Finally things are starting to move

Finally my house is set to officially go onto the market. The website has been up for a week now and there have been some enquiries. Those who contacted the estate agent will be having a preview on Saturday before the official launch, with the 'For Sale' sign going up next Tuesday, but there are a couple of people who are going to be allowed a pre-preview tomorrow evening. There were to be three but one of them can't make it so presumably they will get to look at the place on Saturday instead.

In the meantime I am constantly rushing around removing the slightest blemish from the inside woodwork, rinsing dishes and putting them straight into the dishwasher, and cooking in my slow cooker because I don't want to use the stove and maybe get a spot on it.

The house is not mine any more; I am allowed to live in it as long as I don't mess it up. Here is hoping that it sells quickly and that I get my hoped-for price. But I am not holding my breath ...

How not to spend New Year

I am nearly healed now and in an earlier post I promised a picture of my black eye, which has descended to become a black and yellow cheekbone.

On January 2 I was in the garden with D2 readying my worm farm to be transported to her place; she asked me to bring over the hose and I managed to catch my toe and tripped over it, hitting my head on the upright for the clothes line during my descent. D2 is en emergency physician at one of our biggest hospitals so she raided my medicine cupboard and unearthed some 40-year-old combine dressing which she used to make a pressure bandage and carted me off to her hospital.

There my forehead was very neatly stitched - 14 little blue stitches in all, and handed a small tube of antibiotic ointment to keep the wound moist. The stitches are out now but I am still using the ointment as there are a couple of not-quite healed patches. I will have a scar through my eyebrow but hopefully it will not show tooo much; and incredibly I didn't break anything ...

A busy week but not as bad as I imagined

Yesterday an oven-cleaning specialist came and cleaned by grotty oven. It is not so much that I had neglected it but that it is supposed to be a self-cleaning oven and to get it to self clean one has to turn it up high and the fat and other debris is supposed to burn off. Unfortunately, the glass doors are not self-cleaning and clouded up with soot and smoke as did the surrounding chrome. This defied my efforts to remove it.

However the oven elf had a special tool which got rid of all the burnt-on blackness and he finished by adding a small tag to say that the oven had been professionally cleaned - so now I can't use that oven as I don't want to disturb the tag. Luckily I have double ovens ...

Late yesterday morning the photographer and dimension measurer came and did the place over. I must say that the photos are nice and the realtor and I spent a happy half-hour selecting the best of them to go into the brochure and onto the web-site which should be up in a couple of days. The house really looks nice. Today there was also a walk-through by three other agents from the realtor's office just in case they have someone on their lists who might be interested.

Also today a man came to fix the stove because the large hotplate decided to stop heating. Luckily it was just a broken wire and he was able to fix it. The stove dates from the 1960s and I wasn't sure if it was still repairable or, indeed, if there were still spare parts if needed. (There aren't).

The woodworking elf who is Irish and should properly be described as a leprechaun has to come back and do a couple of small things which were forgotten and the chief elf, who is on holidays, left me an unintelligible message from his holiday hideaway so I am really none the wiser as to what he has organised.

The cleaning lady is, I hope, coming on Friday to do the windows and the white woodwork and I just have to keep it all clean and tidy until it is sold, and get the pool canopy repaired and the broken air-switch fixed and the perennially leaking pump fixed.

This is all a very boring list of what has been happening for the last two days but I need to get it down in writing while the process is still clear in my mind and so that I can look back in a couple of years and realise that I survived it all.

From the measurements obtained yesterday it appears that the new apartment is about 6 square metres bigger than this house which suits me fine as I hate feeling hemmed in.

My black eye is nearly better and the stitches are out of my forehead so I must write up what happened and post a rather gruesome picture taken the day after my fall on New Years Day,

It has not been a good start to 2011

The elves have basically finished with their makeover and I have the house to myself again for a short while. Next week the marketing starts in earnest with the photographer and the person who measures up the house coming on Monday; the website goes online on Tuesday; also on Tuesday the sales team will be going through the house. I am not sure what their role is but I gather that the process is not a lot of fun. Saturday of next week is the previews for people who might be interested in buying the property and on January 22 is the first open day.

Hopefully a cleaner will be coming to do the windows and detail the house the day before the previews and the professional oven cleaner will be coming on Monday along with all the estate agent's people to gather information for the website.

I will make a separate entry for the saga of my black eye and post a rather gruesome close up of my poor face with its 15 stitches and all the bruising. It garnered a lot of sympathy from the elves, bless them ...