Cleaning For The Cleaners

I spent about eight hours cleaning today, which is about eight hours more than I wanted to spend cleaning today, but that's how it goes sometimes. A man from our housing office was coming out to take a look at the state of the house and how many repairs would need to be done before they could rent it out to someone else, and I had this idea that the chest-high piles of random things in the middle of our living room, piled dishes in the sink, carpet that hadn't been vacuumed since I could last see it (three weeks ago, maybe) and mounds of dirty laundry were going to get us some sort of bad score. So I did a Pre-Move Cleaning. This is not to be confused with the Pre-Post-Move Cleaning, which will be when I clean the house from top to bottom after we move all our stuff out in preparation for the professional cleaners we will hire to actually clean everything. I have inherited the "clean for the maid" gene directly from my mother, and it's impossible to shut off.

I was picturing the housing representative as some sort of icy woman with bushy eyebrows and hair slicked back in a bun who would be there three hours. She would open all of the cabinets and look under the sink, glare at everything, say "Hmmm" in a disapproving tone, and scribble things on a clipboard in red pen. Periodically she would raise her eyebrows in a look of disbelieving horror whenever she found some particularly noxious transgression.

The person who showed up was a very friendly elderly gentleman who had very reasonable eyebrows. Not only did he not use a red pen, but didn't even say "Hmmm" once. It's lucky that he was a cat person, as Loki made instant friends with him and followed him around the house demanding to be scratched behind the ears. No doubt it was Loki's influence that got us our good report. He told me to weed the garden and replace the cat-chewed blinds, but otherwise things looked fine. So long story short I spent eight hours cleaning and then the guy was in my house for maybe five minutes. It was rather anti-climatic after all that fuss. Oh well.

We'll be moving all of the big stuff over this weekend, and then we should have another week or so to get everything ready for the final walkthrough. Right now I'm trying to figure out exactly how to talk to Connor about Saturday, as I want it to be as easy for him as possible. He doesn't adapt to change very easily, and after the notorious Wedding Freak Out I'm a little nervous about the whole thing. We've kept everything around and above his crib exactly the same to make sure that he's not freaked out beforehand, but I'm sure that he'll be a little nervous sleeping in a strange house the first few nights. Luckily he seems pretty acclimated to the apartment-- goodness knows he's been there enough. Does anyone have any tips for making the move with as little stress as possible for the boy?

~Jess