Dear People-Who-Bought-Our-Old-House:

I feel really bad about the way we left the house. And I know you were pretty ticked about it. And I don't think you believed my husband when he explained why. And I've felt bad about it for over a year.

So this post is inspired by my need to apologize to you and explain what happened, and since I can't really tell YOU, I'm sending it into the world.

I feel horrible about leaving trash in the house, food in the fridge (which I also sorta regret, because I lost some really nice storage containers), filthy floors, a broken TV in the living room, and much more.

We know it looked awful.

We had planned on moving everything out, cleaning the entire house, and being out in plenty of time for you to move in.

But you see, we closed on our new house the same day, and had nowhere to move our stuff. So, in the weeks leading up to closing on the old house (both houses really), when our realtor assured us that he had a verbal agreement from you thru your realtor that we would have 10 days after the closing to move, we were relieved.

And that's what we planned on. In fact, we planned on being out in 7, giving us a little cushion room, and ensuring that you would have an empty, clean house to move into.

Up until we were actually signing, and the written agreement said we had to be out that day, our realtor still insisted that he had a verbal agreement that we had 10 days, and to not worry about it.

So when we were moving items the evening of the closing, just to get started, and you showed up and then called your realtor to show up, and the three of you glared at us while watching us move for over an hour that night, completely ticked off that we were still there... we had no idea.

And my husband came to talk to you, and you were clearly ticked off, and your realtor said there was no such agreement, and you wanted us out by 6pm... well, in that moment I was ticked at you. "We had an agreement", I thought.

But in the week or so after that I realized that this was just another reason we don't recommend our realtor to anyone, why I stopped talking to him partway thru the process & made FireMan handle everything.

And so that night we called in reinforcements w/ pickup trucks, and busted our butts to get out ASAP. You finally drove away, but we, and our army of family & friend, worked until 2am. And I mean worked. Hard and fast.

And at 2am, we looked around, and said... done.

The place was filthy, we had no time to clean. Our TV got busted in the loading process, we didn't have time to dispose of it, so we left it on the floor.

A day or so later I realized I left all the food in the fridge. In the rush to move it didn't even occur to me to open it & look.

I'm actually quite certain we probably forgot some other items, tucked away somewhere.

Three days later we tried to sneak back to retrieve a rock from our landscaping, one that FireMan had brought to me on one of our first dives together, one he found at the bottom of a quarry and thought was pretty. You saw us, and glared. I grabbed the rock & ran back to the car.

I'm sorry. I really am sorry that we weren't out when you wanted us to, I'm sorry that we left the house in that condition. That was never our plan.

And I know back then you didn't believe us when we told you our realtor had told us you agreed to a later move date, but it's the truth.

And so this is my apology. Take it or leave it as you like, but I refuse to feel bad anymore.

Oh, and I hope the house is working out well for you. It's a good house, it really is.

God bless,
    FireWife