Soft underfoot

This whole buying-a-house caper was actually a bit of a spur-of-the-moment thing, or at least a spur-of-the-week thing. We were all geared up to move into another rental and ended up putting in an offer on a place and (after a lot of fucking around with incompetent real estate agents) we'd bought a house before we had time to pinch ourselves. One of the differences you notice with renting and buying though, is the level to which you are expected to clean the house upon vacation thereof (as in leaving the house, not going on holiday). When you rent, you have to clean every nook, all the crannies and even the windows and the cover that goes over the bathroom fan. When you sell a place, it seems you only have to make it look as clean as you have to so that people will want to buy it. Apparently, it's just fine and dandy to leave boxes of kitchen stuff in the shed, odds & ends related to car-maintenance in the garage and (curiously) a couple of eggs (one broken, one intact) under the pine tree in the back yard. Carpets, and the treatment thereof, is another area where the policy is different. When you finish renting a place, you're obliged to have the carpets professionally cleaned. If you're moving out of a house you've sold, there is no onus on you to do so. The people that buy the house, buy it as-is, inlcuding the carpets. This is a roundabout and rather long-winded leadup to an anecdote involving carpets. We just had our carpets cleaned. We had the carpets in the three bedrooms and a rug that we had bought in our last house, which we'd brought with us and needed a good shampoo anyway. (It was originally white but after heavy use wasn't really anything resembling that anymore.) So we had the guy in on Wednesday to give all the rugs a good going over. When I got home from work, C & her mother were examining the carpets in the bedrooms and I had a look and remarked at how clean they looked and smelled. I went about my business and noticed a while later that they had been out the back for a while, I don't know why. So last night, the carpets had had 24 hours to dry and we could move furniture back in. We did. Then C went out to do our first big shop since we'd moved in, while I did a general tidy around the living room and got dinner on the go. She got back with the shopping and left the car just outside the carport, close to the back gate, making it that little bit easier for me to carry the bags inside. How sweet... Later on, C's mum again came over to drop off an old sewing machine. I had to go out, get it out of her car, and put it in ours so C could take it into town and have it serviced. So I ran out, barefoot, moved the machine from one car to the other and thought "While I'm out here, and while I have the car keys in my hand, I should move the car into the garage". It seemed like the logical thing to do and I was surprised that C had left it out of the garage, merely for my benefit. So with sewing machine in the back seat, I started up the car and moved it under the shelter of the garage. Then when I stepped out of the car, my foot touched the ground and I remember thinking "Funny... I don't remember having the garage floor carpeted".