyback with anyone else."

And the cherry on top was "If you were just doing this yourself there would be moving companies tripping over themselves to get this gravy train.  A 10 ton move is so much easier than a seven ton move."  Easier for her to say than it was for me to comprehend.

Then she dropped the question that we all dread: "Now, when are you moving?"

Honestly, everyone wants to know this but I have no idea.   The answer is complicated, but its all predicated on the moving company, which is the piece of this puzzle that refuses to cooperate.

In order to move the following HAS to happen:

1. Moving company comes in and spends two days packing and moving 75% our of stuff out of here.

2. Painting of two upstairs bedrooms happens.  Then the bedrooms are "staged" and the house gets listed.

3. Once the house is listed on the MLS, THEN and ONLY THEN, we start looking for a new home in Baltimore.

4. The house offer in Baltimore is predicated on the house in Columbus going into contract - OR - getting a bridge loan.

5. Once the house in Columbus sells, THEN we finalize the move to Baltimore.

But without that bitch in Chicago cooperating in scheduling the move the packing of our stuff for local storage so we can get the house listed, then we can't do anything.

SO the moving thing really has become a Chicken and Egg kinda thing.