The first lap

Wednesday last week represented a milestone in my race to live under brighter skies. Finally, I had chucked out enough books and furniture and clothes and small household items to see the back of every closet, the bottom of every drawer, the surface of every shelf. Finally, I had cleaned out enough cupboards, vacuumed up enough dust, washed enough surfaces and painted enough walls, windowsills and baseboards. Finally, all the blinds were repaired/cleaned, and new Roman blinds covered the venetian ones (something I had never quite gotten around to before). It was time to list.

And list I did. My place is now officially for sale. Hurray. Now, all I have to do is be a fastidious Zen housekeeper and keep things well-enough organized that the place can be shown anytime (once I squirrel the twenty-year-old stained coffee-maker out of sight, hide the dirty dishes in the dishwasher, put the toothbrush in the drawer, and generally remove my own "living" traces from the place).

The place looked nice yesterday for its first Open House - I even added flowers. It's not a showcase, but it's attractive, fresh, clean, shiny, all the things that attract buyers, hopefully some buyers are enough attracted by the lowish price to want to bite. The realtor said that 8 parties, including three agents with buyers, had visited in under 2 hours. After he left two more groups of people, residents in the building, came by to look. One group was a young couple with a baby about 2 years old, who at the moment have a one-bedroom.

I think this bodes well - already 10 groups of traffic through a place that's been listed for only four days.