Closing Chaos - "We Move In"

We're collecting the best real stories from real estate. This story is from Jora's COO, Nathan McNeill.

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A Cabin in the Woods

When I was 13, the new owners of our old house finished moving in before we started moving out.

Here's how that happened.

My parents had been gone for a week. They had driven 5,000 kilometres in and around Louisville, Kentucky to find a house which met an impossible combination of attributes:

1. Within an Hour of Downtown Louisville
2. Room for a family of 6
3. Out in the country
4. About $35k (for context, this was 1994)

In the end, they threaded the needle and closed on a log cabin in southern Indiana. Of the four criteria, #1 was right under the wire, #3 was a slam dunk, and #4 passed.

#2 had to stretch a little. The cabin was 900 square feet. One bedroom, one bathroom, and one big loft above the cozy living area where all four of us kids would camp out until dad could take in the two-car garage and make some additional living quarters. We took possession in a month.

Everyone was excited. But my parents were exhausted. They picked us up at my grandmothers after a 10-hour drive back down to Mississippi and then drove an extra hour back home.

We had sold our house, but we had a few weeks before we had to be out. We could relax for the night and then get packing.

 

Possession and Possessed

But when we pulled into the driveway, things began to get a little weird. To begin with, the dog started barking at us. Which was especially strange because it wasn't our dog. But that was only the beginning.

To get to our front door, we walked past the garage, which was connected to the main house by a glassed-in breezeway. You could see into the breezeway as you walked past it to the door. We usually kept pot plants in this space. Maybe a chair or a side table.

The breezeway was full of furniture. Not full like a normal room. FULL of furniture. Furniture stacked up to the ceiling. So much furniture you couldn't walk into the room. Threatening to topple over and come spilling out the glass on either side.

That in itself was strange. But then certain appendages and contours amid the rubble began to take on shapes which we knew. A leg sticking out horizontally connected to a chair which we had seen before. A line curving underneath a pile of boxes proved to be a table we had sat around for dinners and breakfasts, and lunches. The fuzzy pillow was not a pillow at all but the only visible cushion of our old grey couch.

It was our furniture. Our furniture was stacked floor to ceiling in the breezeway.

We unlocked the front door and walked into the smell of delicious Chinese food. But my mom hardly ever cooked Chinese. The house looked lived in, settled, cozy and welcoming. But with someone else's furniture. Someone else's decorations.

 

When The Romans Move In

The buyers of our house were relatively recent immigrants operating a restaurant in town. They were very nice people and very honest and hard-working. But some of the local customs had escaped them. Like the custom of waiting until the possession date to move in. Seeing how it was now their house and seeing how we weren't around, and seeing how we had left all of our furniture and belongings strewn throughout the house as if nothing had happened - as if they had not even bought the house, they took the initiative to move in...after first moving our stuff out.

In retrospect, they must have wondered at the strange new customs of their adopted homeland: "I guess people rely on the new owners to pack their belongings for them. But when in Rome..."

At the time, I wasn't thinking too deeply about any of this. I was excited. I was ready to move to our new cabin in the woods up north, where there was snow every winter, and I figured this fortuitous turn of events could only expedite that process. My mom on the other hand - for some inexplicable reason known only to adults - started crying.

We stayed there that night. We had nowhere else to stay, and the new owners were very welcoming. I slept in my own room in someone else's bed, surrounded by someone else's stuff with someone else's pictures on the wall, the smell of exotic food wafting up from downstairs. It was an odd combination of familiar and foreign, comforting and unsettling.

The next day, we packed all of our belongings out of the breezeway and into a Uhaul with the help of a few friends. A day or two later, we were headed north to Indiana. Despite the precedent set by our home's buyers, we were unsure if we could accomplish the same coup against our new home's sellers - especially since they themselves were present along with their things.

But the Overton window in my 13-year-old brain had moved considerably in the last few days, and it seemed entirely possible that we might, if necessary, pile the sellers, along with their earthly possessions, inside the garage in order to make way for us and our stuff in the main house.

Fortunately for everyone, we found out halfway to Indiana that the sellers had graciously agreed to allow us to move in early and had even more graciously moved all their stuff out without our help.

 

The Key to Closing

We never did get an entirely satisfactory explanation from our home's buyers. We never really knew whether they knew how inappropriate their actions were.

They did serve us a free dinner at their restaurant. And we got one line that served as something of an explanation and something of an admonition, and a lesson which has stuck with me through every house I've bought or sold since:

"You give us key. We move in!