Because I love painting so much AND because painting the kitchen ceiling once just isn’t enough, the universe sent me this little jem last night:

The (full!) bathtub drain burst, apparently because whoever originally installed it did not use glue on one joint.  Awesome sauce.

The lighing is bad in the picture because we had to flip all the fuses because the light fixture was filling with water.  The good news, I guess, is it isn’t going to be to terrible to fix it.  But the ceiling will need to be painted …again.

Today, I did a little spring cleaning and pre-staging in the girls’ rooms.  I have written before about my war on Stuff and Clutter.  Despite the general messiness in the rooms, once they were cleaned up, it was clear we are winning the war.  Each girl keeps all her toys in her own room. The only exception to this is games and puzzles in flat boxes which are stored in our game/playroom.

In this round, I consolidated both girls’ books into one book shelf and removed a too-tall shelf from M’s room to make it roomier-looking for staging purposes.  I will let her have it back in the rental, if there is room.

I give you these photos as proof.  Also, I would like staging suggestions and help figuring out what kind of accessories I need to add.  Accessories are not my strong suit.   I am not removing the girls’ pictures from their rooms, though the rest of the house will be stripped of family pictures for the most part.

M’s Room:

Should I get a different quilt or comforter?  What should I put on the wall there? It needs more color.  Also, I will get some kind of small throw pillor (or two) to go with the white pillows.

I still need to recover that chair seat with a darker color fabric.

This is the bulk of M’s toys.  She also has a box of pokemon guys and pokemon cards in her closet that she wants to sell soon. Her books are currently located in L’s room.  The majority of these stuffies will be packed up for staging.

M’s closet. Pokemon guy box. Random pillow and blanket on the floor. I don’t know why.

L’s Room:

I have a bunch of different fabrics to frame to hang over L’s beds instead of headboards. Kind of like this.  I am also going to make poofs to hang from her ceiling like this.

Those two small pictures will be replaced by a mirror and the picture over the fireplace will be framed.  Should I removed the doll house from the fireplace?

These are all the girls’ books, except for holiday books which are going into the basement temporarily.  I need some kind of decorative crap to sit on top of the shelf.

L is much more of a clutterbug.  She is the queen of little bits of crap and toys that come with 4,000  accessories.  Today, she agreed to let about 1/5 of her toys go to make room for the new birthday presents she got.  This is what is left, minus a new American Girl doll and a few other things she currently has laying around the living room.  The box on the top shelf is empty, but it hides a messed up spot of paint on the closet wall.

I am open to any and all staging ideas. Bonus points if you have pictures I can copy.  I know the rooms look very white, but the walls are actually cream and the floors are stained quite dark.  We aren’t painting them colors, but I am open to pretty much any other suggestion.

I was going to write about L’s new taught-by-a-laowai chinese class, but then I thought it would be more appropriate to write about my newest distraction:

Calculating exactly how much new house I can buy with the cash I have on hand.

For example, last month I had the girl do a short and extremely painful modeling shoot for a local textbook company.  They got paid $150.  That is slightly less than one square foot of new house.  Only 2,699 more torturous days like that and I have my house free and clear!

(And yes, I am confiscating that money because they were not very good actors and that was stressful for me.  Also, they will live in the house.  We will be paying for college, so consider it a downpayment on that.)

I was going to write about that until I got distracted by this:

Yes. That is a roach.  I found an mother fluffing ROACH in my house.

A friend of mine found a roach in her house a few weeks ago which was yucky, but she called the exterminators and we all moved on with our lives.

Then she moved to a brand new, never had any people living in it before house and found a roach THERE.  This was upsetting for those of us who like to assume that brand new houses will result in brand new perfect lives, but she called the exterminators again and I got over it.  (But not before I told her 87 times about illegal Chinese roach chalk, which apparently is illegal and not sold here because our Chinese groceries are just not effing Chinese enough.)

Last week, I went over to fondle my friend’s brand new shiny house. I asked her many inappropriate questions like “how much does this cost” and “you paid WHAT for that??”  I also made her get out a tape measure to humor my need to know exactly how big the rooms were and how high the lovely ceilings were.    I also brought home a load of empty moving boxes.  Because some day we are going to move dammit.

I put those boxes in my detached garage because I am lazy. Then this weekend, Mr. A cleaned out my minivan for me because I am lazy  because he loves me.  He grabbed some boxes from the garage and filled them with all the crap the girls had crammed under their seats.  He brought the boxes in the house and I put all the girls’ junk on the stairs because I am lazy so they can learn some responsibility by finally putting that stuff away sometime in April.

So today, I was dustmopping the stairs (around all the girls’ junk) when I found it.  A nearly dead roach, legs still twitching, apparently smothering to death in a dust bunny that was as big as a real bunny.

After the freaking out that ensued (I will spare you, but it wasn’t pretty), I figured out the path of transmission. (House, new house, boxes, my house)  Then, I texted my friend repeatedly and called an exterminator. I suspect she called one too.

We are going to blast this mother effing house down to the studs with chemicals.  The roach was likely only in the house for about 24 hours, but it still could have had about 57 roachlettes in that time.  Mr. A went out and burned all the boxes in our fire pit and we will bomb the crap out of the garage too.  Maybe it will help with our squirrel problem.  And then, best of all, I think we will have to spray my van.

So that, my friends, is how you did not get a post tonight about Chinese school.