Make yourself useful and...

tackle one project in your house that you usually avoid like the plague.
Let me tell you why this is what I'm doing today:
I am super-determined to sell my house. Like, last week.
I'm so over it. It kills me too, because I loved it so much for such a long time. I always wanted this house, because my grandparents have always lived next door to it and I've just seen it forever and for some reason knew I'd live here. My husband was not so sold on it. He still isn't sold on it. I think he resents ever having had to live here at all. We bought it from my father for WAY more than he paid for it and I think that at the time we were too starry-eyed to haggle or walk away, since we were already renting here anyway. But alas, when you're like 21 years old, you usually don't buy a house in the first place and now we own property which I guess is good in the grand scheme of things. So we've been here for a long, long time (I moved in here in the summer of 2004, and the hubs moved in after we got married that October. I was slightly more old-fashioned about those things then. *Sigh*), long enough to have replaced almost everything, like floors and walls and cabinets and water heaters and every single appliance in the kitchen. Someone is going to get what amounts to a brandy-new house. For a while after we moved in, we ripped up the floors and painted all the rooms colors that made us feel good. My kitchen is lemon yellow. My bathroom is orange, like as orange as a pumpkin. The bedroom? Hunter green and purple. Yeah, really. The living room walls are covered with reclaimed barn wood that will probably be the only thing left standing when the house eventually makes the slow slide down the hill and into the lake. Stenni's room is a plain mocha color but we figured that when she's old enough to know what she wants we would change it. I guess now we won't have to. It's very strange to deconstruct the house to the way someone else would want it instead of the way hubs & I want it. The "red room," which always had black and red walls and black carpet and red furniture since we built it, is now a subdued blue color that just seems disappointing. The new backsplash in the kitchen, while very nice, is definitely not what I would have chosen. It's white with a little strip of copper-colored glass tiles at the top. They had to take down the giant shiny copper tiles that I installed myself as a backsplash when I first moved in. It broke my heart.
Here's the a link to the listing on craigslist. I think we'll meet with a realtor within the next week to get the ball rolling. There are still a million projects to be done but it feels like everything I do to get the house ready to sell is killing a little piece of myself. We have been so close to selling so many times now, and this time I found a house that I really do love and could see myself living in for a long, long time. I know that in order to have room for more kids and for hubs to be closer to work this is the next logical step, and I know that I can't stand in the way of it. A new house is an adventure, and the idea of decorating and furnishing it is honestly thrilling to me. Plus there's a bar in the basement, which helps. But I just can't help but thinking that as a homemaker, I've made this home. And I've made it mine. And without it, I won't know what to do with myself. It's terrifying. Any suggestions, besides suck it up? Because that's what I'm going to have to do in the end anyway.
Anyway, for make yourself useful Monday, I'm going to make myself useful and tackle my bathroom. The tub needs a-scrubbin and I have too many creams and oils and other various potions that have been sitting in the medicine cabinet unused for years. I want some potential buyer to think "ooh, this bathroom looks clean and bright and awesome, and there aren't 17 hand soaps all over the place" instead of, "seriously? what does one person need with 12 kinds of moisturizer?"