Going once, going twice, SOLD!!!

That's right. Our house sold about two and a half weeks ago. A true, mondern-day miracle!! The average number of days on the market for houses in our neighborhood is over 100. Ours was on the market for 30. We even got it for just under asking price, which means we made money on it - an anomaly in today's maket. At this point, it appears that it will all go through and we'll move out the end of April. We feel extremely blessed and have no doubt that this is one of the Lord's tender mercies in our behalf.





With the selling of our house came the first item of business: hot tub removal, by order of the buyer (it's been broken for years). Unfortunately, this blog post doesn't even come close to relating how utterly amusing or dangerous this whole process was, but hopefully it gets the general idea across. So we put an ad on Craig's List last Friday ("free hot tub; if you can move it, you can have it"). Within minutes we had calls coming in. It was arranged that Saturday some guys would come get it. They ended up being two (that's all the man power they showed up with) LDS YSA's who thought they were pretty hot stuff and could take care of the job in no time. They sorely underestimated the job, to say the least. They brought a dinky, little dolly - one that would be used to haul soda cases or something. They were smart enough to somehow arrange bringing a forklift, though it was too small for the job as well. They couldn't even get it into the back yard because it got stuck in our neighbor's soft dirt in the front yard - and that was after they broke part of that same neighbor's curb by attempting to drive the forklift up it. Soon enough, Danny and his friend/former coworker Harold Stradling (also a tender mercy of the Lord) got roped into this whole process too. They tried getting it onto the dolly to get it to the front yard, but it couldn't get over the bricks surrounding our grass. Once they realized that, they decided to ditch the dolly momentarily and roll the hot tub itself. Yes, roll a square hot tub. It took a couple of rolls to get past the grass and bricks. Then they somehow managed to get it back on the dolly and through our side gate (with only inches to spare on either side). They could only go so far on the dolly and had to again resort to rolling the hot tub to make it to the sidewalk, where they laid it to rest mostly in our neighbor's yard. The next task was to load it onto the forklift. But not so fast. The hot tub was far too big for the short little arms of the forklift; it would've toppled right off or gotten it's underside punctured under its own weight. So they strapped it on with one measly harness and began lifting it into the air. At this point I had to go inside, not wanting to see the strap break and the hot tub fall. I fully expected to hear a big crash and go out to take pictures of it in a shattered heap in the middle of the road. To everyone's surprise, the strap held and they got it to the truck only to find that the hot tub was slightly too wide for the truck's bed. So they had to lift it even higher. I don't know how, but they finally got it into the truck and ready to be hauled away. Then they went back to the back yard to get the gazebo, which shortly fell apart on them as they were trying to get it out. They ended up disassembling the rest of it, planning on reassembling it later on. "They'll never figure that out!", is what I was thinking! Oh, and the best part was that I overheard them as they were working on the gazebo say, "Dude, where are we going to put it, that hot tub?" I couldn't believe my ears! After all that, they had no idea what to do with it. Truly, some very bright young men. When all was said and done, it was about a four hour ordeal with several miracles occuring: 1) nobody got stung by scorpions or bitten by black widows, both of which were seen in or around the hot tub during the process; 2) nobody got injured or killed, both of which were very likely; 3) our house wasn't damaged in anyway - there were a couple of close calls; 4) they actually got the hot tub out in one piece - we're wondering how they did once they got it to Casa Grande; and 5) our neigbors weren't completely ticked-off at us for ruining their curb or jacking up their front yard.