October 7th was Pacific Grove's annual Historic Homes Tour, and for the first time, we were on it. The premise is simple: you clean house for a month, leave your front door open for six hours, and let 500-600 total strangers walk through your house. Easy, right?
We're not complaining. After all, we volunteered. We'd considered being on the tour last year, but the house just wasn't ready. There were too many holes in the floors (figuratively speaking) for it to be safe for visitors. Amazing how quickly another year came around, though, and suddenly we're up against a deadline.
Which was partly the point. We knew that if we were going to open the house to visitors on October 7, we'd better be done with our remodeling chores sometime on October 6. We got close.
The bathroom was almost done. It still needs trim around the door, and I can see a lot of small details that didn't get finished properly. It also forced us to clean up the backyard and hide the biggest piles of junk. A little paint here; a little spackle there; a lot of dusting and vacuuming everywhere, and everything's ready to go.
Each house on the tour (there are about a dozen) gets its own set of volunteer docents who guide visitors through the house, make sure nobody gets lost, and generally act polite and answer questions. That means Kathy and I had to "train" our docents a week beforehand, in that we led them through the house and told them stories that they could later relay to their guests. In all, we had 12 docents, who worked in two shifts of six, with two on each floor. That seemed like a lot of docents to us, but that's the way the Heritage Society likes to do it.
They also hinted that they'd prefer it if we weren't at home during the tour itself. That suited us fine; we didn't want to be hanging about while strangers whispered about the hideous wallpaper, odd paint colors, etc. In order to gently nudge us to a safe distance from home, the Heritage Society puts on a nice brunch for all the affected homeowners. And, ironically, provides us tickets so that we can visit everyone else's house.
Fortunately, it was a beautiful day out, and Kathy and I had fun walking all over town spying on houses or just enjoying the day out. When 4:00 PM rolled around and we were finally able to return home, we didn't notice anything out of place. Remarkably, there was almost no evidence that anyone had been there. Had it not been for the balloons out front and the article in the newspaper, I wouldn't have suspected a thing. Even so, we think we'll take the next few years off. Too much pressure getting everything ready by October 7.
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