Our current house feels less and less like it’s ours as the days go on. For one thing, with all the work done on it, it no longer looks like it did even just one month ago.

There are railings on the front porch, we moved the porch swing, and all the dragons are packed up and hiding in the garage.

There are railings on the back porch (notice the inclusion of the lovely patio set we found a few weeks ago, plus all the brand new plants and landscaping around the porch itself. Until we decided to put this house on the market, that was still all bare, ugly dirt.

The tree on the wall of the breakfast nook is finally complete. Considering that my friend came over to do the trunk and get the whole thing started about three years ago, it’s more than past time I finally got it finished. In answer to the obvious question, no, we will not be painting a tree on a wall in the new house. As gorgeous as this thing is, once was enough. The thought of having to duplicate all of those little leaves makes me a little weepy.

Of course, on the plus side, even as the current house feels as if it is starting to slip away, the new house feels as if it is coming more and more into focus. Thursday morning we met our realtor and several inspectors at the house in Sacramento and while Richard and the realtor and I sat in the dining room and went over a whole stack of paperwork, the inspectors walked around the house and poked and prodded and peered and took copious notes so that we will know exactly what we are getting into in the new place. Thankfully, the verdict is – nothing we didn’t already expect (with the possible exception of the carpenter bees munching on the back deck – and holy crap but those suckers are big and ugly – but since the deck’s going to undergo some serious renovation, the bees aren’t a problem anyway).

Yesterday afternoon Richard and I headed off to Sacramento for the East Sacramento garden tour, which was a self-guided walking tour of nine gardens in the Fabulous Forties, a neighborhood just across the freeway from where we’ll be, full of huge, gorgeous old houses, tree-lined streets, and soe rather nicely decorated back yards. We could not have asked for better weather for an afternoon spent wandering around looking at gorgeous houses.

Afterwards, Richard asked if I wanted to go swing by the new house and I made some comment to the effect of ‘duh!’ so we headed over in that direction in a circular route, tracking down the location of several more stores, coffee shops, and interesting places to go explore once we move in. Then we stopped at the new house and got out to ponder additional possibilities for the driveway we’re going to be putting in, and while we were doing that, someone came out from the house next door, and before we knew it, we were introducing ourselves to our soon-to-be new neighbors. So what was meant to be a quick little stop quickly turned into a much longer visit, involving a nice long chat with our neighbors, who are delightful people who are maybe just the slightest bit excited about our proposal to take out the inappropriately placed pine tree that stands between our property and theirs. We stood out in the front and talked about the neighborhood and they told us about some of the other neighbors, and then they showed us what they’ve done to their backyard (it’s absolutely lovely and I am hoping we can pick their brains for ideas for our own backyard) and it was the perfect way to end a day in what will soon be our home town.

And as we headed home, away from the place that will soon be ours, back to the place that won’t be ours much longer, it was just one more reminder of how this decision of ours to pick up and move and make such a drastic change in our lives is good and right and meant to be.

Today we left work early to go see a flower.

This is a corpse flower (Random woman, crouching child, and ladder included in photo for scale) . It blooms only once every few years, and the bloom itself only lasts for 18 to 36 hours.

The interior is really quite lovely, if you don’t mind the distinct smell of rotten fish.

They cut ahole near the base of the blossom. I can only assume this is so the rest of us can see what the bugs the flower’s so desperately trying to attract see shortly before they die.

This is what the corpse flower plant looks like when it isn’t flowering. If not for the spots on the trunk, you would never guess they were even members of the same plant family.

This particular flower actually bloomed yesterday, so it’s already started the process of slow wilt. I am not sorry we waited until today, however, since the reason it is called a corpse flower is because it puts off a smell reminiscent of rotting meat, and the botany students manning the greenhouse and answering questions noted that by about 10pm last night the stench was so strong that people could smell it several buildings away.

It seemed like the sort of thing that was worth leaving work early to go see.

First, and perhaps most important, the house is ours. There was a bit of excitement last weekend, what with the offer, and then the counter offer, and then the counter-counter offer, and then the discovery of another offer coming in from someone else, effectively throwing a big fat wrench right in the middle of things, and then the several hours of nail-biting suspense while we waited to find out if they’d pick our offer or if they’d, instead, force us into a nightmare of multiple counter offers and uncertainty, and then finally, late at night, the phone call from our agent letting us know that we finally had an answer. Paperwork was officially signed. There was, naturally, a bit of cheering.

And since then, it’s been just a constant effort to keep the house clean and neat. Every morning when we get up we have to vacuum and straighten and make sure every surface is wiped down and then spend the day hoping that none of the cats decides to plant a particularly slimy hairball in any prime traffic zones, and then all that’s left to do is sit back and wait for someone to decide to come see it. Which did not actually happen until this morning, when Richard and I were already scrambling around getting the house ready for our first Open House, so I did the world’s fastest vacuuming job and then dashed away to choir rehearsal while Richard stayed behind to let the agent and her clients in before leaving himself.

