Listen up, people. Yeah, you. Stop whispering in the back corner. Sit up straight. Eyes front. Everybody on their best behavior.

My father has started reading my blog.

Sweetpea toasts your health with a vintage Vitamin D.

I want to tell you that our house is looking great, that it is clean and sparkling and clutter free, with a fresh coat of paint and ready to be listed and shown. I want to tell you these things. But I would be lying.

My home looks awful. It looks like the home of a woman who has two toddlers, an obsessive love of blogging, and a very hairy dog. It looks like the home of someone who kept far too many aluminum formula cans as pencil cups, and maybe enjoys beer a little too much. The house, in fact, looks a lot like my desk:

I know. How do I get any work done? Or maybe it looks like I work all the time, in an Ernest Hemingway sort of way.

One of the first things advised if you plan to sell your house is to get rid of the clutter. If possible move a third of your stuff out of your house. That is back-breaking labor around here, when all of our walls look like this:

When we moved into the house, the books alone were three trips in a pick-up truck. Az the Worn and Weary looked at the boxes of books lining an otherwise empty house, and said, “I never want to move again.” I agreed. But now we have to pack them all up again and move them into storage. Prospective housebuyers are strange animals. They don’t want to see books. I am unclear on why exactly, but I suspect the Taliban. But then, I suspect them of a lot of things.

Prospective homebuyers have their own tastes. In preparing a house to show, you are supposed to make everything as generic as possible to appeal to as many people as possible. We will be repainting the living room (left pink by the previous owners) an innocuous grey color called “almond.” I am insisting on a little warmth for the entryway, a light apricot color whose name I forget, but it sounds edible, like every other color nowadays. Peachy cotton candy dreamsicle, or something.

But first we have to scrape. Scraping paint is like peeling a sunburn and improving your property value at the same time. I secretly and compulsively enjoy it. But each time I scrape peeling nasty paint off my entryway, I discover rich, stained wood underneath, or a bit of detail hidden by the decades of paint.

I feel the urge to strip the whole thing and find the gorgeous wood. Must. repress. this. urge. Stripping and refinishing wood is a huge job, with no real payoff if we move. And in a house this old, there is undoubtedly lead paint, which is dangerous for anybody, but especially the kids. So I must scrape off only the little bits necessary to repaint, and clean it up immediately. Bye-bye, beautiful wood. I will dream of you.

You may also see in the above photo a bit of our neighbors’ beat-up RV that is frequently parked outside our house. These are our worst neighbors, who definitely will not help sell the house, but there is nothing you can do about neighbors. Neighbors whose front porch is packed with a junk collection. Neighbors whose teenaged son plays his hip-hop music wall-shakingly loud when he works on his occasionally operating muscle car. But what can you do? Neighbors. We have more good ones than bad ones.

And our yard. Our sad, sad yard. It has never recovered from my blogging. I can post pictures of our flowers, but they will be close-ups, because I am just too ashamed of our yard. Here is a lovely gladiola blooming by the porch, a porch that awaits scraping and repainting.

As you can see, I have a lot of work to do. And I don’t know how I am ever going to get it done. Somehow, somehow. I will be enlisting aid. Az’s loving family will visit soon, and the men in his family do not consider a vacation complete without a project to do. Bless the southern farmboy work ethic. If I just leave the cans of paint and brushes out where they can see them, the job may get done without even being discussed. Fingers crossed.

For all you toilet-training mamas out there, you must see the Japanese potty-training video that Drama Mama has up on her site.

I will be showing it to JellyBean at the earliest opportunity.