We have spent the last two weeks in frantic activity, turning out everything and turning our house into the show home that the agent wanted to see when the photos were taken for the website.
The kitchen before.
To say this has been blooming hard work is the understatement of the year.
(So far.)
Our garage is full of the excess contents of the house that littered all the surfaces such as the kitchen worktops, bathroom and other furniture. That’s after we had filled my dad’s garage and spare room with as much excess as we could get into the space available. We even removed six bookcases (and all the books contained thereon) from the third bedroom so that people can see properly how big it is. (Definitely big enough for a bed. A single bed would leave lots of space for furniture. A double bed would leave about the amount of space that you get in the “master bedroom” of some of the new houses we have been looking at lately. I don’t think we could physically fit into a new house.)
We do have an awful lot of stuff. It’s tempting to just scoop it all up and take it to the charity shop or tip. In reality, it represents so many chapters of our lives so far that we are painstakingly sifting through each cupboard and each drawer to inspect the contents and decide properly what we want to keep, what we can do without and what we can throw away.
It’s not easy. It sounds easy enough but when we find ourselves looking at a pile of stuff that hasn’t been used for an embarrassingly long time, but cost some of our hard earned cash and has its own story to tell, it’s difficult to make the decision to part with it.
I have to balance this against the knowledge that when I have been in our little cottage in Le Grand-Pressigny for an extended period, managing perfectly well with a fraction of the stuff we have at home (thinking that we still think of our house in Derbyshire as “home”), if someone had sent me an email saying “I am sorry to report that your house in England has blown up” (or burned down), I would not have been the least bit perturbed. I would have missed some of my cake stands and crockery, and my beads, but not the rest of the stuff.
This weekend we have been having a bit of a breather before the real work really starts. We have hidden as much as we could behind the cupboard doors and in my dad’s house. Now we have to truly get down to the nitty gritty of really sorting out and getting rid, whilst trying desperately to keep the place clean and tidy just in case someone wants to come and have a look round.
We are in limbo, playing the waiting game. We can’t move forward now until the house is sold and the money is in the bank. This is not easy for a Sagittarian, whose main accomplishments do not include being patient.
Have a good week !!