On the 6th of January, we winterized the RV in North Carolina before heading further north to Virginia, where nighttime temps were freezing. We stopped at a Blue Beacon about thirty minutes from Waynesboro to have the RV washed, since we’d be storing it for a couple of months. They did a great job and within about an hour we were back on the road. Once we got to Randy’s parents’ home, we parked the RV and moved into the house for the winter, while we helped get it ready to sell. It’s a 13,000 sq ft home with 7 beds, 6 whole + 2 half baths and an indoor pool, on about 45 acres of land, backing up to a river. So, not your typical home. And there was several generations worth of stuff stored in the house, too, so a bit overwhelming to say the least. But how do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time! Staying in the house full-time made it easier to get things done quicker, too.
The first step was to move Randy’s brother, Mike, from the house to an assisted living apartment in town. His moving date was the 14th, so we had a week to get him packed. You’d think that’d be plenty of time, but he is quite the collector of things and didn’t want to get rid of much, so I worked long days, sorting through all his stuff and trying to help him get organized instead of just packing and moving a lot of trash. For example, notice the pic with all the cups and mugs below? That’s what we narrowed his collection down to. What you don’t see is the two 13 gallon trash bags full of the ones he did NOT take! Thankfully, other family members came in a couple of days before the move to help finish the job, since Mike and I were starting to get tired of each other by the end of the week. 🙂
The best part about Mike moving out was that he took his white cat with him, so we could start working on removing tons of long, white cat hair from carpet, furniture, etc! It was at least a week before I stopped noticing white fur floating around the wood floors, even after just vacuuming. I finally found a few places where it had collected and would float from, like in heating registers, behind the piano and clinging to the bottom of cabinets. SO MUCH CAT HAIR!
Once Mike’s room was emptied, the next step was sorting through the piles of stuff in other rooms. It was interesting to find some cool, old things that I’d never really paid attention to before, since there was just too much clutter to focus on anything particular. It was tiring work, but kind of enjoyable at the same time, since I like organizing and getting rid of trash. We took 7 truck loads of trash to the county dump, so I had LOTS of fun, haha! About half of those loads was paper to recycle, from old bills, utility statements, receipts, blank tax forms, etc. There were bank statements and canceled checks from the early 1950s still being saved! And besides the recycled paper, there was about the same amount of paper set aside to be shredded — statements that had social security and financial account numbers on them. SO MUCH PAPER!
Besides cleaning the clutter, there were also quite a few other things that needed cleaning and fixing. It took a while to figure out how to get the stove top off, to fix the gap in the countertop, because the grease/gunk under it was “gluing” it down so tight. We finally used a knife to cut through and release the stovetop. Here are pictures of a few of the projects.
It was a little tricky to navigate cleaning out for Real Estate photos vs getting ready for an Estate Sale. We tried to focus on decluttering the piles out in the open, instead of in drawers or cabinets, to get the house looking nice for photos. Then once the photos were taken, we started pulling more stuff out and messing the house up again. <sigh> Unfortunately, the first Estate Sales lady we were working with had told us to sort through and clean out and pull things off shelves to stage for the sale. As I was reading about staging for an Estate Sale, I realized that there were other companies who would do all the cleaning and staging for you! So, we switched companies, which took a ton of pressure off of us; allowing us to just focus on finding the things we wanted to keep in the family. The new company will also provide services to do any work after the Estate Sale, to get the house ready to show. So, they manage getting all the fixing, painting and cleaning done, instead of us having to hire multiple contractors. Yay!
While the RV is parked, we are taking the opportunity to go on a couple of other trips before heading back out to travel full-time. We will fly to Missouri to see Marissa in her last college theater performance. And from there, we’ll fly to Miami to go on a 10-day cruise to the Caribbeans. Once we get back to Waynesboro, we will have a week to de-winterize the RV and make sure it’s ready to start full-time traveling again. Woohoo, I’m eager to spend time roaming around Tennessee!!
UPDATE: Here are a few pics from the real estate listing. So much better!
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