The Open House was pretty much a dud – we only had one person show up and that was another agent who’d been unable to make it to the agents’ tour, which was disappointing., and suggests that despite my fervent wishing, we are going to probably have to do at least one more, and soon. It’s not exactly fun, because for this and for the agents’ tour, it’s not just been cleaning the house; it’s also required me to round up all the cats and then cart them off to sit, in their carriers, in my parents’ garage for the hour or two each event takes (the weather’s been nice enough to leave them in the garage; once it gets hotter, if we have to do this again, we’ll bring them inside).

So that’s how things are going right now. Lots of cleaning. Lots of wandering around the house noticing more things that probably ought to be cleaned, or put away, or fixed, or otherwise dealt with. Scheduling inspections for the new house, and singing paperwork to get all our financial ducks in a row in preparation for the new mortgage, and most of all, lots of crossing of fingers and hoping that someone comes to buy our house, so that all the pieces fall into place and we can just collapse somewhere in a little exhausted puddle and not have to worry about houses old or new any more.

The work continues on the exterior of the house. Both back and front porches now have railings down the steps, which are brand new on the back porch because the old ones were looking pretty old and ugly. The plan right now is for them to finish everything up on Monday, although they have not even touched the interior yet, so it will be interesting to see if this actually happens. As I mentioned earlier, this house has a *lot* of trim.

My dad conveniently has a project where he gets to work from home for a few weeks, so I wheedled him into playing house sitter for us for the past two days – mainly just to be here to let workmen in and out of the house as they needed. Thursday the tile guy came and ripped out the magically warping marble shower surround, and did all the necessary patching of holes in the underlying sheetrock that result from having to pry well-adhered marble slabs off of a wall. He, too, says he will have it all finished on Monday, but currently we have only about one wall of tile installed, no fixtures, no doors, and we are both using the shower in the guest bathroom in the meantime, and also hoping that miracles really will happen and everything will actually be done on time.

My dad was also here to let the pest people in this morning. They came in and climbed down under the house and did whatever magical things they do to make the termites disappear, and when they were done, they filled out a form declaring that our house has now cleared all pest inspections, which is apparently a good thing to be able to include in the ‘buy this house’ descriptions on realtor.com.

Richard and I, in the meantime, have been busying ourselves with other house things – but mainly related to the house we hope to buy, as opposed to the house we intend to sell. Yesterday after work we met with a friend who also happens to be a mortgage broker (and who also came highly recommended by a few other friends who have already worked with him for their own house purchases) and went over our financial applications (the verdict – we both have excellent credit scores and we are definitely going to be able to do the convoluted financial thing we want to do to make this whole ‘buying a house before we finish selling the first one’ thing work). Once the financial stuff was done, then all we had to do was hash out the terms of our offer. Last night our realtor filled out the forms and then emailed them to us (ah, the convenience of modern technology!) and we printed them out and then he walked through every single bit of them on the phone and even though it was technically still Thursday when we signed them, it was only because we squeaked in under the wire with a few minutes to spare. Richard dropped off the forms this morning and we have given the sellers until tomorrow night to respond. It’s all very exciting and also more than a wee bit terrifying.

I did not end up having to prime the scary yellow patches, because as scary as they might have been, they were still light enough to paint over without bleeding through. This afternoon I headed back to the hardware store, where they now recognize me, after three visits in less than a week. A very nice man at the paint counter helped me pick out a few paint cards, and then sent me home with two huge flipbooks of cards displaying every single color ever made by Benjamin Moore, and despite being completely overwhelmed by choices, I actually was able to find one that more closely resembled what I had been imagining in my head. Back to the hardware store, and then back home again with a gallon of paint in the color Elephant Tusk, and I got to painting, because at this point I figured even if I absolutely hated it, I only have to look at it as long as it takes to sell this house.

Richard enjoys painting just about as much as he enjoys being strung up by his toes, so he didn’t do any brush-wielding. However, he rescued me from the tedium of paint preparation by taping off sections of the wall for me so I wouldn’t have to do it (because the taping is the part of painting I hate most of all). It might have gone faster if I had used a roller, but my experience with rollers is that they are far more likely to splatter fine particles of paint everywhere (including on me) and I have much more control over the splattering when I use a brush. So it took me about three hours, total, to do the wall (interspersed with dinner and watching an episode of Veronica Mars on DVD), but the extra time was more than worth it when compared to the distinct lack of paint anywhere but on the wall, where it was supposed to be. And when I was done, I pulled off the tape and damn if it doesn’t look almost exactly like what I had hoped it would be. The fireplace build-out really pops out of that wall and it looks amazing.

