Sunday, July 24, 2011

The Girl Who Powerwashed the Hornet's Nest

Our house sparkles. Day-glow, iridescent, crystal-clear, shiny. Well, parts of it do. In order to show the house we need to get it to the "uncluttered and immaculate" stage. I believe we have achieved "uncluttered" in exactly two rooms (both of them bathrooms), and "immaculate" on a few select planar surfaces of the house, mainly outdoors.

This weekend, we successfully tackled the last* large-scale project in the great summer-fixup: the garage. Our garage floor now has a shiny new, waterproof epoxy coating, complete with colored sprinkles that looks far nicer than our formerly-stained and patched floor. And our neighbors got to view the entire contents of our garage spread across our lawn for a little over twenty-four hours while it dried. But, we sorted and packed (and purged!), and the inside of the garage now looks wonderfully neat and organized.

After helping with the garage floor, I played with our new toy. We spent some of our garage-sale earnings on a powerwasher. Why oh why didn't we buy one of these suckers (blowers?) years ago? I am a total convert. Our concrete patio used to look stained and ugly after eleven years of water and the sooty mess that I think comes from living a little too close to the airport. Our white-vinyl-and-trex deck also had a stained floor and general layer of dirt that made it look grimy and that was nearly impossible to clean, even with a scrub brush and a bottle of housewash.

No longer.

With nothing but high-powered water, I have magically transformed our concrete patio into...wait for it...a concrete patio. Ok, a new-looking concrete patio. And the deck is shiny and sparkly.
And I took my life into my hands in dispatching a hornet's nest with my magic water wand. Poor things were tending eggs, and kept coming back looking for them (every time they would fly back around, I would magically summon a tornado from a safe distance away.) The deck is now free of bird guano and all of its crevasses are free of accumulated dirt.

While I was on a roll, I discovered that our old gray-spotted plastic patio chairs (which moved with us from our last apartment 11 years ago), were actually white. The back of our house was the same gray as the front (and not brown). And we can now sit on the deck box/bench without turning the seat of our pants gray. I might have kept going, but I was getting sunburned and I really don't want to see next month's water bill.

Now that most of the projects are done, we have to do some massive furniture re-arranging (i.e. staging) and some more massive decluttering (holy smokes do we have a lot of junk in our house). And hopefully at least one of the various flooring places we have called will eventually find us worthy of their carpeting and actually agree to both measure *and* install in a timely fashion (seriously, how hard can it be for people to accept the money that we're offering them?)

The house looks pretty good (if you can see past our boxes). Not so good that I'm changing my mind about moving (did I mention the granite countertops in the new place? Double ovens? 9-foot ceilings and wood floors?). But good enough that I will be proud to offer it for sale and hope that it earns a fast bid (or maybe 3? I could totatlly go for a bidding war....don't laugh...)

*Technically, the ginormous-yet-badly-overcrowded office closet may be a bigger project than the garage. But it is air-conditioned.

No comments: