I keep renaming my blog.

I am indecisive.

It'll probably change again.

heartache and bruises and letting go

Well, it's over friends.

(At least I think/hope it is.)

Our realtor came over and took pictures of the house this morning and soon everyone on the interwebs can see what I've been doing all these weeks. Really, it's been months since we began this project, but the biggest push (and the inception of this blog) can only be measured in weeks.

I don't have to paint anymore. Which is great, because over the weekend I threw away 3 of my 6 paint brushes because I neglected to care for them properly. Kind of an apt analogy for my life right now.

I spent this Mother's Day weekend busting my butt to get the house ready for this morning's photo shoot. I spent more time on a ladder (and accidentally splattered more paint) than I have since... well, since last weekend. But whatever. 

My right arm aches from hours of brush-stroking my hallway walls after I discovered that a paint roller made the base coat of what I'm guessing might be pre-1950's milk paint chip off like cheap nail polish. It's a long and tall hallway, y'all, with a wall that extends up the stairs. My arm aches.

But, I gave the remainder of my 5 gallon bucket of hallway (and supposed to be for 2 other rooms which we're now not painting) paint to a friend today, so it's over.

Have I ever mentioned that I am extremely impatient? My phone and computer probably hate me because I've been refreshing Realtor.com so often, checking to see if my listing is live. As of 8:08pm, EST, it is not.

Which makes it even more illogical that I have also been waiting all day for realtors to call me, asking to show my house. Hint: they didn't. Because they can't see it yet.

My legs are covered with bruises from encounters with ladders, furniture, and tools this weekend. I'm not caring for myself well, physically (don't ask about the huge second-degree burn on my forearm from a coffee spill last week) just like  I have not been caring for my paint brushes. 

I had a really crappy Mother's Day. My air compressor stopped working (this is a really weird thing to start the crappiness of a day, but I never claimed to be predictable). The deck of the riding lawnmower was off-kilter which apparently my 16 year-old mower told be about the last time he mowed bit I forgot, so the 2 weeks' growth of grass loomed large in my yard. My husband was 950 miles away and no one thought to pamper me on what is supposed to be at least one day out of 365 that I am treated like the princess I secretly am. And I was just. so. tired. Weary to the bone, but driven by the perfect image of how I wanted my home to appear in its listing.

I cried, last night, as I drove to Tropical Smoothie Cafe to buy myself dinner at 6:30pm because no one offered to cook for me or suggested that we go out to eat. I took a bath after I finished painting last night and watched an episode of Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt which I don't quite like but for some reason am compelled to keep watching. And I took the entire day off work today to do my part in getting my house listed (my part, admittedly, ended before 11am but my youngest ended up staying home, sick, today so I didn't even get to chill alone.)

Still, life goes on. The fate of my house is now out of my hands. In addition to being an impatient perfectionist, I'm also a bit of a control freak so the whole process of letting go is really hard for me.

But I'm doing it. Bruises, heartache, and all.

the last

I often find myself wondering these days about "the last."

Is this the last time that I'm going to eat at a particular restaurant before I move?

The last time I'm going to have to buy paper towels here?

The last time I'll see a casual acquaintance before I move?

The last mortgage payment for this house?

I don't have a firm move date set. All of the home furnishings and "stuff" that I am taking with me are moving the week of June 13. I will be on vacation here the week of June 19. And I scheduled a hair appointment for June 28.

Beyond that, the boys and I just need to be in Louisiana before August 8, when school begins there.

How quickly will our house sell? If we don't get a fast offer, we could conceivably stay through July. We are not taking mattresses or our couch with us. We could slum it with paper plates and Netflix on phones & laptops for quite a while!

Should we pay for a pool membership here, knowing we may only be able to use it for a month?

Do I schedule a trip that I really want to take for July, knowing that I may have to drive 13 hours from my new home to participate? And if so, do I deposit the boys at grandparents' houses, within 4 hours of our current home, while I go on the trip? Or do I leave them at a new house which isn't in a neighborhood, where they know nobody and their dad is at work all day. Yes, they are big kids, but sometimes that makes the prospect of leaving them alone even more harrowing than when they were younger!

When do I take my canine and kitty companions to Louisiana? Would I worry more about them if the neighbor watches them here while I'm gone in June, or if they're home alone all day in a new house, in a new neighborhood.

No answers. Only questions.

Other things I've done this week (2)

Once a week, I try to post other things that I've accomplished the previous week which weren't ill-fated weird interesting enough to write a post about.

Other things I did this week

• updated some of the electrical outlets and switches in the kitchen
• moved the refrigerator to a different wall in the kitchen which made a HUGE impact in opening up the room (that, and the light paint on the walls)
• decided to list the house as it is next week (eek!)
• returned a bunch of things to Lowes because I am not going to do those things. Gotta love money being returned to my credit card statement!
• cleaned up hubs' mess from the living room ceiling project 
• took everything off of 2 metal bookshelves that were in a bedroom, disassembled them, moved them into the dining room, reassembled them and put everything (and more) back on them PLUS threw down some carpet remnants to cover the nasty floor and moved the table into the dining room. (this was an exhausting afternoon)
• hauled 2 contractor bags of debris out to the curb. Gosh, I love living in the city and having bulk trash haul services!