There’s been other progress on the house as well over the past two days. A small work crew of two have been cutting and painting and fixing and replacing all the trim on the exterior (and there is a *lot* of trim on our exterior), and when we got home today, we discovered that they’d installed the new railings around the front and back porch, and also suddenly we have a great big front porch we never knew was there. It is amazing to me how a space that looked so tiny when it wasn’t enclosed can look suddenly larger simply by the addition of walls. It makes me want to put a little bistro set out there so we can drink coffee in the morning and listen to the birds in the tiny little forest in the neighbors’ back yards, and watch the picturesque farming equipment rolling around in the fields past the end of the street. Here’s hoping it makes someone else – someone with enough money to buy our house – feel the same way.

It is a good thing that the hardware store was closed by the time we headed off to buy additional paint on Sunday, because even though I thought I could live with the color of the swatches on the wall, by the next morning, I knew I really didn’t like it at all. So this morning I painted over the green swatches with two coats of primer, and this afternoon I went to the hardware store to pick up something new. I was aiming for something in a neutral shade of warm beige. It certainly looked warm beige in the store. But the big squares of color on the living room wall are currently looking a lot more buttery yellow than beige, and I suspect that tomorrow morning there will be more priming in my future. Sigh. There is a very good reason why the dining room was the only room in this house that ever got painted.

On the plus side, the house we really like in Sacramento will need minimal painting, if at all, because the current color scheme is lovely, and I am all about minimizing any amount of taping and painting and also the inevitable swearing. Monday after work we went over to walk through the house a second time, in order to get a closer look and make sure this was really the one. I walked through the house and took a ton of pictures, and we opened cupboards and peeked in drawers, and stood in rooms and pondered possibilities. There were features we’d forgotten about from the first visit – like the little enclosed porch right off the kitchen that already has a pet door into the house, making it (with a little cleaning and adding of tile) the perfect place to put the litter boxes. The backyard has more than enough room to put in a two car garage and still have plenty of open area. The yard not only has a little fledgling pomegranate tree, it also has a lemon tree, a peach tree, and even a red grapefruit tree (and unlike the white peach tree in our current backyard, there was nary a peach-eating scrub jay in sight, and unlike the little baby grapefruit tree we currently have, that one is old enough to produce actual fruit).

We know, already, some of the work that will have to be done; as well as the work we will want to do (the style of tile and cabinets in the kitchen is rather unfortunate), but for a house built in 1920, it’s in amazingly good condition. We even got a chance to chat with one of the next door neighbors. And by the time we left, we knew that this house was the one.

So now we are going through the process of looking at the various options for financing and longer-than-usual escrows and contingency plans and bridge loans to figure out how to make this work, so that we are not suddenly saddled with two mortgages, and crossing our fingers that no one else out there is thinking the same thing about what we have now pretty much decided is ‘our’ house. And in the meantime, final plans are shaping up for the current house. This morning I was late to work because I had to stay and meet with the guys who will be fixing / replacing /repainting our exterior trim and installing railings on both the front and back porch, and I had to leave work early because I had to get home to meet with the guy who will be making our strangely warped marble shower wall go away forever, and Friday morning the people from the pest inspection place will be coming out and taking care of the damn termite problem once and for all. Or maybe not once and for all; but as long as the termites stay away long enough for us to sell this house, I will be happy.

And I keep on wandering around the house with empty boxes, finding new things to pack, emptying and reorganizing drawers and cupboards, wiping down surfaces, making lists, and telling myself that putting a lockbox on a house with indoor-only cats really won’t be as bad as I am imagining. And hoping that some time before they come this weekend to film the virtual tour, I will have finally nailed down the right color for that one wall in the living room that isn’t too green or too yellow, or too whatever other possible wrong color I can think of and will, instead, be just right.

Books, I have decided, have a unique property unlike anything else, in that the more you pack away in boxes, the more still remain on the shelves, until you wonder if you actually just imagined packing them all up and if the stack of sealed boxes in the garage are just full of very heavy air. Also, in case it wasn’t obvious, we have an awful lot of books. I packed up several more boxes yesterday, and sealed up three more this morning, and still it feels as if I have made barely even a dent in the numbers.

