Into Limbo!
Well, the good news is that we (finally, hopefully) have a firm plan, and that we get to leave Florida even sooner than expected. Might be an.. interesting month, though.
So really, before we could change anything on this end, we had to see if we could push our closing in Richmond back to our move-in date there, or close to it. So our RVA realtor got in touch with the seller's agent, and in his words, it wasn't just a no, but a HARD no. Apparently the lady is buying another home, which is contingent on her selling her current home (to us, of course), which in turn is contingent on us selling our place. So she just wasn't willing to add any delay (yet of course she's also insisting on staying in the house for 2 weeks past closing, which seems rude to me).
That answer made delaying our closing here a moot point, so we're sticking with the original plan: we close here on the 18th, and in RVA on the 22nd. But since the buyer won't let us stay here after closing, that means we have to be out by the 18th. And since we can't take possession in RVA until June 5, that makes for about 3 weeks of homelessness. Kinda scary, not gonna lie.
But like I said, I think we have a plan. I called to ask about renting a moving truck for 3 weeks (23 days, actually!), and the price wasn't nearly as scary as I feared. So that's the plan--we'll get the truck here and load up on the 16th, hit the road early on the 17th and drive to Virginia Beach--we booked an extended stay hotel (also not too crazy expensive, thankfully) for the 3 weeks, and it's close to Heather's parents' house, so we can hang out there a lot too, and keep most/all of the pets there. Probably one or two of the kids will sleep there as well, since the hotel room only has 2 beds. We can do the closing on this house remotely from there on the 18th. The truck, we'll park at the hotel if we can, or find somewhere else--our RVA realtor (who is awesome, by the way, and probably the one person through all this who we actually still like) offered his office's parking lot, if nothing else.
So that's it. Suddenly we find ourselves not a month away from clearing out of FL, but less than 2 weeks! Thankfully, we've been purging and packing for months already, so we feel okay about it--indeed, we wanted out more sooner than later, so from that perspective this is a great thing. Loading the truck should be fun. But as long as all goes well with the closings and the drive up to VA, we'll deal with the few weeks in limbo, land happily on the other side in our lovely new home, and look back on these days with fondness before long. Or so I hope!