Blaine Voyage

Sarah here.

Our house was full of painters most of the day today. They painted the kitchen, which looks so much better now that it’s no longer the color of mint-chocolate chip ice cream, and spent the day doing prep work on the third floor, which is going to look much better as well.

I am a million times happier with the yellow than I was with the green, so yay to that.

Mike says he made some significant progress on his part of our room. He also wrote his first-ever blog post, worked on the taxes, paid the bills, and did the food shopping. I have no complaints!

The girls came to me and said, in essence, that they couldn’t make real progress on either of their two major projects (their room and/or the play room) without my direct oversight and involvement. I am impressed with them for being self-aware enough to realize this, although it slows our overall progress quite a bit.

That said, today we finished their room. Both girls worked super-hard, and we had quite a few laughs along the way. We packed up 8 boxes of their books for storage, brought about another 1-2 bookshelves worth of books to the library to be shelved, laughed a lot as we sorted through some of the unbelievable assortment of crap they’ve accumulated and/or created, and cried a bit when we encountered photos of our dearly-departed cat, Charlotte.

I’d say the highlight of the day was discovering Julie’s additions to a cat toy:

Elizabeth couldn’t stop laughing, and then we moved on to making some modern art. Frankly, the cat looks so fat wrapped in yarn, that it’s hard to tell whether it’s intended to be a cat or a cow. That is appropriate, since we also discovered the last of the advertising for the “company” Julie founded last year, which she intended to call “Cat Co.,” but her spelling words led her to call it “Catcow,” so…

In between our laughter, we also got a lot of work done.

Below are before and after shots of the girls’ room. I know it was outrageously bad before, but my take has always been that I refuse to function as my kids’ maids. I can give them advice and make suggestions, but at the end of the day, as long as they follow my strict “no food upstairs” rule, I’m not worried about bugs, and I leave them to their own devices when it comes to their room. That way they get to experience natural consequences, like the cleaning service hiding all of their stuff. Julie in particular tends to be a terrible pack rat, who wants to keep everything from random slips of paper to broken Pez dispensers. I was really proud of her today, as she was much more sanguine about trashing and packing up her stuff than I expected. And Elizabeth got a good lesson in the fact that she also has (more muted) pack rat tendencies, and so it really isn’t fair of Elizabeth to blame Julie for all of the mess.

Before:

After:

Tomorrow we are off to Philly to spend the day celebrating the 6th birthday of a very special member of our extended family, so the only work we’re likely to do is carrying boxes out to the POD and garage in the morning before we get ready.

For those playing along at home, here’s our current house-prep score card:

Still to go: Mike’s and my room, the master bathroom, the main bathroom, the playroom (G-d help us all), the attic, the office, the front foyer, and the basement…

Completed: The third floor guest room, the third floor bathroom, the girls’ room, the library, the living room, the dining room, the kitchen (enough for them to paint anyway), the guest bathroom…

Overall, I’d say we’re close to 50% of the way there on getting the house ready to go on the rental market.