How Being Homeless From a Hurricane Wasn’t the Most Annoying Part of Our Moving Experience

Ohhhhh boy, where do we even begin?

This move has tested us.

We’ve been in the new Florida house for about two weeks now, and we finally own it! To fully understand how excited we were to get those keys, we’ve got to back up and explain the timeline.

We were supposed to close on our Louisiana house on a Thursday with a loaded-up Uhaul waiting nearby, then we’d leave town and stay with friends a night before closing on the Florida house Friday, the following day. ‘Perfect plan!’ we thought. LOL.

It got to Tuesday and we had the house totally packed up ready to pick up our truck and have a couple of movers help us load the heaviest furniture Wednesday afternoon, but one of the 8,769 storms in the Gulf started creeping toward south Louisiana and had us pretty nervous.

By Wednesday morning, Hurricane Sally swung a little east and we were thinking ‘okay sorry Mississippi, but this works for us,’ save for the thought of driving a truck through the tail end of a storm.

Now we’re homeless

Alex went to go pick up the Uhaul and while he was gone I got a call from our Florida realtor saying that, cool story, banks won’t allow houses to close when there’s an active storm on the way.

We had two dogs, a baby, a packed-up house, and we were homeless. Do we laugh? Do we cry? Not sure, but we did both just to be safe.

We OBVIOUSLY kept the TV out of the Uhaul and had The Weather Channel on the whole time, watching the water rise in the downtown of our new home most of Wednesday. The buyer of our Louisiana house luckily let us stay one extra night so we had a place to stay after closing, but we had to be out by noon Friday.

Our newest plan was to have Alex and the dogs in the Uhaul, and the baby and I in our car and we’d drive either until we got to Florida to stay with friends or until we reached a hotel halfway and had to stop.

But then I went to load the car Thursday night and… nothing. The car wouldn’t start, lights weren’t on, nothing.

Oh, and the car is broken

I spent most of Friday at the car dealership looking like a pathetic homeless mother while Alex inhaled hot dog breath inside the truck in the parking lot of a nearby abandoned beauty supply outlet.

At one point, a kind-eyed older receptionist came up to me and with her cigarette-hoarsened voice asked if I wanted her to personally drive me and the baby anywhere because it was going to be a while, but I had nowhere to go.

Luckily Eleanor was an angel and she apparently enjoys eight straight hours of Guy Fieri exploring the nation’s holes-in-the-wall more than I do.

By about 5 p.m. we got on the road $1,400 poorer (turns out it was an oil leak) and got to town by about 9 p.m.

The house had power, which was the major win we needed, but a boil notice was in effect after the storm so we couldn’t use the water.

Oh, and this isn’t even the part of the story that’s the weirdest.

A new house surprise

As backstory, the new Florida house was a short-term rental/AirBnB for whoknowshowlong before we bought it.

We had worked out with the seller to stay at the new house during the awkward in-between closing time since the house was meant to be vacant anyway, and we’d pay her a daily rent fee. The tenants were supposed to be out three days before closing anyway and our realtor did a sneaky drive-by the week we moved and saw a truck full of stuff on its way out, so it was promising.

HOWEVER, when we arrived late that Friday night with a canceled-and-yet-to-be-rescheduled closing, the house was full of stuff. Like FULL. A bed in every bedroom, artwork on almost every wall, utensils in the kitchen drawers – you get the idea.

These tenants must’ve only owned a couch and their clothes.

Obviously, this put us in a bind.

We woke up the next morning and called our realtor to be like ‘excuse me, where’s Ashton Kutcher because clearly we’re being Punk’d’ and she was as surprised as us. The seller’s realtor tried calling her repeatedly and had no luck. We wondered if she was okay and maybe her own house was damaged but later found out she’s just like that.

She said she’d be around to the house at 10 a.m. the next day, Sunday, and her realtor came to help load things and she never showed.

In the end, we packed this lady’s entire house for her. Like, we disassembled the beds so they’d fit down the hallway, I used our bubble wrap and boxes to wrap up her wine glasses and we even had to USE OUR OWN UHAUL to personally deliver everything to her house.

The shed that put us over the edge

So by this point everything of hers was out of the actual house which is what we were most concerned with because we needed to unload our stuff to return the truck on time and avoid the ridiculous late fees, but there was still the matter of the shed.

She had piles and piles of stuff in there. Some things I noticed included: A lazy Susan; old baskets with prices on them like a thrift store; broken glass on the ground; and a photo album but all the photos were burned and melted into a heap inside the covers.

Our closing was rescheduled for the next Thursday, so a little under a week after the original date, and we waited day-by-day for this gal to come get her stuff. Nothing.

I pre-purchased a padlock in my growing anger at the rudeness of it all, waiting for us to officially own the place and get all that junk out so we could start the DIY workshop/She Shed of my dreams.

Maybe our down payment money is lost in the abyss?

So fast-forward to the day before closing and we had to figure out the finances. The closing company at our sale from the week before held all our proceeds (read: the next downpayment) for us until we could figure out what was happening with our new closing after the storm. We tried several times to call and make sure a wire transfer would be set up but couldn’t get ahold of the woman we’d been dealing with, or actually anyone at the company.

At 4 p.m. the day before our closing, we found out that this particular woman was no longer with the company and someone else would be handling it, but it was all kind of a shitshow and they made out like I was the crazy one for being anxious.

At this point, Jesus took the wheel and we grabbed a drink and hoped for the best.

The morning of closing our realtor called to prepare us that the owner would be coming to closing with a document for us to sign saying that she could have access to the shed for another day to get her stuff. We were all like ABSOLUTELY NOT but our realtor essentially said please do it because this lady is questionable and might blow up the whole thing over her old burned up photo albums.

So, we conceded, and she sneakily wrote in another day on those documents so she’d have the whole weekend.

Oh, and she proceeded to charge us $42 a day for the convenience of staying at the house for the few days before we were able to close, even though we had proposed calling it even for the labor of moving for her and the minor damage done by the storm to things like the mailbox and a metal carport roof.

In the end, she got most of the remaining junk out but left a lot. We now have a lock on the shed and plan to get rid of what’s left, and we can finally start planning out our DIYs.

Oh, and the seller called and left me a voicemail this week saying she hadn’t gone through the boxes we packed for her but she wanted to see if we packed up her cookbooks for her from the kitchen. I’m obviously not planning to return that call because she can look for her damn self now the house is settled and we’re done.

It has felt like the last two weeks has been one small annoyance after another, and not any one of those things would probably have pushed us over the edge, but once we got to the point the shed wasn’t cleared by closing, we were so dejected. Maybe it’s one of those things we’ll look back on in a few years and laugh about, or think we were maybe too harsh, only time will tell I guess.

If you’ve read this far, thanks for sticking with us, and we’ll be back to our regularly scheduled content soon! Our friends on Instagram kept us humble and laughing through this whole thing as we posted the saga on stories, so if you don’t follow along there yet, check it out!

Also, if you missed our last post, check out the new house tour here.

Have you ever had a crazy moving experience? Let us know in the comments and make us feel better!

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