As I am now regularly seeing people in Fort Payne (I have recently moved back exactly 25 years after graduating high school from here), the immediate question I get is an optimistic, “Are you all settled in now?”

I then explain that we are still waiting on the cabinets to be fully installed and we are also finishing up some of the bathroom renovations.

The next question: “Well, are you at least moved in to your new house?”

I again disappoint by answering that we still have our belongings split between our new house and my parents’ house.

The third question is now less enthusiastic than the first two: “Do you know when you might be able to move in?”

I turn the question back on them: “I was hoping you could tell me, actually?”

In a last ditch effort to obtain some kind of hopeful response from such a realistic narrator, the final question: “Did you at least sell your house in Tennessee?”

And with that, I get to officially give a confident and direct answer: “Yes we did! Last week, we paid $150 for a mobile notary to drive to our house so we could sign the papers to complete the sale- and to prevent us from having to drive back to Nashville.”

Now, if you’re looking for a more humorous version of that answer, then I would go on in detail to tell it like this:

It mattered to me that that whoever ended up buying our home was worthy. We not only invested in major upgrades each year, but we also took immaculate care of it: No smoking, no dogs, no cats, and no shoes on in the house.

There was surely some psychology involved in our decision a few years ago when we decided to get all new flooring in our Tennessee home; that the entire stairway and upstairs floor would exclusively be white carpet.

When you have white carpet in your home, with kids, it means that by default, you have to hold yourselves to a higher standard as the homeowners to take especially good care of it.

Therefore, we made it a rule that that anyone who came to see our house to potentially buy it had to take off their shoes at the front door. The thing is, we couldn’t enforce that since they were visiting our home while we were not there.

So starting with the very first visitors, I carefully surveyed all the white carpet to look for any evidence of shoeprints.

And sure enough, the very first visitors definitely wore shoes on our white carpet despite.

It was the ultimately betrayal. I felt like Willy Wonka when Charlie didn’t give back the Everlasting Gobstopper at first…. like Michael Scott when he thought Jan cheated on him… like Larry David when he discovers a person doesn’t use drink coasters… like Chris Harrison realizing some of the contestants might not be there for the right reasons. In the likeness of that classic Seinfeld character we all know, I angrily muttered to myself, “No house for you!”

I immediately announced to my wife and our real estate agent, that whoever visited our house just now, I know for a fact: They are not serious about buying our house. Next!

Of course, I was right.

Like Jason Segel in I Love You, Man… I had easily and accurately predicted that person was not serious about buying my house.

Beginning with the 2nd visitor, our agent sent us a box of shoe covers for everyone to wear to place at our front door.

Fortunately, we only had to show our house for one week before the right buyers came along. I was relieved because I work from home; meaning I had to magically disappear for an hour when I received the 2 hour notice that new visitors had scheduled a viewing. It only took 5 viewers seeing our house in that one week for the right buyer to make an offer.

But yes, we now officially sold our house in Tennessee. The money has been transferred to our account.

So despite the ongoing ambiguity of when we are finally going to move into our Alabama home, and thereafter, actually “settle in”, we can at least check one more huge item off the list:

We sold our Tennessee home for about double what we paid for it 9 year-and-half years ago and our house only had to be on the market for one week and have 5 viewers.

If I wasn’t so distracted by the remaining renovations on our Alabama home, I might actually be able to a moment to celebrate that!

Officially: Our goal is to officially move in this weekend, making it exactly 4 weeks that we have lived with my parents during the transition.