After all the painting, cleaning, fixing and other preparations, the neighborhood tour went very well on Saturday.

Friday night we had a babysitter and went to a pre-tour party for all the owners of homes on the tour. This involved getting a quick tour of all the houses that would be open the next day. We were too tired to make it through them all, but the ones we did see were all neat. They included two small bungalows with really nifty colors and funky modern art, a ultra modern condo with a tower that made Justin dream of mounting a red eye into it and having a Sauron room,anda huge Victorian house that has just been completely remodelled and I found jaw-droppingly beautiful, but it's $750,000 asking price is a wee bit above what I imagine I will ever pay for any house.

Justin and I both woke up early on Saturday morning and did a few last minute things like sweeping the front walk, painting some trim on the porch columns, and marking a few rooms as being not on display. Then we went to a pre-tour breakfast so that we wouldn't have to cook at home, after which I took The Middle Girl off to her friend's house for a birthday party and the day and another friend of ours came and got the other two. We'd taken our dog to the kennel on Friday, so that the house wouldn't be covered in mud and dog hair after it was cleaned and because had the dog remained during the tour, he would have gone insane with joy at the thought of all those new people to jump on.

The tour started at 11 and since we were one of the later homes on the list, we didn't have any one show up until about 11:20. After that there was a pretty steady stream of visitors. The people who renovated our house and whom we've talked to a few times came to see the place which was great. They thought the place looked really good and we found out a few things -- such as where our kitchen cabinets, which we'd always suspected had been salvaged from somewhere had come from and where the fireplace mantels that used to be in our house went (they are now in the possession of the mother of the two brothers who put in most of the work) . We had pictures on display of what the house looked like before it had been renovated in 1990, when we bought it in 2002 and what it looks like today. Those were a big hit with a lot of tour takers.

I surprised and pleased to hear probably half a dozen people say that ours was their favorite house on the tour. Most of them said they appreciated that it looked like a house in which people actually lived. It was cleaner than usual, but we didn't go out of our way to hide the Legos and other stuff like that. I did hide anything I thought people might be interested in making off with, but we don't have much that people would want to make off with anyway, so that hadn't taken long. We had several people ask if we travelled a lot, because our living room is a collection mostly of stuff picked up in our earlier lives like when Justin lived in Taiwan and I when I was in Europe during college. It's our travel room, even though we haven't been any where since we came back from Alaska. I was also surprised by how many people loved the table cloth I had on the kitchen table (which looks like a quilt top). I think they were all disappointed when they asked where I got it and I told them TJ Maxx. I think they were expecting something fancier or more exotic.

By the time the last people came through at 5, I was worn out. The kids came home about 5:30 and then there was an after party and dinner at another house that night.

All in all, it was a lot of fun, the tour raised necessary funds for the neighborhood and community center, and although I always get a bit of house envy seeing where everyone else lives, I wasn't embarrassed to be on the tour with either the bigger and fancier places or the artsier, funkier places.

Here are the pictures of the inside of the house, all neat and clean and tour ready.