Now that I am a full-time Army Wife ...

After leaving my full-time employment on Friday for a full-time Army Wife position, I quickly jumped into my new role. (Yeah, yeah, I have somehow been doing both jobs, but you know what I mean.)

Cleaning and scrubbing and dusting and packing and organizing and staging. Oh my! And that was just in the kitchen this last weekend.

In case I haven't mentioned it before, we've been in this house for 5.5 years. We've accumulated a lot of stuff (read fiestaware) in those years. Including some sticky black crud on the tops of the upper cabinet doors that must have started collecting long before we moved in. Needless to say, we hadn't cleaned that aspect of the cabinets since we moved in. Yuck!

I started with the kitchen because we want to take a few things with us to Jack's school, and we need some things to go in Jack's car. A 10.5-week stint in a Residence Inn without some of our own kitchen stuff could be rather frustrating. So we are taking items like the rice cooker, favorite frying pan, cutting boards, a tad of fiestaware, miscellaneous spices, new $23 wok, newly sharpened knives and carrying case like you see on Top Chef.

I've done some strategic rearranging to hide the piles of plates, like pushing them to the back of the pantry and then placing the crock-pot in front of it. That way I don't have to do a temporary packing before the movers come to do the real packing. We'll see what the staging expert realtor has to say about that technique.

One thing this perfectionist (read borderline OCD) can do is get so caught up in the minutiae that I miss the big picture. So a daily reminder to myself is to remember that this is an 70-year-old house and no amount of cleaning and painting and staging will make it look new.

OK. I gotta go finish the kitchen today. Catch you later.