I have the cleanest house in the world...for at least the next few hours

I feel like I've been hit by a truck. Our house is being relisted today, so we spent the weekend cleaning and organizing. One would think that there wouldn't have been that much to do, given that we had been showing our house only two months ago. But no. Apparently, our last realtor, while very nice, was even more of an amateur than we thought, because she gave us a few minor chores and then told us that the house looked fine. Little did we know.

The Shark came by last Wednesday to walk throught the house and tell us what we needed to do to get it ready to show (and stage for the extensive photos he will be taking today and posting on his website). I followed him around with a pad of paper, writing everything down. The list was over a page long. We needed to:

• replace the light fixture in the dining room (which I've hated for the entire 7 1/2 years I've lived in the house, and have been meaning to get a new one for God knows how long, but just never got around to it)
• clean out and organize every closet in the house
• recaulk the bathtubs in both bathrooms
• get rid of the CD rack (which had 300 CDs in it)
• get rid of the huge easy chair in the sitting room (*sniff* -- I love that chair)
• rearrange the furniture in the guest bedroom
• get rid of as much as possible on the kitchen counters, which meant I had to redo every cupboard in the kitchen
• get rid of the drain-rack next to the kitchen sink
• move the stereo speakers off the top of the armoire in the living room and put them on the floor
• pop the screens out of every window and clean every window, inside and out
• clean out/organize the garage
• clean/organize the laundry room
• get rid of every last leaf and stick on the lawn and driveway, and possibly plant some flowers (in January!!)

Saturday morning, we slept in a little bit, but as soon as we got up, we were off and running. Every waking minute of the next two days was spent working. I loaded 900 songs onto my ipod in the process of culling through the CDs. I threw away the extra spices that were cluttering up my spice cupboard (I had 4 tins of bay leaves, 5 boxes of baking soda, 3 extra containers of nutmeg, 2 boxes of ground mustard, and 3 boxes of whole cloves). I organized my 40 pairs of shoes and my 25 purses. We washed, folded and put away every piece of laundry in the house. I caulked the tub and washed every window. We vacuumed, moved furniture, compiled massive piles for the dumpster and the Salvation Army. By the end of the day, my lower back was so locked up that I couldn't even sit, and even rolling over in bed proved to be enormously painful. Thank God for Dr. Lopez, my chiropractor -- he worked on me for 1/2 an hour this morning and told me I would need to do stretches "a bunch of times" over the next few days.

But the effort was worth it, because the house is pristine. We got everything done. And it will look perfect until either Jason or I set foot in the house again, because Pig Pen has nothing on either of us.