Start your engines

We're going to be living in temporary housing in Cleveland before March 19th, so the official "get the house ready to sell" clock is ticking, ticking, ticking. Even though we've known for months that we'd probably be moving sometime this year, there's still a lot to do. Especially since every time we pick up something, Liza gets two more things out to play with, all while spilling milk someplace hard to clean. Gonna be a long couple of weeks, folks.

Liza took a nap on Friday (Hurrah!), so I spent three hours cleaning our bedroom. Our bedroom, which has few pieces of furniture, practically no clutter, and has a door we can close to keep the kid out once it's clean. And it still took three hours.

Part of the reason I wanted to get it cleaned up and ready to go was to take some photos of it that could be used as part of the brochure when we sell our house. From past experience, it's inevitable that the house will be a wreck the day that the realtor comes to photograph it, or at least the weather will be bad and make everything look all gloomy. So while it was sunny and I had a few hours, I took the time to photograph it in all its sparkling glory. I present to you ... our bedroom!


Unfortunately, there's just no way to get a shot of the room that doesn't include the posts on our bed, and I wasn't about to raise a ruckus to get the cat out of the room, so the photos aren't perfect. But at least they're a good backup plan.

With the consignment sale next weekend, we're in a mad rush to declutter all of Liza's stuff and get everything tagged and out of her sight. Today we tackled her room, taking the crib apart and rearranging the furniture of her new "big girl" room. And I cleaned everything once, although I know I'm going to be doing nothing but putting away toys and books and wiping up juice stains in here for the next three weeks. At least the windows should stay clean ...

You may notice that her rug is gone ... not for good, just long enough to get it cleaned. Between the cat puke and Liza's occasional attempts to mark her territory, it was about time. Since we needed to clean the living room rug (kid puke), it seemed like a good idea to just send them all at once. I'm thinking I may not put it back down to show the house ... without the rug you can see the (excellent) condition of the floors, and it makes the room a little less girly, so potential buyers could see it as more gender neutral. Plus, it'll come back from the cleaners already wrapped and bagged, ready to ship, and if I leave it that way, I know I won't have to clean pee off of it until it gets to the new house.

I just noticed that the floor looks so good in the second picture that you can actually see the reflection of the books on the bookshelf. Way to go, me!

I think the bathroom is next on my descunging list. Five windows to wash, most the kind where I'm going to have to pop out the screen to wash the outside of the upper sash. A couple hours of using a razor blade to scrape dried bits of "varnish I stripped off a piece of furniture that went flying off the newspaper tarp and dried on the tile floor" up. Getting all the cat hair off the curtains. Yep, gonna be a funnnnn weekend.