Yesterday we made what will probably be our last visit to our old house.

They say go lightly in the world, leave only footprints. And mostly we do. And mostly it’s right.

But it’s still a little sad seeing the place so empty of us, with only the imprints of furniture feet left…

We bought our new house before selling the old one. There were a couple of reasons for that. First, we felt some time pressure on the new one… if we had had to make our offer contingent on sale we likely wouldn’t have been successful. Second, we wanted to paint and stage our house for maximum impact, because we were afraid that in a crowded market we might get overlooked.

So, we took out a bridge loan for essentially the entire purchase price, giving us five months to either pay it off or refinance. A potentially expensive option, especially if the house didn’t sell.

After a 4-week campaign of open houses and online ads and so on, we were lot 5 of 6 at yesterday’s auction. We didn’t know until the last second whether there would be any bidders, but in the end there were two. That’s really good, because the competition really does jack up the price.

During the actual bidding, the $$ didn’t quite reach the reserve price. At that point, the auctioneer takes the leading bidder into the back room and gently puts his hands around their throat while looking deep into their eyes, purring and hissing and spraying pheromones out of a special deal-closing gland. Another $100k magically appears.

Sold.

It’s a big relief for us, because I’m still unemployed and so refinancing might have been tricky.

And as a bonus, I got to meet this guy, Shane Cortese, who was in a bunch of NZ TV shows maybe 10-20 years ago that we watched on DVD when we first got here. He was part of a revolving group of people who produced what I thought was a really good body of work. He gave Hollywood a try, and ended up back here doing these auctions. I remember seeing the announcement of his career change in the paper.

One of our fellow pétanque players makes his living as a semi-itinerant arborist. He’s in town at the moment so we hired him for a day’s work clearing jungle. Money well spent.

In several of our homes I’ve felt a need to start things off by taming the green growing things. In Missouri it was the trees growing on the dam to our little lake. In hindsight that was probably a mistake… it looked worse without them and probably didn’t perform any better. Here in our Birkenhead house we had exuberant English ivy taking over a fence. The initial hacking back was a few weekends of work, but then it was much more under control in subsequent years.

Now, we have a steep slope down to the water. At some point, previous owners put in paths and plants and even an irrigation system. But it’s all completely overgrown and more or less impassable. Gordon the arborist made a big dent in opening things back up, but it remains to be seen how much we’ll actually get down there.

Our last house had a huge wall of built-in bookcases in the family room, thanks to the previous owner’s record collecting habit. That gave us the freedom to display a bunch of things in a way that didn’t overwhelm the living space.

Over the years we’ve accumulated a lot of such items. Souvenirs, knick-knacks, tchotchkes: the words we use to talk about them are all a little bit denigrating.

Now we have a smaller version of the same shelving setup, so choices have to be made. We laid everything out and sorted into three piles: display, store, and donate. I suppose the full Kondo approach would have been even more severe, but we have storage space and years of retirement stretching ahead of us. The more draconian cull will come later in life.

A few boxes of our stuff made it to the Salvation Army. And seeing our things there offers perspective: the memories may be priceless and unique and helped shape us into who are we today, but the souvenir wineglass is $2.