It's great to have a clean and shiny house. It's not so great when we want to find something. I can guarantee you it's not where I last put it. It's tucked away somewhere, out of sight, in order to make the house clean and uncluttered. Oh, it's cluttered all right. Just hidden clutter.
The dog bed is rolled up and stuffed in the back of a cedar chest under some hanging clothes in the closet. The shampoo is stuck in a box in another closet. Countless things have been stuck in drawers; they are so accessible for shoving something in. The wall calendar is...let's see, where did I put that?
I think selling houses is for people younger than we are. People still with all their brains, not just part of them. It's hard enough to remember where you put the keys; it's much worse when you've packed keys into boxes. (Yes, our spare house key, which we need to give to the real estate agent, is packed in a box somewhere, so we had to have another one made.)
We are cleaning like the white tornado. You Baby Boomers will remember the white tornado; you younger ones will say, "Huh?" Here's a quote from a computer web site:
AJAX officially stands for Asynchronous Javascript And XML. Of course for me, a baby boomer who grew up watching TV commercials back in the Sixties, AJAX will always be a "white tornado" for cleaning my kitchen floor, or a "white knight on a horse" who would point his lance at people in the park and their clothes would turn magically clean because AJAX was "stronger than dirt."
So tonight we have a shiny clean house ready for showing. We can't find anything, but it certainly looks good. Just don't open any drawers.