When I was growing up, I had a friend whose mother made us walk up the wood tread on the side of the stairs and not on the carpet runner that ran down the middle.
In the same house, the sitting room in the front of the house had a cord, kind of like those that you see in front of museum displays, which blocked entrance to the room.
No one -and I mean no one -ever sat in that sitting room.
This woman was, to put it mildly, a little obsessive about cleanliness in her home.
To give her her due, however, the home was beautiful and had been featured in some magazines, but trying to live a normal life in a display home must have been a bit taxing.
These memories of Jen's house came flooding back to me after we put our house up for sale a couple of weeks ago.
We spent several hours cleaning both inside and out and trying to unclutter 19 years of family life in our home.
And the house is looking pretty good, I have to admit, but suddenly, I feel that I'm no longer living at my home; I feel that I'm in a show home. Anything taken out has to be put away.
There's no more putting the feet up on the coffee table and strewing books and magazines on the floor beneath me.
God forbid I should go into the kitchen and fix up a plate of nachos to sit with in front of the TV.
"Clean up your mess. Watch what you're doing!" is the mantra these days.
It seems to me that the vacuum cleaner is the new pet in the home, always underfoot and always looking for attention.
But we have to be ready because any time might be SHOWING time and the SHOWING is the be-all and end-all when you're trying to sell your house.
Actually, the most difficult thing about selling our home hasn't really been the selling at all. It's deciding where we're moving to.
It seems that every idea we have of where we'd like to live is torpedoed by one well-meaning friend or another: "You don't want to live there, the construction is really bad," or "Avoid that complex, the strata council is dysfunctional," and the ever-popular, "You want to live in that neighbourhood?! What are you thinking?"
At the moment, I wouldn't be too distressed if our house doesn't sell so that I can just sit back and enjoy my summer.
The thought of packing, finding a new place to live and moving is a bit overwhelming.
In the meantime, though, we'll be keeping the place clean, so if we invite you over, don't be insulted if we ask you to take off your shoes.
Or even more likely, if we don't invite you in, it's not that we don't want to see you, it's just that we may be having a SHOWING.
