Now that we’re about to move we’re fixing up the little things in our old house. You know, the little things that take 30 minutes each but make life more pleasant. Like replacing the awkward deadbolt to the garage door with a convenient lockset with a real doorknob, so you can shut the door without a key and keep the cat out of the garage.

I’m totally kicking myself for being so lazy over the past five years and not doing this stuff before. It all seemed so complicated; how do you find a locksmith? What lockset? Now we’re rushing to do about twenty little things like this so the house sells well. At least the new owners will enjoy the work, even if we don’t.

The big thing we didn’t do when we moved in was repaint the house. The hideous, amateur paint job. (Seriously: painting is a professional craft. You can’t do it yourself. Don’t do a sponge decorative finish because you read an article in Sunset; it will look like measles. And don’t be lazy about surface prep; that flat latex you painted directly on old oil paint will chip off in weeks and those hinges are now forevermore half-painted.) We’ve been apologizing to guests for the ugly walls in this house for years. We’re finally fixing it, right after we leave the house forever.