Welp...we're officially FOR SALE again!
I was feeling SO great about this earlier in the week, and then the sign went up and the first call came for a showing at the stupidest. most inconvenient time, and instantly I felt that sick feeling come back like I felt last November when I was SO done with letting people walk through this house. I tried saying a prayer to be nice and to have a kind, happy spirit that people could feel in this home instead of hating the world, cuz you know, probably that's not the best attitude to have when you're trying to sell a house...
On Wednesday night, after the tornado sirens ended and we all got back in our beds and went to sleep, the winds kept blowing and the storms kept storming and McKay wandered into our room and crawled into a little heap in our fluffy chair in the corner sometime in the middle of the night. And then sometime later in the middle of the night, Craig started throwing up periodically for about three hours or so until he finally fell asleep about five minutes before the alarm went off to wake up the girls for seminary. I let him sleep and just drove the morning routes to sem and school and picked up some Sprite and crackers for him on the way home. He had a consistent rotation of crackers, sleeping, and throwing up going until about 1:00pm when he finally stopped throwing up and just slept for three straight hours. He's pretty sure it was food poisoning because it was almost exactly 12 hours of misery and then poof! it just ended...
So, while Craig was on his death bed, our realtor put the FOR SALE sign in the yard and got the listing up and running on realtor.com I figured that was probably a good time to get all the last minute things done that Craig and I were supposed to do today...taking down the dining room table from the Missionary Moms Lunch, resetting McKay's furniture, moving our giant ridiculous, dilapidated recliner out to the garage, and just general cleaning...including the TOILETS (blah...why did I leave those for the end?? why did I not suggest that Craig just clean those yesterday in case he came down with food poisoning at the last minute??)
With one person now doing what two of us had planned to do, it was an unexpectedly busy day for me. McKay's room has been doing double duty as a bedroom and Craig's office since Christmas, so I needed to make it look a little more functional and less like a storage facility. First, I cleared off McKay's little desk and chair and hauled them out to the garage. Then, I moved Craig's giant desk and chair (and two bookshelves, and a printer, and a monitor, and a shredder, and about 4 jillion electrical cords that go to...I have no idea what...) to the opposite wall, and put McKay's bed on the wall where Craig's desk had been. I emptied out McKay's whole dresser and put all his clothes on hangers in his closet (and got rid of quite a few things that were way too small) and then hauled that dresser out to the garage, too. And let me just tell you how clever that little trick was! There was no way I could carry that thing through the house and out to the garage by myself. So I just pushed the dresser across the carpet in McKay's room and then out into the hallway onto a giant beach towel that I had laying on the wood floor. And then, once it was securely on the towel, I just pulled the towel through the whole house with the dresser on top of it, via the kitchen and the laundry room, and that was like 75% of the work right there! By the time I had gotten it that far, all I needed to do was lift it up and over one little step from the laundry room into the garage and then a short distance across the garage to the place where it's now hiding until it moves to Birmingham. It's really too bad there was no one at home who was conscious enough to celebrate that success with me because I was pretty excited about the ingenuity of that plan. After a little vacuuming and dusting, McKay's room was finally done.
I moved on to taking the leaves out of the dining room table and carrying them up to Savannah's room where they are now tucked under her bed, along with a whole lot of other stuff that originally Craig was going to put in the attic. Because I can do a lot of things I did not think I could do before Thursday morning, but going into the attic is not one of them. Nope. Not doing it. And really, it seemed unnecessary when Savannah's bed can hide a whole LOT of things...and I've never once seen a spider under there.
With one person now doing what two of us had planned to do, it was an unexpectedly busy day for me. McKay's room has been doing double duty as a bedroom and Craig's office since Christmas, so I needed to make it look a little more functional and less like a storage facility. First, I cleared off McKay's little desk and chair and hauled them out to the garage. Then, I moved Craig's giant desk and chair (and two bookshelves, and a printer, and a monitor, and a shredder, and about 4 jillion electrical cords that go to...I have no idea what...) to the opposite wall, and put McKay's bed on the wall where Craig's desk had been. I emptied out McKay's whole dresser and put all his clothes on hangers in his closet (and got rid of quite a few things that were way too small) and then hauled that dresser out to the garage, too. And let me just tell you how clever that little trick was! There was no way I could carry that thing through the house and out to the garage by myself. So I just pushed the dresser across the carpet in McKay's room and then out into the hallway onto a giant beach towel that I had laying on the wood floor. And then, once it was securely on the towel, I just pulled the towel through the whole house with the dresser on top of it, via the kitchen and the laundry room, and that was like 75% of the work right there! By the time I had gotten it that far, all I needed to do was lift it up and over one little step from the laundry room into the garage and then a short distance across the garage to the place where it's now hiding until it moves to Birmingham. It's really too bad there was no one at home who was conscious enough to celebrate that success with me because I was pretty excited about the ingenuity of that plan. After a little vacuuming and dusting, McKay's room was finally done.
