There's nothing like putting a house up for sale to force a disorganized, lifelong clutterer with bipolar disorder to change her ways -- and to send her into overdrive.
When our lawyer specified that the house was to be sold "as is," I figured heck, I'll straighten it up, but since the value is in the land anyway, I don't need to get all hot and bothered about it. That was before my brother Bill decided that just in case someone might want to buy the house, we had to get it looking really good, even if we weren't going to address things that would require $$$$, such as repairing textured ceilings or fixing a broken, expensive recessed light fixture. I adore Bill, but I can honestly say I wish he had NOT felt this was important.
Before Mom died I'd already started out by packing away most of her clothing, knowing it would be either put into a future garage sale or donated to charity. I did this because I wanted the closet space! (And now I wonder, since I've managed to fill 2/3 of her closet without buying new clothes, just how the devil I ever fit it all into my own closets in the first place.) Then I started cleaning out the kitchen, because kitchens are easy compared to almost any other room in the house. Once you get rid of the dozen duplicate utensils for turning over scrambled eggs, hamburgers, pancakes, etc., and all the other redundant kitchenware that breeds during the night to fill your drawers -- as I say, once you pull all of that out and put it in a box marked "garage sale," you can actually find logical places to put what is left. Neatly.
Every plate, dish, serving bowl, you-name-it, got washed, along with all the crystal and cut glass, the demitasse cups I found in a high cupboard packed in a coffee canister, and all the utensils and flatware. The dishwashers -- both the machine and me -- got a hard workout. But when the kitchen was done, for the first time since I've lived here (11 years), I knew where everything was and where it was supposed to go. GOD was I proud.
After Mom's death, my friend JoAnn came here to help clean out, clean up and declutter almost every weekend from February through May, and I worked a great deal on my own as well. The sense of accomplishment was almost overwhelming, and as I wrote in My Home, Past and Future, adding Geodon to my medication cocktail was a big help. But as the garage sale on May 30th drew ever nearer, my mind started into power mode.
How much of this is due to Geodon, there's no way to tell: the med change came about just as the pressure on me was increasing. While the choir in my ear grew fainter, the thoughts in my head went faster: I gotta remember to clean the cat boxes every day, I gotta get all my boxes of papers out of sight, I gotta get the mess out of the sunroom, and I gotta buy scratch cover for all those little nicks in furniture, I gotta buy more Febreze, I gotta, gotta, gotta keep moving!
Then, the day before the garage sale, seven people showed up and wanted to go through the house. I couldn't get hold of my friend, neighbor and realtor Wilma, who was going to help me with my first-ever garage sale. These people were hustlers, and I'm sure they got some real bargains -- but what am I going to do when a guy pulls out a hundred dollar bill and says, "I'll give you this for these two gold chains" but say okay? At least I held my ground and would not sell my grandfather's music box ("I'll give you $200. No? $500. PLEASE?") or the carved Indian heads from South America that my sister-in-law had already put her name on. Still -- I made more that day than in the two days the garage sale was officially open!
Bill and his wife arrived from California in the evening after the sale's first day. Sometime that evening I commented to my sister-in-law how proud I was of the organization of my kitchen. She shot back, "I don't know, all I see in here is cat food and cat poop!"
That set the tone for the entire ten days they were here. I was so hurt, and so angry, and maybe because of that I was extra sensitive to snubs for the rest of their visit -- but I don't think so. I felt devalued, ignored, belittled or attacked over and over again. This kind of friction has never happened before, so it has to have been due to the circumstances. I hope so. I don't ever want to be as angry with my family again as I was during that time. (For example, I found my beautiful bowl of yellow and white silk flowers in the donate-or-haul-away pile, and was told that "silk flowers are out for staging a house." Excuse me? AND this meant they were to be trashed, without asking me? Well, they're back inside now, and prominent in the staging. They look great.)
They'd said their visit was to do heavy cleaning and going through my parents' 47 years of accumulated possessions, but in fact very little actual cleaning was done -- there was just too much else to do. We wound up with one side of the garage completely filled with things I mean to keep -- and no, that's not really as much as you think. The other half of the garage had a huge pile of discards -- eventually taken away to be donated, recycled or junked by a hauling company. Furniture was moved around. Cleaning out the rest of my mother's bedroom and staging it took my two sister-in-laws a full day.
It took me three or four days of increasingly less patient requests to get the three bookcases taken out of my bedroom after I had packed up all the books. My suggestion that we move a desk in the corner of the dining room from the west wall to the north was ignored. I did it later myself, and because I had to drag and push it, a loose leg came off. I managed to wedge it into place, and yes, the room looks bigger with the desk moved. I was right.
By the end of the ten-day visit, enormous progress had been made, and I was exhausted but never slept well. Bill and his wife left Sunday afternoon, and by that evening I was already longing to strangle somebody. Did my brothers and their wives have any idea how much they had left me to do, alone, in the day and a half before the photographer was coming to take pictures of the interior of the house, in the two days before the broker open house?
