Moving house

We’re putting our house on the market in the coming weeks and are currently getting it ready for public viewing.
When we were discussing this move we calculated that since we got together some 12 years ago we have moved house 11 times. 10 times around Belfast and once to Derry.
We once moved house to a rented house on a Saturday and moved out the next day so that might not count, we didn’t even unpack the boxes.
When we were in Belfast we must have viewed a hundred of houses over the years. A number stand out in my mind. One had an actual shrine to Gerry Adams with burning candles, the lace table, framed pictures cut out of newspapers, the works. Another had a life size statue of Our Lady at the top of the stairs. At another, which I brought my mother along to view, the gentleman who lived across the street greeted us enthusiastically with a friendly wave from his bedroom window wearing a smile and nothing else.
I don’t want our house to be on a list of scarily memorable houses that viewers speak of at parties to their friends so we have to make changes. We shall downscale our mammoth security measures, what we call our Caolan or Captain Destructo-proofing – or childproofing as other people call it – and paint every available surface magnolia.
This house has been a lived-in family home for four years and has several scars to prove it. The smiley faces my kids have drawn on the landing walls are cute but will have to go. The locks and bolts we installed to keep the kids from stuffing bananas into the DVD player or eating all the soap in the bathroom will have to be taken down. We will have to unscrew things that have been screwed down like, and I kid you not, our TV which was actually bolted to the unit (don’t ask). And screw back the things that have been broken off – like the two gigantic kitchen cupboard doors which Captain Destructo took off the hinges when he was going through his ‘I have superhuman powers and will prove it to you two by breaking everything that I touch’ phase when he was two.
The husband went to the “It’ll do the way it is” school of DIY. You have to have a GCSE in “I’ll do it tomorrow” before they let you in, and an NVQ in “Complaining whilst DIYing” is preferred but not necessarily essential. He got an A in that anyway so he’s set.
When we first moved to this house he put the undercoat on a large wardrobe so that it matched in with the colours in our son’s room. That poor wardrobe has waited four years for the next coat. Our house is littered with half done jobs. The hall walls are a different colour from the stair walls – he’s been ‘doing that tomorrow’ since 2005.
We may have vast experience in moving house but the vast majority of it was before we had children. Now we are going to have to get our home to showhouse standards and keep it there until some other person makes this place their home.
That will mean that the children and the dog will have to live in the garage with all the clutter, toys we can’t bring ourselves to throw out, Christmas trees and broken lawnmowers. They are all just too darn messy to live in the house. The husband and I aren’t allowed to sit down anywhere in the main house and must spend the next three months standing waiting in the hall for viewers, smiling maniacally, telling strangers that our neighbours are lovely and pretending that our house always looks like something out of the Next catalogue.