So planetdan has been painfully neglected as of late. I did take a trip to Hawaii last month, but my absence has mostly been due to the fact that I moved. Or rather, I put my house up for sale, sold it for a song, agreed to purchase a new one, and then lived in limbo for months until the damn thing finally closed – just last Friday. I’ll try to keep it short:

February
I put my house up for sale, thinking that such an awesome house would surely incite a bidding war, and that the thing would sell for a premium, netting me a hundred grand to put down toward the next house, easy. I have a ton of showings (and log countless hours to vacuuming, dusting, and sitting at the coffee shop waiting it out) but no offers.

March thru July
As I slowly catch up to the reality of the crappy real estate market, I am forced to admit that my house might be overpriced. I try various price reductions, new signage, and weekly open houses, but people still don’t seem to be grasping the unparallelled charm and decorative whimsy of Casa de Danny. I set up a nanny cam in the house in the hopes of hearing some constructive criticism, but the garbled audio picks up nothing except for the loud booming bass when someone actually has the guts to play a song on my jukebox.

August
After four price reductions the showings have all but dried up. The options are to take it off the market and try again in a few years, or to do one more drastic price reduction as a last ditch effort. I love my house, but in my head I’ve already moved, so I try for bottom dollar. It sells in three days and for twenty percent less than I was hoping. Closing is scheduled for a little over a month away, so I start looking for a new home, and find the perfect place three days later. They accept the offer and I start packing.

The buyers of my old house schedule their inspections and appraisals. The house is in even better shape than I thought. I see the new buyers drive by the house occasionally, clearly looking forward to moving in. I’m knocking on wood like crazy and doing everything I can not to jinx the sale, when one morning I wake up to this:

My neighbor’s car, parked directly in front of my newly-sold home, has had its tires stolen, replaced by a lone cinder block, like I lived in the projects or something. I thought this type of sh!t only happened in the movies. I tell the neighbor to get that thing towed before my buyers drive by, mouths agape. He complies, and luckily no one is the wiser.

September
Closing time arrives and my old house sells without a hitch. My new place is not so lucky, though, and closing has been delayed until the seller can get his affairs in order. He lets us move into the house anyway, which is good because I would have nowhere else to live, but it’s also unnerving because if the house doesn’t close we’ll have to move right back out a month later.

On moving day, the meteorologist predicts it will Flash Flood all day long, and it does, but I’ve hired movers so I stay dry as a bone and tip them all ten dollars extra. Regardless, none of my furniture fits in the new place and moving sucks hind teat. Is that even a phrase? Hind teat? I don’t like it and I wish I hadn’t used it.

October
The new place is nice, but not officially ours yet, so I feel apprehensive to hang anything on the walls or alter the decor, so I just live out of boxes. Then one day we get a foreclosure letter in the mail that says all occupants must be out of the house by December. Panic is followed by lawyers who are followed by the realization that if we don’t close on the house by December, it will go into foreclosure, and we will be evicted. Which sounds awesome, but there is nothing I can do about it. I go to Hawaii and lay on the beach and try not to think about the rotting pit in my stomach.

November
After countless delays, the new place has still not closed, and certain requirements detailed in the purchase agreement have not yet been met. Closing is scheduled for a Friday, and on Thursday night we are forced to threaten to walk away from the deal. There are screaming matches between realtors and few hurt feeling when dan gets testy and starts telling people how it is. Very few escape my wrath. But at the last moment everything works out, we officially buy the place, and I spend the next week walking around IKEA like a zombie, hemorrhaging money.

This whole process of getting from one place to another has been the world’s biggest pain in the ass, and in the future I will probably have to refer to 2010 as “The Lost Year,” but now I live here:

The only thing I haven’t really figured out yet is how to deal with this:

Won’t the tree eventually outgrow the hole and rip the deck to shreds? Doesn’t nature always win these battles? Oh well, looks cool in the mean time.