What Open House?

Tomorrow will be our first, and hopefully last, Open House. Ideally, someone will come in, fall in love with the house, put a bid in on it, and we'll be on our way to actually making a sale. Realistically, our nosy neighbors will be the ones to show up and poke around while we are wherever we are supposed to be so that we do not get in the way. I'm thinking of hiding in the closets to pop out at them, but I'm guessing our Realtor will not like that one little bit. I suppose in the off-chance an actual interested buyer appears, we should behave and spend those few hours anywhere else but on our property.

Anyway, most people would probably suggest we spend today scrubbing the house from top to bottom until it shines. We should empty all of the cabinets, use Q-tips to clean out the corners, vacuum everything, wash the items before replacing them, then move on to the next task. Heck, we should probably bleach the bottoms of our shoes to make sure we do not accidentally track in one speck of dirt to sully our house's appearance.

Yeah, I baked cookies instead. When they were done, I ate a bunch of them. My concession to cleaning was to wash the bowls, measuring cups, and cookie sheets when I was done.

Part of me is surprised at how lackadaisical I am about the Open House. I normally do my best work when completely stressed about a given situation. I turn from a normal human being to a frazzled workaholic who cannot sleep until I find a way of removing every last fingerprint from all of the shiny objects around me. With three kidlets, who just happen to be fingerprint-producing fiends, you can imagine how little sleep I get under those circumstances.

Truth be told, I just cannot bother. If the house is meant to sell, it will. If it is not, it won't. I did put a fresh coat of paint on a lot of things. The house will be vacuumed, dusted, and have the bathroom freshly scrubbed before the Open House. Other than that, I really cannot justify additional cleaning simply for neighbors that do not come to my house to visit me while I am here. If it makes them happy to discover that I did not bleach the inside of the fridge, then so be it.

My official excuse for not turning the entire house apart to get it white-glove clean is that I was waiting for the washing machine repair guy to show up and did not want to be mid-project when he appeared. Guess what. He never showed. I've been stood up before, but never by an appliance repairman, so this was an interesting novelty. I called his company and was told a call was placed to my house saying there was a need to reschedule due to a lack of an available repairman. None of the phones in my house record such a phone call, and there has been an adult in the house all day long just waiting for this guy to call. Thanks, Mr. Nocallnoshow. (Hey, I wonder if the repair guy was Damian--see yesterday's blog entry for an explanation--and he was mad at me for destroying his ability to get a job because he erroneously put my cell phone number on his resume instead of whatever his own number is. Huh.)

Whatever my excuse, it was still a lot more fun to bake and eat cookies than it would have been to clean. I have no regrets. This might change by tomorrow evening if our Realtor tells us there were complaints. However, think of how much wasted effort was saved if nobody shows!