I read it didn't really matter whether one spends the time before an appraisal (for the refinance) cleaning or not. They don't measure the cleanliness of a house, only the size of the rooms and their features. Saying that, the article does suggest that your house should be fairly clean and not looking like a pigsty as you live there and for your own good, there should be some order to how you live. Following that sort of rule, I feel our house could be tidier, so I thought I would address that.
We have a few bins of Halloween decorations out, we are in October now, not that this shitty weather is any indication, so knowing that, I decided to get on it after the boys went to bed, around 11:00pm. I worked until about 4:00am stringing up the lights on our stair rails, hanging our assortment of scary witches and zombies and werewolves. It was kind of fun doing this. It is usually a little more fun knowing I am doing it for Wife. Of course she will enjoy the house decorated, but mostly it felt like I am doing it for devious reasons. There are a few holes on our walls, such as by the punching bag where the frame holding up the bag was leaning against the wall and surprisingly, Javalina busted a hole just by the whole being punched against the wall. Another hole is halfway down the stairs, there is a little spot where the stairs turn 90 degrees, I guess it is referred to as a landing, and when we were moving a desk one of the corners got jammed into the wall. By devious I just mean I am using some of the bigger posters and scary props to cover the walls and thus save the time from properly fixing these failures.
I guess the one fix I did do was re-weather stripping the back door where that dog living with us went nuts and cut it up. Last week sometime, the dog must have sensed something like a raccoon or possum right outside because he chewed up the bottom 2-3 wood slats in the blinds in the door frame and somehow scratched the weather stripping away. This amounted to about 15 minutes of elbow grease as I used a putty knife to scratch off the old weather stripping, then I used some Goo Gone to remove the sticky residue. I then washed the area with some soapy water and attached the new stripping. I did this because Wife and Javalina were blaming the holes as allowing spiders to get into the house, hoping this shuts them up.
After all the Halloween decorations all night, I went to bed at 4:00am, but woke up when I heard Javalina stirring Friday morning for school, at 6:30am. I got up to check on him, make sure Boy was taking him to school and that got me looking in the kitchen and I decided to clean some space in the fridge so I could put the sodas sitting out in a proper place. This led to me spending the next two hours cleaning the fridge and rounding up two bags of expired foods, from brown dried limes, to old beer bottles labeled with a 2005 expiration date. I discovered, almost a little funny, but by the amount of bottles, our favorite condiment must be relish. We had about 8 bottles of relish all over the place, from the top shelf to the doors to the bottom shelf in the very back. I felt much better to go through and do this.
The next chore I did was do the same with the spice cabinet. We had gotten to the point of just putting the newest salt and spices on the counter. Since I was in clean up mode I decided to go through and look at each bottles expiration date and throw some stuff away. All I cold say was "Wow!", some of the bottles made it over expired from our first house. We had a paprika container that said "best by April 30, 2006." We moved into this house in May 2007. All together, I threw away four bags of food and old spices and stuff. This then made the putting away of all the spices next to the stove much easier and organized. I was then to very easily clean the rest of the kitchen and declutter the counters.
While I was doing this, I was also washing and trying to get Boy involved in helping by having him take care of the bulk of his crap. He likes to use the pool table as his work area whenever he gets posters and crap in the mail. He was up to about 6 new tubes of posters leaning against the walls and I had him putting all these away and taking care of all his accessories from his game nights that were thrown about the room all over. I kept an eye on him by working in the kitchen and then moving towards him by cleaning the room in between. That room isn't too bad other than I noticed the walls were splattered with chocolate milk or something like that. I just grabbed a wet sponge and spent a good 10-15 minutes cleaning the walls. I also managed to hang a couple of photos and frames we had lying around.
By then, it was 3:30pm and realized I had not slept at all and if I was going to get any rest, I should just stop and lay down. I ended up sleeping until 6:30pm. I somehow talked to Wife in my sleep when she was on her way and I had told Boy to pick up his brother if I didn't wake when my alarm rang. I had a feeling since I only slept like two hours in the early morning that I wouldn't even wake when I heard my alarms. I barely remember turning them off, but I did not. When I woke at 6:15pm, the first thing I did was look into Javalina's room and did a little "phew!" when I saw his room light on.
I am running a day late because I didn't want to stop and write when I needed to be cleaning and I would continue writing today's blog (I am writing this Saturday morning around 4:00am), but I have an appointment with the guy we are selling the land to in New Braunfels and I really need to sleep some more. Wife is worried because I am going out there by myself and she thinks I am going to get drowsy driving. I think I will be fine since I am chasing down money, I should be excited about the little trip. Maybe I'll even stop and look at the jetskis at that store they sell them with the money in my pocket.
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