Closer to Heaven

If cleanliness is next to godliness, then we must be living right outside the pearly gates now.

I dropped Jonas off at school yesterday morning and came back home to get this house in order. It's amazing, all the stuff that collects over the years, and you don't even realize it. It doesn't help that we are both pack-rats.

So I started in the master bath and worked my way all the way across the house. I patched ancient gouges in the woodwork, scrubbed hard water stains from the porcelain, bleached baseboards, collected the dust that settles in the corners. Trashed half the stuff in the closets, and took most of what was left to the sharing center.

I have a real problem with cleaning out closets. My last major overhaul was before Jonas was born. His bedroom was previously our office/general storage room. There was stuff packed into that closet dating back all the way to junior high. Some of it even older than that. All those little things that seem so important at the time. Things you swear you'll keep forever, and do, until something comes along and makes you realize that you really don't need it anymore. So out went all the junk, all the clothes that will never be worn again, all the little memory things like the balloon given by a best friend after a minor surgery, and the flowers saved from the ex on our first anniversary. Just what the hell did I need those for anyway? Some sort of reminder that there really was some fragment of human in him?

I dusted places that have probably never been dusted, like those shelves in the closet, just above the clothes bars, and vacuumed behind the furniture. Who pulls out their furniture and vacuums on a regular basis? I cleaned fan blades, baseboards, fingerprints on doors. The windows are sparkling, at least until the cats press their curious little noses against them again.

The tile floors have never looked better. Jonas's toys are arranged neatly. The kitchen sink looks like stainless steel again, instead of some dull and dirty hole in the countertop. The fridge has been emptied of all the leftovers and the shelves wiped down. The only thing I didn't get to was organizing the cabinets. But every person is allowed some sort of clutter, right? I mean, who in this world has an organized tupperware cabinet?

So, now the inside is all sparkly clean, and the outside is still a disaster. Still waiting on the stucco guys to call me back, still waiting on the drywall guy to come visit. It's frustrating to have to work on someone else's time schedule when reall all you want to do is get it over with. I've never been a patient waiter.

To be fair though, we're in our summertime rain pattern. Meaning, it rains every day. It's kind of hard to do stucco work in the rain, I suppose. And we certainly can't paint in the rain. On the brighter side, on our nearly daily drive by the other house, we've observed no flooding or drainage problems. That's a huge plus considering we're below sea-level, and most of this town spends the summer soggy and squishy due to the poor drainage. The more we drive by, the more we call it "our new house" and the more we call it that, the more we can't wait to move in.

All this, and we haven't even made a formal offer yet. Sort of jumping the gun, aren't we?

But it's not officially for sale yet, anway, so I don't see why we're in any real hurry. Step one is to get this house marketable, and then we can make our offer, contingent upon the sale of this one. Seems silly to make an offer with a contingency when the house isn't even on the market yet. (Either of them, for that matter)

So we sit, and we wait patiently for all of the cards to fall into place. And in the meantime, we try not to lose our minds with all of the work that is still ahead for us.