I think that if there were an award for Girlfriend of the Year, I might have put myself in the running this past weekend. Dave’s mom arrives on Thursday (she’ll be in town for 2 weeks), so this weekend was one last frantic attempt to make Dave’s house look somewhat presentable. It seems like we’ve been doing these House Fix-Up Weekends for ages, but we’ve taken an awful lot of weekends off in between, so other than painting and replacing the floor in the living and dining rooms, we really haven’t done all that much to the rest of the house. Here was the weekend task list, along with what we still have left to do:

* We painted the guest room. It used to be an insanely bright, migraine-inducing yellow, and now it’s a soft, light lavendar. Soooo much prettier. I actually like being in that room now.
* Shopping! We got kitchen stuff (trivets, oven mitts, frying pan, etc.), cleaning supplies, a toilet repair kit to fix the broken toilet in the guest bath, curtain rods for the living room and guest room, and curtains for the guest room. Dave’s mom is like me, she needs it to be really dark when she’s trying to sleep, so we got dark purple (light-absorbing) curtains to complement the lavendar walls. Oh, we also got some cool framed art to hang in the guest room, too.
* I cleaned out the den/music room. (I would call it a den, because it’s a big room downstairs that isn’t the living room. Dave calls it the music room because it’s where he keeps all of his guitars and various other musical equipment.) I should mention that cleaning this room out was no easy feat. It was so cluttered when I started that you had to climb over furniture and piles of laundry to even get in the room. This room tends to be the usual hang-out for Greta, the semi-feral cat that comes inside for food but won’t let any human touch her, because there are lots of good places for her to hide in there. In fact, it’s so much her hang-out that while I was cleaning it, I found half of a disassembled mouse. I made Dave come get rid of it, I don’t do rodents. In my defense, I’m not a total weenie, there was also a spot of dried cat sick that I cleaned up without complaining, and a whooole bunch of dead bugs (this is the country, after all). And in Greta’s defense, it could have been one of the other cats that killed the mouse (or got sick in the corner), I have no proof that it was her. It’s just a hunch. In any case, the room is now just about as clean as it’s probably going to get. I even made room in there for the old sofa that was replaced in the living room.
* Dave tried to fix the broken toilet, but all the bolts are rusted over, and he has to get a hacksaw to cut them off. That’s a task for later this week.
* I cleaned the half-bathroom downstairs, and the master bath upstairs. I cleaned the tub in the guest bath, but with the broken toilet and tools scattered everywhere, I didn’t bother with the rest of it. Again, a task for later this week.
* Dave started painting the trim in the living room/dining room. He ran out of primer, so he has to finish that this evening.
* I taped off the borders in the guest room so Dave can paint the trim in there, too.
* After Dave does the trim, I’m going to head back over and do the floors downstairs. The laminate floors we installed are dusty, and the rest of the hardwood floors are in dire need of a good scrub-down.

I guess all of this sounds pretty selfless on my part, but the truth is, I am totally marking my territory in that house, and Dave knows it. I figure that I’m most likely going to live there someday, so I might as well make it comfortable. But at the same time, I want it to look nice when his mom gets here, and when my family comes over on Thanksgiving. So I’m not whining about the work that we still need to do, even though my back is aching and I have a dozen small injuries from what we’ve already done. It’s cool, it’s all the name of Parental Approval.