How long can this go on?
I know we are close. So close. All of the taupe painting is done. I completely repainted the green room today, when I had only intended on going over a few touch up spots with a roller. (Daughter thought it would work to touch up with a paper towel, since we were already using the paintbrush and rollers that were on site for the taupe. Spoiler: It doesn't work.) The closet doors are back on everywhere where they had been removed for painting or cleaning. The freshly cleaned heating vents are back in place, after I stripped off all of the latex paint that some lazy contractor had smothered over them. I started to wash baseboards again, after the kids did a once-over on move out. But there are so many spots where magic eraser can't remove the stains, or the paint is just chipped off anyway. So we will be painting baseboards all around. I feel like I just did that, even though it was over two years ago I did the baseboards in the entire house at the Original Park.
As little things went in, like the gleaming clean cool air return grate, or the glossy new programmable thermostat, the dollar signs went back into my eyes. I worried a couple days ago when the cat pee smell never seemed to recede that I wouldn't be able to rent the place at all, much less for the price I want (and now need to pay for new appliances and new windows). Either two days of letting Nature's Miracle do its stuff, or not wearing the same clothes I wore to sit on the floor and scrub out cat pee, seems to have done the trick. Once I can get to the point of mopping and shining the floor, I know I will be able to rent out the condo for top dollar (as they used to say on HGTV so often that I learned to hate that phrase).
The punch list seems never ending, even though I know we made serious headway on it today. Tomorrow we paint the purple room and the trim. The new towel bar needs a molly to mount the other side of the support (there is now one loose in the framing of the wall). There's a carbon monoxide monitor that can just plug in, and the kids should return the other smoke alarm that accdentally was packed and moved instead of putting in a battery and returning it to the ceiling. I want to make mopping the floor and putting down a urethane floor restorer the last thing we do before locking the door, so all the others need to be done first.
While I was painting the green room, I started thinking about how I am a product of my upbringing, and I was showing all of it today. It's my mother and stepfather's anniversary today, and because of that I thought of all they taught me about doing this kind of home maintenance myself. They never shied away from jumping in and getting it done, as we are doing now. I may not have been allowed to paint my room in 8th grade, the year they surprised me with it, but I wasn't excluded from remodeling after that. I expanded my train of thought from there, and realized how my dad and stepmother also factored into how hard I was working to flip this condo. Dad was air force, and I remember my mom telling me there was never a chance that he was going to fail a move-out inspection from base housing. I've never forgotten that, when I was beating the inspectors myself (particularly the ones who wanted a kickback from people who paid their friends to clean instead), or now, when I wanted the condo cleaned to those standards when the kids moved out. I felt like it was my heritage to scrub and disinfect every square inch of the place. I found a way to tie myself into both of my mothers too -- they both held real estate broker licenses, and they both have had rental income properties. All four of my parents would have done the exact thing we did. They would have kept working on this project until it was perfect, no matter how sore their backs or how much their feet hurt. No matter how long it takes, I am going to get it done right. My parents taught me too well to fail at this.
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