I Mean It This Time

So, we’re putting the house on the market again, this time for good. David’s had to resort to using either the girls’ room or ours as his office, depending on which has fewer people in it at any given moment, so it’s time. We like our real estate agents, I’m not knocked up, I’m getting more than four hours of sleep at night. No time but the present. No excuses. And, if we sell the darned house before the weather gets warmer, I won’t have a chance to weep the tears of longing into a pool that won’t be ours for much longer.

So, to that end:

• There is a desk chair in my living room. It was in the family room, then the girls’ room, and now has migrated there while we wait for the newly-cleaned carpets to dry.
• Carpets are disgusting.
• When that much dirt is pulled out of your carpets, it is entirely possible to hear your grandmother tsp-tsking you from heaven with the hand she’s not using to hold a vodka martini (what kind of liquor do you think the celestial bartenders use? Grey Goose?).
• Get your carpets cleaned a lot more frequently than we do. By a professional. That handy-dandy at-home carpet cleaner you borrowed from your mom and never gave back doesn’t do squat when you have a bunch of fur balls living with you (no, not the kids. They don’t shed that much). Just a tip. A gross, dark, dingy, gag-inducing tip.

• Children make excellent painters. I highly recommend making use of your own.
• One who loves to live inside walls painted a Mediterranean blue does not do well in ones now khaki. So. Much. Khaki.

• Paint does not come out of a cat’s fur.
• Silly Putty does not come out of a child’s hair.
• There is dust in corners you didn’t even know you had.
• You own more vases than you know you had.

• And more picture frames.
• And crayons. So. Many. Crayons.
• Walls without pictures is a house without love. Not to be dramatic about it.
• The laundry pile that had been chipped away into a tolerable nugget has gone through some crazy mitosis while were were painting and is now looming like a mountain of doom over our laundry room. It is possible to growl without meaning to at such a sight.

There is a poinsettia on the counter, a box of Carnation breakfast mix is in a Target bag on a deck chair (it’s raining), there are bills in various stages of getting paid scattered on the dining room table, there are stuffed animals on all the couches, there is a bathroom baseboard heater that just keeled over and died a horrible death, there are closets stuffed with clothes and a shed bursting with toys, and now there are mangled clementine sections littered on the floor like confetti during a parade of jungle animals. There are fake plants and new throw rugs in places on the exact opposite side of the house of where they’re supposed to be.

The photographer comes on Friday. The listing goes up this weekend. No problem.

At least the carpets are clean.