Projects that I need to finish

• reinstall crown molding in the living room. A complicated project because I need to buy 1" x 2" trim to complete the gap formed by the ceiling beams we installed
• finish painting around the ceiling trim in my bedroom
• decluttering & organizing the house to get it ready to show (did I mention there are already 2 couples that are ready to see it the moment it hits the market??)
• if I'm really ambitious, hold a yard sale on Saturday morning. I need to. I have a HUGE pile of stuff sitting in the corner, ready to sell.

Updates on projects that I needed to finish from previous weeks

• reinstall doorknobs on bedroom & bathroom doors.
• buy more paint for my bedroom
• prime and paint laundry room and bathroom doors 
• sand & paint the hallway walls
• prime and paint more of the staircase railings
• find the screws for the air vent screen that I took off 4 months ago so my cat will not continue to crawl into the ductwork
• paint the remaining wall of my living room 

Hubs' weekend project

You may recall that I mentioned my husband's weekend project was removing living room ceiling tiles.

Just like in the hallway, we uncovered bead board, and, as always. clues about the original layout of the house.

There was apparently a wall on the other side of the front door (which is at the bottom left in this picture), creating an entry hallway. This confirms our theory, based on the huge hole in the paneling at the bottom of the stairs, that there was once a doorway that aligned the front door with the stairs. We were planning to restore that doorway, if we stayed here.

The problem, as you can clearly see from the above picture, is the nasty, jagged line in the ceiling (also, not pictured, are two circular holes: one in the "hallway" and one in the actual living room, that indicate the former location of light fixtures).We had already planned to paint the ceiling, so I did some quick measuring and determined that this break is almost exactly 1/3 of the way into the room, so we could put up a faux beam to cover the gap and another one, symmetrically, on the other side of the room. The plan was mostly brilliant except for the fact that the room is just over 13 feet wide while the longest board we could buy is 12 feet long, so we had to piece things together.

More pictures to come, but the ceiling did get painted (I am still scraping paint splatters off the floor to prove it!) and a gorgeous black fan installed. The light kit for the fan didn't work so well, so we'll have to return it and get a new one. 

Sadly, I had to return hubby to the airport in the middle of a thunderstorm AND rush hour traffic on Monday afternoon, so now I'm on my own to finish things up.

The finishing-up has a definite end point because the other half of his weekend project was convincing me to list the house now, unfinished (it makes me cringe just to type the word!)

Inventory is low in our local housing market, and we live in a highly sought-after school district so our agent is convinced that with the amount of square footage we have and the improvements we've already made, the house will sell quickly. Cross your fingers, because ready or not (emphasis on the not), our listing goes live on Monday, May 9!

Weekend update: my kitchen painting project

So much has happened in the past week! I've been too busy doing to write it all out until now.

The big deal is that hubby came home for a visit! I didn't tell the kids, and left late on Thursday night to pick him up from the airport. Their reactions when he went to wake them up on Friday morning were priceless!

After a walk-thru assessment of the house which he hadn't seen in 2 months, we made a weekend to-do list and headed to our favorite date spot, Lowes. Seriously, 3/4 of our date nights end up at Lowes after dinner!

Hubs' weekend project was removing the living room ceiling tiles, like I did in the hallway last week. His other project, unbeknownst to me, was convincing me to list the house before I was ready. More on that later.

I went to work updating light switches and outlets in the living room. Here's a  peek at the mess I was dealing with. Can you see those fabric-wrapped wires in the outlet box? Probably not, but I assure you that's what is in there!

My big project for the weekend was painting over the faux wood paneling in the kitchen. Of course, I don't have any actual "before" photos, but here are two random, real-life (aka messy and yes my dog eats his food out of an old saucepan and his current water bowl may or may not be a serving bowl with Christmas designs on it) pictures I found on my phone.

I chose Olympic's Sky Splash, which is the perfect neutral blue to accent the super clearance deal tiles I found for the backsplash (Style Selections Floriana Heather Subway Mosaic at only $1.99/ sheet!), all of which would look dreamy against the Fusion Mineral paint in Bedford which I chose to paint over the cabinets. 

 

Toss in an Ikea farmhouse sink and this is one swoon-worthy kitchen in the works!

I put the first coat of primer on and immediately yellow stains began bleeding through. So I switched over to a tinted primer for my second coat, but still had some pretty significant bleeds. Being the impatient person I am, I used the paint next because, hello, it is paint + primer. This went over much better, and after a second coat the only minor issue that I could see (and probably only because I painted and was looking for problems) was slight tinting in the grooves of the panels.

(an "after" picture will go here, eventually, when I remember to take one)