Fizzbo

That's how I hear you pronounce FSBO, the acronym for For Sale By Owner, a perhaps Herculean task that we are currently engaged in. Our first Open House is on Sunday, an ad is in the NYTimes and on craigslist, we have a website, and we only have... about 1 million projects to accomplish in the next 40 hours. This should be a new HGTV show, kind of like a combination of Get it Sold, 24 Hour Design, and Designed to Sell, with just a touch of 24 thrown in to really capture the drama.

Allow me to raise the stakes: Other than the few hours we can eke out tonight after Clio goes to sleep (at 9, if we're lucky), we will have both children on our hands for all 40 of the remaining hours. And it is supposed to rain straight through until Sunday.

Last night I painted the walls of the outdoor stairwell to the basement, in the dark, holding a flashlight between my thighs. Today Dave spent 7 hours stripping the front door (stripper doesn't seem to work as well in 90% humidity) because--naturally--it is not a standard size so we could not go for "money" in the money or time dilemma and simply buy a new one. We hired cleaners to come in and do the heavy stuff (ceiling fans, floor scrubbing, dusting the lampshades), and then proceeded to track dirt through the house as we brought boxes to the car to go to storage. We are trying to be smart about all of this, and not send things to storage that will have to be repacked or in some way reconsidered for our actual move. We are holding on to things to try to sell later- but that means they need to be photographed and inventoried before they go to storage. How many of you know that I am excellent at doing things the hard way?

Still to do: paint that front door (buy paint at Home Depot), clear out the basement and stage the office as a guest room, organize the closets, read the For Sale By Owner Handbook so we know what to do if we actually get any offers, get flowers and balloons and pre-made cookie dough (who doesn't like chocolate chip cookies at an open house?), oh, and a cute umbrella stand in case it does in fact rain on Sunday- no need to have wet umbrellas dripping through the clean house. Make take-aways (flyers and stat sheets on the house) and have them copied: What's the right amount? Who knows? Paint the frame around the bathroom ceiling light and scrub the bathroom ceiling. Etc. Etc. Etc.

And tomorrow I am supposed to go to the opening of This World and Near Ones, a major 19-artist installation on Governors Island, the last project I really worked on for Creative Time that will be realized, where one of the two books I just edited will also debut. Do you think I have time to go? Let me mention that to get there I would need to take a subway to a ferry.

So, this post is partly a post- this is very much where we're at right now- but it is also an excuse, to let you all know why I have not been posting so much. There's so much to tell, so little time to tell it.

Wish us luck on Sunday!