This Is All I Could Come Up With While I Was Procrastinating

So tomorrow our realtor is coming to our house and putting it on the market. It's not particularly exciting news, I know, but it is a big thing for us because that means that somehow in the next twenty four hours we have to make this house look like we have walked around in Padded Socks for the past six years and only Gently Tippy-Toed on the carpet. Oddly enough, prospective buyers aren't terribly interested in carpet that shows evidence of Stomach Virus '04 or The Time The Dog Was Incontinent.

Go figure.

Also: I have long spoken ill of the flat paint that the builder used in our house. When we moved in the painters left us everything that was leftover, but when I tried to do touch-ups the color was lighter and didn't look right at all. If I were my mother-in-law I would now say something like, "Well, maybe it was because it wasn't a very taupe-y taupe, it was just more of a taupe, but not too much grey in it, and if the paint store didn't mix it just right you might see a little too much yellow in it and it figures that the paint wouldn't touch up right because I just can't have anything and you know how every single time I find something I like it doesn't work right, or it's discontinued or they don't have my size because I promise that I don't try but I've lost some weight, I mean I haven't meant to but it's just because we've been staying busy around here and you know Mother and I don't eat much, sometimes we just like to split a pimento and cheese sandwich and eat a Pringle."

Sorry. Sometimes I start to miss Martha and it makes me feel better to talk like her for just a second.

Anyway, you can imagine what parts of my walls look like six years later, especially considering that for the last two a certain little boy has rubbed his sticky little fingers all over them. But I figure that whoever looks at the house won't think it's cute that one time Alex stuck his hand in a jar of peanut butter and then "made train tracks" on the walls in the dining room, so I figured I had to come up with a solution.

So this afternoon I marched right into the paint store, showed them the paint chip that I've carried around in my wallet for six and a half years, and asked them to mix up a gallon in their cheapest flat paint.

And can I just tell y'all? It worked like a charm. I hit all the high traffic areas, and they look great. You can't even tell I painted.

So I'm revising my original opinion on flat paint. It seems that I was wrong. Flat paint, when mixed to the correct color specifications, is delightful.

Isn't this riveting information? All this talk of home improvement?

Coming up in my next post: we'll be talking about gutters!