February 25, 2005

Spring Cleaning (And an Unusual Number of Pornography Mentions)

So we've decided to put our house on the market next weekend. Given the metro-DC real estate market insanity (think Victoria's Secret on once-a-year clearance sale day), it should sell in less than 48 hours. We bought it less than an hour after it went on the market, and hopefully we'll be as lucky selling it.

Therefore, this weekend will be devoted to cleaning the house and making it presentable. We started a few days ago and did the downstairs. Basically, you have to put away every single personal item--the goal is to make the house look like a model home, beautifully decorated, but unlived in. The issue is, our house is not beautifully decorated. The King and I prefer black leather furniture that looks like it came from a frat house basement. We've got tacky alabaster statues--about twenty of them--of naked women. Granted, they are Greek goddesses from when the King lived in Crete, and at least they aren't out on the front lawn, but they're still naked-lady statues.

We have my collection of erotic books and pagan books, from my dabbling in Wiccanism. Given the astounding percentage of fundamentalist Christians around here, those probably will ensure that at least one woman will screech, "Bob, we can't buy this house! It's inhabited by SINNERS! We'll never get their filthy God-cursed aura out of the carpeting!"

Plus, we definitely don't have enough closet space to hide all the vibrators and porn.

(Geez, when I look at it like that, we definitely shouldn't be allowed to be parents.)

So anyway, given all of the above issues, we're working on it. We've found ourselves disagreeing on what constitutes "personal items that must be hidden" and what are "beautiful home decorations." For instance, I said, "King, your collection of seven dusty and mismatched model cars should be stashed in a box." He said, "But these are collectors items! Everyone will think they're really cool!" Me: "I don't. And they're not. If they're from Ace Auto Parts and you picked them up while getting a new spark plug, they're not considered collectors items. Trust me."

Of course, just then, 20/20 had a bit on some guy who sold his childhood collection of those itty-bitty Hot Wheels cars for like forty-three bazillion dollars. Which the King thought made his point.

And then he indicated the three porn mags and two overdue library books that I had missed under the coffee table and I had to shut up.

1 comment:

MsPrufrock said...

I had to dig through your archives to ensure that what I'm going to mention was actually posted by you. So, speaking of porn, I have told The Dude about your 57 inch hdtv porn-viewing, and he is deep green with envy. For some reason downloading grainy porn from the internet and watching it on our 17' monitor just ain't doing it for him.

So more about porn...kinda. Your spring cleaning reminded me of my ::ahem:: goodie wardrobe, where I keep my ::ahem ahem:: outfits. I'm terrified that one day I'll leave the door slightly ajar when the in-laws or nieces/nephews are over and they'll stumble upon my treasure trove of dress-up clothing. You know, nurse uniform, short latex minidress, corsets, etc...When we come to sell the flat I'm going to nail those doors shut I think.