I moved on to taking the leaves out of the dining room table and carrying them up to Savannah's room where they are now tucked under her bed, along with a whole lot of other stuff that originally Craig was going to put in the attic. Because I can do a lot of things I did not think I could do before Thursday morning, but going into the attic is not one of them. Nope. Not doing it. And really, it seemed unnecessary when Savannah's bed can hide a whole LOT of things...and I've never once seen a spider under there.
By the time all the kids had come home from school, Craig was starting to regain consciousness, and everything was finished except for that dumb recliner. That thing came from my dad's house in Houston, and I can't really remember what our logic was in bringing it with us to Dallas, but it has lived upstairs in our playroom for the past 6 years growing more and more dysfunctional every year so it was beyond time for it to go. Craig and I had moved it downstairs earlier in the week intending to freecycle it, but people aren't stupid. Even freecyclers didn't want that dumb thing. So, there it was on Thursday afternoon just sitting right in the middle of the living room...like a huge old lazy dog laying in the sun.
(If that doesn't make any sense, we have an alley garage which means it lives behind our house and we don't have a driveway in the front. So to get anything from the front door to the back we would have had to carry it down the street and around the block and then through the alley. Dallas is weird.)
Right after we unloaded the recliner, I got a text from the real estate schedulers saying that someone wanted to show the house at 6:45 that night. Holy heck! I still needed to clean bathrooms, get Emma to her DMCO rehearsal by 5:00, get back home and get ready for my rehearsal (which was starting late fortunately...cuz I still can't remember if I even got a shower that day) oh, and there was also a 2-day camp out thatthe walking dead Craig and McKay had decided they were going to try and make it out on...That's another whole post. I can't even try to fit that story in here.
I didn't want to haul it back upstairs, but it was way too big and heavy to slide around through the house on a towel and out to the garage. Plus, I don't think it would have even fit through the laundry room door anyway. So...brilliant idea #2....McKay and I put the seats down in the back of the van. I drove the van around to the front. Megan and McKay and I carried the chair out through the front door and shoved it into the back of the van! And then I drove the van back through the alley, and backed it into the driveway, where the three of us unloaded the recliner into it's new temporary home in the garage! Hooray!! McKay had a pretty great time riding in the back of the van while sitting in a recliner for a minute or two.
(If that doesn't make any sense, we have an alley garage which means it lives behind our house and we don't have a driveway in the front. So to get anything from the front door to the back we would have had to carry it down the street and around the block and then through the alley. Dallas is weird.)
Right after we unloaded the recliner, I got a text from the real estate schedulers saying that someone wanted to show the house at 6:45 that night. Holy heck! I still needed to clean bathrooms, get Emma to her DMCO rehearsal by 5:00, get back home and get ready for my rehearsal (which was starting late fortunately...cuz I still can't remember if I even got a shower that day) oh, and there was also a 2-day camp out that
The short end to this crazy story is that everything got done. The house was perfected. And we all lived.
The longer, more interesting ending, because I can't resist giving you every singe detail, is that...
I came home from taking Emma to DMCO and finished up the last few things before the people got here at 6:45, and then Megan and I waited in the car out front while the people looked at the house...for FIVE MINUTES! ugh! Just long enough to use the bathroom and wash their hands and leave what I hope was water all over the bathroom floor and lock us out of the garage! UGH!! We realized after 20 minutes of trying to reach our realtor (who is my neighbor and very dear friend fortunately and didn't mind that I texted her 50 times while she was at church) to let us into the house with her lock box key, that the other people had left the patio door unlocked, so Megan snuck us into the house that way, and I made it to my DMCO rehearsal and I also now have a house key with me on my rental keys..because yep, they're still fixing my Jeep and I'm still driving that rental car.
The longer, more interesting ending, because I can't resist giving you every singe detail, is that...
I came home from taking Emma to DMCO and finished up the last few things before the people got here at 6:45, and then Megan and I waited in the car out front while the people looked at the house...for FIVE MINUTES! ugh! Just long enough to use the bathroom and wash their hands and leave what I hope was water all over the bathroom floor and lock us out of the garage! UGH!! We realized after 20 minutes of trying to reach our realtor (who is my neighbor and very dear friend fortunately and didn't mind that I texted her 50 times while she was at church) to let us into the house with her lock box key, that the other people had left the patio door unlocked, so Megan snuck us into the house that way, and I made it to my DMCO rehearsal and I also now have a house key with me on my rental keys..because yep, they're still fixing my Jeep and I'm still driving that rental car.
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