work work work

Oh, but my feet hurt. M and I have been on the go since eight this morning. Tomorrow is the big family show-off-the-house dinner, and there were a few things that just had to be done before such a thing could take place. So today, we have done sixteen thousand loads of laundry, mopped the kitchen floor, cleaned the bathrooms, used the carpet cleaner in the sunroom.. twice, gone shopping, cleaned the living room including baseboards, etc--we didn't do it when we moved in because we ran out of time and we're not using that room, mopped the entryway, put a million things away, did the dishes, made two loaves of bread, stacked boxes in the basement and in the storage closet, put away a bunch of clean clothes and stacked the broken tree limbs in the front yard into a pile on the side of the house. The biggest job that we did, and the one that made the most difference.. we probably wouldn't have started if we'd known how long we would actually work on it. There are three windows in the living room, and they were indescribably dirty. I was just cleaning the inside of them when I realized that I could at least open the window and vacuum out the dead bugs and dirt, and then somehow we ended up taking all the outer panes and screens out and scrubbing the windows and shutters from the outside. Then we notice that there's a garden hose in a heap, so we end up spraying down the porch. And then the boy gets it in his mind to fill a spray bottle with bleach and attack the gutters, but then didn't follow through, so we have two feet of pristine white gutter in the midst of all the green. I have NO IDEA how this house got so dirty, both inside and out, but I suspect that they could have actually sold the house for more than we paid for it if it had been cleaned. Anyway, the windows look SO GOOD. This sounds stupid, but you can actually see through them from the outside. You couldn't really do that before. Seriously.

So anyway, now we're tired and we still have more to do before we can go to bed, and we'll still have things to do in the morning. For one thing, I was planning on fixing my three lasagnas and a baked spaghetti tonight so I could just stick it in oven tomorrow from the fridge, but that is apparently not going to happen. The good thing, though, is that after tomorrow is over, we will have a house that is clean and livable, and we won't have to spend every single free moment working on the house. That will feel nice. There's still plenty more to do (I have a feeling that this will always be the case) but this weekend will make us officially moved-in, I think. And now it'll be time to start trying to get things in exactly the right order. That part is fun, though. (Also, awful, but let's not think about that.)