a sad day in yarn land

My house has been on the market about a month now, and I know it's early to get discouraged, but I'm discouraged. I've been reading about staging your house and companies that will help you and what they charge and how much faster your house will supposedly sell. If it works, it's worth every penny. Also, if they do the work, I'd say it's worth every penny. If they just tell you what to do and you have to do it, not so much. I was looking at some of their before-and-after pictures, and most of them basically look like they picked up and put away the junk the homeowners left scattered around, and added a few plants. That's hardly rocket science.
Anyway, comparing my house with some of the "after" pictures and the well-staged homes I've seen at open houses and in pictures online, I realized that my yarn stash is definitely not helping and needs to be relocated. I find this pretty painful because I have an overly sentimental view of the yarn. Last summer it was basically what kept me from having a total breakdown and losing it completely. I have friends, I have family, they love and support me and did their best, but in the end playing creating with yarn was what kept me clinging to that last thread of reason until I could get strong enough to pull myself back up. Whenever times get tough, I find it comforting to go into the yarn room and look at it and touch it and just be surrounded by it. Well, now you all know I'm crazy, and it really was making the place look "cozy." Everybody knows cozy is bad, and in the end it's more important to facilitate the sale of the house and moving on than to keep the yarn on the walls as a giant security blanket.
It really was cool, though, I thought. Here's what it looked like.




I haven't finished the bookshelf area you see in the first picture, but the rest is gone. And all is not lost--I'm taking it to work to try to alleviate the beigeness there.
Meanwhile, as I was trying to get everything tidy and impersonal, my unfinished hat stood out as something a stager would remove. Here's where we left it in April.


That hat has been sitting around waiting to have six stitches bound off and a seam sewn down the back ever since. What was my problem? Aside from laziness, I couldn't remember how to bind off, and I didn't have a plan for how the heck to sew the seam with this big fat yarn. So last night I looked up how to bind off, which is really so simple, and I decided to crochet the seam. It's not the most elegant way to do it, but it worked out fine. Next time I'd probably use a different yarn--something more normal and thinner in similar colors--and sew the seam. Duh, but I didn't think of that until after I had already finished. Somehow I felt like I should be dissatisfied with it and undo it and redo it some sleeker way--I guess I've been reading too much Yarn Harlot--but I'm tired of being a perfectionist. I like the hat how it is, it fits my head nicely, and I'm planning to keep it, so there is absolutely no reason why it can't stay exactly as it is.


In other news, my head is apparently the same size as a small lamp shade.