The Last Weekend

I’ve long documented on the pages of this personal website (aka weblog, aka blog) that Mother Nature is a bitch.

She proved that to be true once again this weekend.

After six weeks of hot, dry weather, she decided to unleash a torrent of heavy rains on central Indiana. Just in time to, more or less, ruin our weekend at the lake. We had about two good hours Saturday, between our first guests arriving and the first storms hitting, and then maybe 45 minutes Sunday between storm waves, to take kids out on the boat for tubing and boarding. The rest of the weekend was spent holed up in our home with three other families, 10 total kids from 14 to 3, trying to make the best of the weekend.

This was significant because it was our final weekend at the lake.

We showed the house for the first time last Wednesday and those folks made an immediate offer. They are paying full price in cash, so things are going to happen quickly. We are currently scheduled to close on July 2. However, the inspection is today and unless anything major comes up,[1] we anticipate them asking to close even sooner.

So that was it. Which made it a weekend full of mixed emotions. As I documented last week, I’m well past done with all the prep and clean up that goes into hosting people. I’m done with moody kids who sit around and pout. I’m done with kids of our guests who make huge messes and neither attempt to help clean them up or apologize for making them.[2]

But I also spent the weekend trying to enjoy the good moments while remembering the high points from the past six summers, of which there were many. When we bought the house it was a little earlier than we had planned. But we wanted to do it while the girls were still fairly young and would be able to make memories that lasted the rest of their lives. They’re not pleased that we’re leaving the lake life behind us. But I know they will always look back and remember swimming and tubing and fishing and all the other fun things they did in our time down there.

The only bummer of the deal so far is the buyers decided not to make on offer on our boat. So I’m furiously working various angles to try to sell it quickly, preferably to either someone down there or to someone who is capable of hauling it wherever they want to take it. I’d really like to avoid dragging it back to Indy one last time, and/or having to store it somewhere for awhile as we attempt to sell it. I have a few leads, I have no idea how promising they are. But some information has been sent out. We’ll see if I can get any bites and hook them before we have to be out of the house.

We will go down at least one more time. We drop C at camp next Sunday, which is right down the road. We’ll make a stop to grab our final personal effects, load the trash up one more time, and then depart. Knock on wood we can include wrapping up things with the boat that day, too.

Anyway, it was an immense relief to sell that house quickly. Obviously any time you are buying and selling properties there are endless stresses involved. When you could potentially own three homes for a stretch of time those stresses increase exponentially. We still need to sell our main home – traffic has still been slow although we had an open house Sunday while we were gone, and are contemplating some changes we can make if things don’t pick up in the next week – but getting the lake house moved in a day was monumental.

First world problems…