E-mail Alias already taken

I recently moved to a lumia 1020 and am in the process of trying to consolidate my email accounts and information. Along with transitioning to windows 8.1 on my desktop. 

I have a .live account which I created a couple months ago and I would like to use from now on. Originally I had another Microsoft account prior which was a gmail account. So I went to add this gmail account as an alias to the new Microsoft live account i created. This did not work as it was already its own stand alone Microsoft account.

So I then logged in and closed the Microsoft account which was tied to my gmail in hopes of adding it to an alias to the new one.

However when I go to add this email it still says  "This email address is already taken. Please try another." 

How can i possibly make this work? Is there a time period which the servers will eventually refresh and realize the older gmail microsoft account has been closed/deactivated and i then can proceed to add it as an alias?

I really am a bit bummed right now. I want to move to the windows side of things here and this is preventing me from making the change.

Any Help greatly appreciated!

Thanks