How did one leave a place he's been living for over 25 years and move on to the next?
Just drove off for a weekend house hunting, turned a corner, and bumped into a dream house he and his wife couldn't resist.
That's basically what happened last November when we made a purchase of a brand new home in San Juan Capistrano, located on a hill top between San Clemente and Dana Point, two beautiful coastal cities in the very south of south Orange County.
Then what should we do with the home sweet home of ours of more than 25 years? To sell or not to sell, that was the question. The economically correct answer should the the latter: rent it out and ride out the worst housing slump in years while collecting rental money that should be more than adequate to make payments for a new mortgage whose interest rate is at historical low.
But call us debt-abhorrent or loath-to-be-landlord chickens, in the end we decided we'd rather be mortgage free and nobody's landlord, and sold the house outright, to a beautiful family who really loved our old house and made a moderately-above-market offer for it.
Backtracking a little, it's not that easy to let go of a place you've been living for over 25 years, emotionally. It's our first home we owned, after our first jobs, our marriage, in this country. I started my own business in it--at one time I had my business card with the fictitious business name "Wong Laboratories" taped on the door of my study room, and 24 digital phone lines installed in my garage. Friends and families had visited and gathered in and around the house through the years. Both my parents and my wife's parents had visited here ("It's so darn quiet," my father said to me after we toured the neighborhood together for the first time), and now all of them except my mother-in-law have passed away. More recently, my men's group had been meeting in the backyard most other weekends and had annual omelette cookouts on the barbeque island for 4 consecutive years, practically since we redid our living room and side yard some 5 years ago. And heck, even the bathtub of our master bedroom has some special meaning to it--we got baptized in it some 20 years or so ago.
And there were the neighbors: Scott and his wife and 2 kids who just moved in a couple years ago, replacing the suddenly disappearing Clampitt family whose house (now Scott's) got foreclosed upon, that we seemed to be getting to know each other better and better every time we chatted on the curbway; Kathy and her family across street who are like us the very original owners of their house for 25+ years, and the quiet but gentle school principal couple to the other side of the house, Mr. and Mrs. Joel and Paula Rawlings. Both families we had just invited for a get-to-know-you-better party a little more than a couple years ago after the shock of the disappearing Clampitts.
So we decided, to close our lives here with a sound note--to bid farewell to our dear old neighbors and to welcome the lovely new family to the neighborhood--that we hold a backyard barbecue party for the last time for everybody.
All except Paula--who got down with a cold--appeared, including Kathy's 2 grown boys and one precocious girl who did not show up last time we invited them. Henrik Eriksen and his family were the new people here, and this was my first face to face encounter with him at length since our real estate transaction began. He is a taut, healthy looking man who's turning 50 this year, and an immigrant--from Denmark--to this country too, while his wife Patti a native San Diegan whom he met and married here, with two teen age boys (one had just gone to college) and one girl.
Henrik came here in his early 20's after serving the military in his native country, just like myself. "Why did you decide to come to America, Denmark being such a well-known affluent, welfare society?" I asked him, with curiosity. "Well, somebody has to pay for it," he smiled and said, meaning he's the kind who prefers to make things happen and take care of them himself. He's been in business of his own for years, and was one of the first to take on the e-commerce trend and started an online furniture store back in 1996 that's so successful some people offered millions to buy it, until a few years ago when this great recession hit and his aggressiveness got the better of him and he had to close shop and started working for a major international Danish furniture company as consulting executive traveling between here and New York. 1996 was the year I came up with my first online business VoIP project too, I told him. "We must be long lost brothers, one from the West, the other from the East," he joked.
It must be a rarity, but both escrows--one for the sale of our old home, and the other for the purchase of the new--closed on the exact dates we set months ago, with a 10 day gap between them that we purposely planned, so we had exactly one workweek for our flooring contractor to get in after we got keys to the new house to install the hardwood on the first floor and upgraded carpeting on the second. Magically, these jobs got done on time as well, right one day before our scheduled move-in to the new house.
Came the moving day, a crew of 4 and a truck 28 feet long arrived on time in the morning and got right down to it: hauling the bulky tables, sofa, chairs and cabinets, and miscellaneous boxes of things we had pre-packed ourselves the previous week, with swift deft hands. So did Kathy and her husband and kids, who came to disassemble and move the office furniture I gave away to them, piece by piece, into their home across the street. In less than two hours, our little big house was reduced to an empty hull like no one had ever lived there before. The truck then reappeared at our new home's front curb shortly after lunch. The downloading was even faster than the uploading, with me and my wife busy directing what items go where. By mid afternoon, the operation was complete and the crew gone, leaving a slew of furniture and boxes scattering around in yet another hulky big little house in a brand new community.
It's been almost a month since then, and we are yet to figure out all the light switches in the house--which one is for the hallway, or the stairways; which one is for the dimmer, or the straight on/off; my supposed new home office is still standing empty with boxes strewn around; the same is true for the dining nook by the kitchen, since we had given away our dining table set to Kathy as well. The garage door still opens and closes with grinding noise that the builder had promised to fix, as well as little touch up for the walls and doors, here and there.
But overall we are happy with the grand and spacious rooms of the new house and the quality material they use to build them, the wonderful mountain and ocean views we can see right from our master bedroom and balcony on the second floor, the easy access to the freeway, the fiber-to-the-curb high-speed network that equips each room with an Ethernet plug-in, and the natural, open beauty of the blue Pacific that we can enjoy every time we drive up and down the hill in and out of the community. All the sentiments of leaving the old home are gone, at least for now, replaced by the excitement and many things to do for the new home.
Who knows, next time I check, maybe we'll be living here for another 25 years already.
* For those interested, here's a stream of pictures I collected that shows "how a house was born," and our transition from the old home to the new:
