You’ve sold your house! Yay!…Aw crap.

Enjoy hammering this sign into the ground. It will be the last time you don’t feel homicidally angry for a long while…a real long while.

I’ve been away from the blog-lar system for the last week because I have been busy participating in that most utterly enjoyable of activities: moving out of our old house and into our new (to us) house. It took almost a year to sell our old house, and it didn’t happen a minute too soon. If I heard one more idiot present a lowball offer with some list of “reasons” why it was so low, I think I was going to fucking lose it. Why in the name of Christ would I care why they thought they should offer less than our asking price? Doesn’t the phrase “sold as is” mean anything any more? We know the driveway isn’t paved, morons, so don’t tell us that’s why you knocked five grand off the price. It wasn’t paved when we put it up for sale either, duh!

The most wonderful part of the selling, however, had to be the mad panic to make the house look like it leapt off of the pages of Better Homes and Gardens magazine for every viewing by a prospective buyer. There is nothing quite as wonderful as walking in the door at five o’clock at night, after having gotten up at three in the morning to hear “Showing tomorrow at ten, could you vacuum?” or spending your entire Sunday cleaning to pretty up the house for a showing on Monday morning. Just once, when someone came to look at the house I wanted to be sitting on the couch in my underwear in front of the TV, watching a football game, chunks of pretzels all over my belly, and a half empty beer helmet on my head, emblazoned with a “Go Raiders!” sticker on the side. I would look up when they came in, and spitting my beer straw out of my mouth, I would say: “What? This is what you’re going to be doing here once you own it!” I am sure the wife would be mortified, but the husband, he’d understand it. You goddamn right he would.

Once the sale has happened, things get nasty quick. First, it is decided by the powers that be (not you, if you are the husband) that everyone should go through everything they own and separate it into items to keep, items to donate to charity, items to throw out, and items to go into the “Going-to-pay-for-the-new–stuff-at-the-new-house-garage-sale.” Garbage Garage Sale. Even writing the words just now is causing me to break out into a cold sweat. What an epically colossal waste of fucking time. As it so happens, no one comes to a Garbage Garage Sale intending to spend over ten dollars, and they plan to leave with no less than five items for that ten dollars. They are all also hoping to one day appear on Antiques Roadshow and tell the host: “I found this at a garage sale. I bought it off the moron for like, two bucks!” And the haggling, oh the haggling. Sample exchange between a prospective customer and myself:

Customer: “This Sony Vaio laptop says two dollars on the price tag. Will you take a dollar for it?”

Me: “How about I smash the laptop over your head and pry the two dollars out of your hand to cover the damages?” and then out loud: “I have to ask my wife.”

Customer: “I changed my mind, I wasn’t planning on spending that much for a top of the line laptop.”

Me: “Fuck you.” and then out loud: “ Thank you, come again!”

That’s two Friday evenings and one Saturday morning I will never be able to get back. The very best part of the Garbage Garage Sale is that afterward, you get to sort all the leftovers into items to keep, items to donate to charity, and items to throw out. Good times.

Look at all the stuff! Look at all the stuff nobody wants! Hey, that’s pretty much all of it!

After crushing all of the dreams of new goodies financed by the garage sale, it’s time to pack up! If you are a woman, that means that three or four weeks before you move, ninety percent of the items in the house are boxed and ready to be moved, or have been sold. This lets the family spend it’s last weeks in the home living like European backpackers, eating dry toast and leftover condiment packages from drive-thrus and wearing the same clothes they had on when the “sold” sign went up. When the big day arrives to start moving, everyone pitches in to help, except teenagers, whose contribution seems to consist entirely of laying on the couch to make it heavier to put in the moving van, and randomly yelling: “Are we going to eat soon?” The one upside of packing all of the shit off to the new house is I now know the exact weight of every item we own: heavy. A lot of times I’m sure it pays to just hire the pros, like these guys:

They offered to move us for ten bucks and two forged Canadian passports. Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to come up with the ten bucks, and I still owe my cousin for the passports. Anyone else out there named Firin’ Explosama or Farouk Al-Waxmani?

Once everything has been packed into the new house, all you have to do is unpack it and put it away, which is the easiest part by far, as long as you hide out in a seedy bar somewhere and don’t participate. Oh, and while you are unpacking, you will have to separate everything into items to keep, items to donate to charity, and items to throw away. You will also need to attend couples’ counseling for a year, or maybe even retain the services of a divorce lawyer. As far as moving’s location goes on a list of “Fun Stuff to Do,” I would rank it somewhere between jumper cable clamps on the ball sack and a Cher/Celine Dion double bill evening in Vegas. If I could give any advice about selling your house and moving it would be simple:

• Torch the old place and everything in it and get new shit with the insurance money.
• Have someone torch the old place and everything in it for you and get new shit with the insurance money.
• Have a Bighorn Sheep repeatedly head butt you in the nuts to simulate the moving experience and get you in shape to tackle it.
• Stay right where you are. Seriously. Don’t even think about it.