It's a shame

I know it's an old joke, but it's a shame when you finally get around to fixing up your house to make it attractive to buyers, you kind of hate to sell it!

We're doing things around here that we should have done years ago. Instead we've just been living with the inconvenience. For 9 years!

Case in point: We have a closet in the kitchen, tall and narrow. When you open it up, there is an accessory hinged to the right side of the closet. This accessory is a stack of shelves which you pull forward and around to get into the back part of the closet. Now this stack of shelves is full of canned goods - heavy canned goods. The shelves weren't screwed in properly in the first place, and have progressively come unhinged enough to make it very difficult to pull them out and around as they were meant to do. You have to grasp the accessory, pull up on it (against the weight of all the cans) to enable it to clear an obstruction and release itself. We have been fighting (and cussing) this piece of equipment for the 9 years we have been here. We knew if a potential buyer came through the house and opened that closet up, they would cuss too. So my husband Ed decided to change it.

He completely unscrewed the accessory shelves and made the closet into a broom closet, with the back shelves used for cleaning supplies. He took the part he removed and stood it up in an adjoining little room (used to be the back porch for the house) and, with another set of bookshelves, made a walk-in pantry for all our food. Now it is a pleasure to open the kitchen closet, and it would be easy for someone to put a lock on it to keep young kids away from cleaning supplies.

My question: Why have we lived with that "inconvenience" for 9 years and now finally fixed it before we sell the house? Sometimes we wonder where our brains are.