Everybody's working for the weekend...

Wait, make that ON the weekend.

Well our house is officially on the market as of today. Now while this is exciting it wasn't possible without a ridiculous amount of effort and hard work by yours truly and a makeshift crew of willing participants.

First off, on Friday we figured we would go out for the evening since we knew we would be working all day Saturday and Sunday. Absolutely nothing was touched or done in the way of de-cluttering or cleaning that we knew was going to have to get done eventually. So unless bringing 7 or 8 new CDs home and playing "Rock Band" deep into the night somehow helped prepare our house for selling, nothing was accomplished.

Next came Saturday. Our goals for the day included, but were not limited to, pressure-washing the deck, painting the kitchen, doing some touch-up work in the bathroom, and moving a few large pieces of furniture down to the basement. Oh and the yardwork but I'll get to that in a minute. We were fortunate enough to have the help of my brother-in-law and his girlfriend, as well as my Pearl Jam-partner-in-crime and his fiance for the day. My main project was painting the kitchen while they worked on the other stuff, which just further supported the fact that I am not a painter as it took me somewhere around 3 hours to paint it. And technically it was only half because the paint below the chair rail is a different color and didn't even need painting.

So about this yardwork. Let me state for the record that I don't mind doing yardwork myself. While I don't have a wide array of landscaping tools at my disposal I will use what I have to make the most of it and try to get it looking as good as I can. But since we had so much on our plate for the weekend, I had made arrangements to have a good friend of my family to work on the yard since he does that sort of thing for a living. And yes, I was going to pay him. He had originally told me that he would be there around 9:00. Well, 12:00 rolled around and I actually called him to see what was up and he said he would be out in about 2 hours. Well, needless to say he never showed. My mom ended up speaking to him Sunday and he apparently came down with a virus after I talked to him and was really sorry. So what was our backup plan? Let's just say we didn't have one. We do have a neighbor that also does this sort of thing for a living but we gave him absolutely no notice on a Sunday and he wasn't able to help us out.

And that brings us to Sunday. We had decided to skip out on church given the circumstances to give us a little more time. We weren't expecting any help but were ecstatic to get a call from my brother-in-law asking if we wanted him and his girlfriend to come over for a little while to help out. Now we didn't know for certain that nobody was able to help out with the yard until around 3:00. This gave me around 4-5 hours of daylight to try to cut grass and trim our shrubs. Oh and it was rainy and rather cold. Well the lawnmower pulled it's annual "you haven't used me in months so I'm not going to start" routine so there was nothing I could do. What I could do however is have my wife run over to the neighbor's garage and borrow various tools without their knowledge (don't worry, we were given permission years ago to "help yourself whenever you need it"). I proceeded to trim our shrubs the best I could given the conditions and was told that help would be arriving in the morning. The only thing is, the weather was even worse this morning, so the yard still needs work but the realtor was still able to get some pictures for the listing, with the idea that they will be replaced once we are re-acquainted with sunlight.

In the end, we were up past midnight on Sunday to get everything we could packed away and in the basement. I swear that if anyone sees the amount of stuff that is already packed in boxes that they would have no idea where we had it to begin with. But like I said in a previous post, at least that much is done if we do end up being successful in this endeavor.