Last Sunday we contracted with movers to carry another load of stuff from our old house to our new house–stuff from the garage and the basement, including this pool table.  Our other helpers had taken off the base, but it still took quite a bit of maneuvering for the guys to get the table out of the old basement bulkhead entrance.  Then when we got to the new house, it got stuck in the bulkhead entrance here.  It was just that much tighter.

Well, they pulled it back out, and then Margy and one of the movers got creative: they chipped and sawed away at the bulkhead framing, to make a little carve out, and finally, with only a small cracked corner, the table made it into the basement!
Along with the rest of the stuff that we hadn’t really been sure would fit into our smaller space.  Now it is leaning against the wall, until we have a chance to unpack enough boxes to clear a space for it.

Not that everything is out of the old house.  This has been a slow process, and there are still items that we are planning to give away through Freecycle, and Margy still has a few boxes to sort and shred, and then we’re likely to have a dump run.  But it is happening, and it is almost done.

A larger feeling of stuck-ness has been in getting the radon levels in the basement to an acceptable level to our buyers.  Our contract was signed on January 26, and we’ve been in due diligence phase since then–two months.  We’ve gone through 5 radon tests, at least as many visits from radon mitigators, drilling eleven holes in the floor to see what was going on, three more “drops” to the system, many hundreds of dollars, and an exhausted feeling that we’d be stuck in this bad movie forever.  I didn’t even have the energy to blog about it all.

But, today, we got the results of our latest radon test, and it passed!  The realtors are preparing documents, and we expect to have a signed contract by 5 p.m. completing the due diligence phase and setting a closing date for April 14th.  I almost didn’t dare to write that down, the last weeks have been so discouraging.  Who could have guessed it would be so difficult?  But it seems we are finally unstuck and moving forward again.