This morning I got up earlier than I needed to, simply because I just couldn’t sleep, and decided to make good use of the extra time by cleaning out the linen closet and the bathroom drawers. The nice thing about having big, deep drawers in the bathroom is that you have lots of room for lots of stuff. The not so nice thing about having big, deep drawers in the bathroom is that there is lots of room for lots of stuff, or more specifically, lots of stuff you forgot you had. I filled up two bags full of garbage – old makeup, half-empty bottles of medication that expired years ago, mostly used sample bottles of toiletries we collected back when we were traveling all over the state for Benthic Creatures, and so on. The cats were all happy because I also unearthed an unopened bag of catnip, which I set down on the bed at first, in order to deal with it after I finished the bathroom, but then gave up and emptied all over the bedroom floor because somehow it mysteriously developed holes that looked suspiciously like bite marks of the feline persuasion and I figured catnipping the floor was easier than dealing with a cat injesting a plastic bag in order to get to the happy drugs within. Then I tackled a few of the kitchen shelves, since people will be opening cupboards to see how much space we have, and that means clearing and organizing and cleaning and also figuring out which kitchen appliances and paraphenlia I can live without for the next few months so that the presence of completely empty shelves tells potential buyers that this kitchen has more cupboard space than they could possibly use.

The recorder group played today, so I headed off to church early to rehearse. There were only four of us, but luckily it worked out so there was one person on each part and I think it is safe to say that we have never sounded better than we did this morning. Then we met my parents for lunch and got around to discussing the location of the house we’re hoping to buy, which ended up in the dragging out of maps and the spilling of very cold iced beverages all over the table in the excitement.

A friend came over to do a quick walk through of the house for us, pointing out a few things we should work on, and we went to the hardware store and stared at walls of paint chip cards and eventually came back home with a little sample pot of color which turned out to be exactly the perfect color for what we had in mind. I know that I would have never picked this color out if it were up to me, because when it comes to choosing colors – especially paint color – I am beyond hopeless – but I slapped a few large patches of paint onto one wall of the living room and what do you know, it works. The only room in this house that was ever painted beyond the move-in white was the dining room, which I sponge painted in three shades of blue, and even then I had to have a friend help me figure out which shades. I have already warned several of my more artistically inclined friends that I intend to bring them into our new house (when we get a new house), hand them a huge stack of paint chip cards, and set them loose to tape appropriate color chips to the walls. I do not mind doing the actual painting work; I just want someone else to tell me what color I should use. I had intended to go back and get a full quart of paint to finish off the walls, once we all decided that the color worked, but by the time we got back out to the hardware store, it was closed. So the living room wall will have to remain strangely splotchy until Tuesday night, at which point, armed with painters tape and a brush, and sheer determination, I will transform our currently bland fireplace wall into a vision of beauty (or at the very least, a wall that is slightly more interesting than it currently is, which will not be hard at all).

We finally got an estimate for the work that will be required to fix up (and paint) the exterior trim, and tackle the issue with the warping marble wall in the master bathroom shower, and treat the ground underneath our house for the termites that, it turns out, were there all along (sigh), and it is a number that is a little bit daunting to be confronted with, but I am telling myself that at least now we know the worst (and it isn’t as bad as it could be, especially considering the termites) and that the silver lining here is that when someone does decide to buy this house and sends in their inspectors, we will not get any more nasty surprises.

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.

So now it is official. The realtor came over and the three of us sat around the dining room table – Richard and the realtor and I – and he opened up the notebook he’d put together for us and we went over everything, one more time. How much we will be listing the house for. The range of prices we hope to get. What all needs to be done to get the house ready. When things will happen. Everything.

May 1st. That is the day the house goes on the market. I am at once excited and terrified by what this date means. I hope that our house sells quickly. I hope that the inspectors don’t find anything horribly wrong. I hope that the house that we found in Sacramento that we both fell in love with is still available when we’re ready to put in an offer. I hope that all of us – Richard and I and the cats – can get through this and that we are doing the right thing.

Three weeks. I’d better get packing.

There was a knitting group this afternoon, at the store in Davis, but I didn’t go. I am an introvert at heart, and it’s been kind of a crazy weekend and there is only so much ‘social’ I can do before I just need to hole up in my own house where I am not required to interact with anyone at all except for Richard and the cats. So instead of going out to knit with my friends, I sat at the breakfast nook table and wove in all the ends of the mitered square blocks I’ve been working on, and read a few books, and didn’t have to deal with anyone at all.

It’s been a busy weekend because last night was the spring concert for the women’s ensemble I sing in, and because last night was the concert, that meant that Friday night was the dress rehearsal, and all together that was about ten hours of singing, or otherwise stressing about singing, over the course of two days, which is far more exhausting than you might expect. If that were not enough, this morning was even more singing, seeing as how it was Palm Sunday and the choir pretty much sang all the way through the service. And of course all of this was prefaced and followed by talking and interacting, and after something exhausting, the last thing I want to do is make small talk. I am not good at small talk. I may smile and nod and come up with the occasional vaguely witty thing to say, but deep down inside I am still that shy and awkward girl I was all through childhood, and no matter how much I try I am not sure I will ever not be.

So this afternoon I did not go hang out with friends. Because sometimes I just need to not have to do anything more than be with just me.