One of the things we were told to do in order to get the house ready for going on the market was to go through and pack up everything we could live without – not just knick knacks, but furniture, too. The whole point is that you want the rooms to have the minimal amount of furniture and things, so that the rooms look spacious and not cramped.

We’re not much into knick knacks (knick knacks plus cats usually equals startling crashing noises in the middle of the night, followed shortly thereafter by a massive skittering of panicked feline perpetrators, and ending up in pieces of broken stuff on the floor), but we do have a lot of books and games and knitting paraphenilia. So the past week I’ve been slowly packing up what I can, scrounging and begging boxes from family and friends and coworkers, and we’ve been slowly moving things into the garage – smaller bookshelves, boxes of books and games and CD’s. I walked through the house and made a lengthy list of things to get done, divided up by room, and since we signed the paperwork I’ve been making pretty good progress on that list, crossing off one or two things almost every day.

Today was one of my Friday’s off, so I’d already planned on tackling a few of the larger items on the list, while trying to (mostly) stay out of Richard’s way, since he still had to work. But then we met with our realtor last night and he mentioned that someone was really interested and wanted to see our house before they made an offer on another house early next week, and Richard and I pondered the possibility of selling the house before we ever get the thing officially on the market and said sure, send them on over, and I didn’t think much more about it until this morning when the woman called at about 9:30 am, and we made plans for her to come over at 2:30 and then I thought about how much on that list still really needed to be done and I gulped down some coffee and then I went into overdrive in a desperate attempt to see how much I could actually accomplish in four short hours without driving either myself or Richard completely insane.

We rearranged the library. We moved a bookshelf out into the garage and I trotted up and down the stairs, hauling boxes and crates outside. I tackled stacks of things that needed sorting and threw stuff out. I vacuumed and swept and rearranged and found creative places to put things out of sight, and after lunch I got down on my hands and knees and scrubbed several floors. I am actually in awe of how much I managed to get done in such a short period of time.

The sheer irony of this is that if we had not had someone coming over to look at the house, I would not have accomplished even half the things I did today. I would have found excuses to spend an hour here and there poking around on the computer, or knitting, or annoying the cats. I am a procrastinator by nature, and while I know that we will have everything on my list accomplished by the time the house hits the market, I also know that there’d be a fairly mad scramble during the last few days to get it all done. So in a way, letting these people come over for a sneak peek was more to give myself a deadline than anything else – and it worked pretty darn well.

There is still more to do, of course. But the things that remain are, for the most part smaller, less urgent. After the people left I made a new list, a much shorter list, and even though there is now only a week left to do everything on that list, I feel more confident that we’ll actually somehow get it all done.