USA to New Zealand
The house was under contract, we were lucky to scrape in before lockdown. But we weren’t sure at all if the deal would go through as it was such an unstable time due to Covid-19. Questions ran through my head that kept me awake at night:
What would we do if we got sick?
What would the buyers do if they got sick?
Would the new buyers keep their jobs?
Would the new buyers decide that buying a house now wasn’t the right time and pull out?
Would all the paperwork be able to be finished with everyone working from home?
And then the big one, would New Zealand close its borders? In the book I’m writing, it’s set in the future and my main character is stuck in the US because New Zealand shut its borders when faced with a flu pandemic. This was a bit too close to home! I had already imagined a future in great detail where New Zealanders were stuck abroad. Settlement on our house was April 2, 2020 - what felt like the longest month of my life (well, at that time, I had no idea what was coming). On March 18, the NZ foreign minister advised to Kiwis abroad, “If you can get home - get home now,” raising our anxiety levels even higher.
That first week of lockdown, we were so naïve. I thought, maybe we could have a farewell party at a park with everyone social distancing. That fantasy lasted a day as the Covid-19 numbers crept higher. We tried the pod idea, but the kids just didn’t seem to be able to be out in a park without rolling on each other.
We had so many deaths early on as the virus ripped through nursing homes, the city and state took it seriously. One week, we were off school. The next week trails and playgrounds were closed. The following week more things shut down as nothing seemed to stop the spread. On April 1, Washington State Department of Health said there were 247 deaths from 5,984 cases through the end of March. And everyone knew you couldn’t get a test, even if you wanted one. When you went out, you knew there was Covid in the neighborhood.
At the same time as all the worrying, we were trying to pack up a house to leave the country. We decided that moving the stuff overseas was going to be too hard in the middle of a lockdown and pandemic. We’d read about people having their container sitting on docks and paying huge amounts of money while it just sat there.
Instead we moved everything to a storage unit. The building was the most public place we went regularly, and you had to touch things! The elevator buttons, the light switches and the carts to haul stuff up. So we gloved up and moved stuff on our own (with a bit of help from dear friends) in our car. We took many, many loads and went through many masks and gloves.
Unable to sell things, our Buy Nothing group all but closed down, and the thrift stores shut, we had a hard time getting rid of things. We tried friends, put things on the side of the road, and used the clothing and book bins. I packaged up boxes of good clothes and sent them to ThredUp to sell. The credit is still sitting there waiting for us to visit, as they don’t mail overseas. We couldn’t get any services in to help us clean for the handover. It was a very busy month, and of course on top of this, we were living with the fear of the virus and our kid was home.
I’ve always found selling a house stressful, but this really was next level! Every day we were thankful for our health, thankful we had sold the house, thankful we had the choice of countries to live in and hoped that our luck would hold out to get us home.
Keeping the kid busy in Covid-19 Lockdown Homeschool