billroper | Entries tagged with cleaning

I have *way* too many things that I am behind on here at home (I have things that I am behind on at work too, but I can mostly ignore those for the weekend) and I would like to finish some of them. Most of these things are sadly resistant to being finished.

I am nearly done with today's five loads of laundry (with a bit of help from K). This is good.

When I got home from lunch, Gretchen was out with Julie which meant that I had access to the entire garage. This meant that I could get out the big ladder, take it to the back corner of the garage, and put the access hatch to the attic that had blown out on a windy day back in place, which seemed a good idea given the presence of a raccoon in the attic.

Unfortunately, the path to that corner of the garage is rather akin to a minefield, the area underneath the access hatch was full of stuff, and the chances of succeeding in doing this were very low. So I didn't try.

There are, however, a great many things that need to be done before I can park my car in the garage again, which is something I would really like to do. Unfortunately, one of the items was something that Gretchen had informed me was all *my* problem.

See, a couple of years ago when we thought we were going to do the repairs on the fence ourselves (with help from Sam), I bought the necessary lumber and piled it along the disaster area side of the garage. Then we ended up hiring someone to do the fence repairs, which means all of the lumber was still in the garage and needs to be moved before it is possible to think about parking on that side of the garage. This is *my* problem.

I figured out how many of the pickets I could stash in the picket storage on Gretchen's side of the garage and shoved them in there. Then there was the problem of the 2x4s. There were a lot of those too. And there was a gap between two shelf units on Gretchen's side of the garage that was just about the size of a 2x4. I moved some empty boxes around to clear the space above the gap (because the 2x4s are long) and slid all of the 2x4s into the gap. I will want to stick something in front of the timbers so that an earthquake or something doesn't decide to drop them onto a parked car, but all of our good bungee cords departed when the fence was repaired...

I then realized that the remaining pickets could be stored behind the hanging bracket for snow shovels and rakes. I had to remove one snow shovel and the snowblower to make this work, but it worked and I was able to shove everything back into position.

This leaves the two 4x4 posts that need to be stored somewhere. In fact, I know where they need to be stored, but it is at the back corner of the garage on the opposite side of the minefield, so that will have to wait. But the garage is a little bit closer to clean (very little, Ensign) which I am going to take as progress.

In other news, the raccoon has not yet taken the bait in the trap -- or perhaps the raccoon is smarter than the guy who set the trap and has acquired the bait without being trapped.

I have a ton of things that I need to do on the computer tomorrow. We'll see how that goes.

The tape that Amazon had promised to deliver finally showed up. Unfortunately, it was the wrong tape. It has now been returned and I went to Home Depot and bought a different brand of tape which I used to mount the mirror today. I had to get help from Gretchen and K, because I could not get the protective plastic to peel off the other side of the double-sticky mounting tape, but once they did, the mirror was finally reaffixed to the medicine cabinet.

When I went to Home Depot, I picked up some quick furniture refinishing product. Today, I used that on the coffee table in the living room, which was substantially the worse for wear. Before I could do that, I first had to get the rest of the caked on slime off of the table. It has been some years since Julie was playing with slime and Gretchen had managed to remove some, but not all of it. Windex and elbow grease took the last of it off. Having stained and waxed the top surface of the coffee table, it by no means looks new, but it looks a heckuva lot better than it did.

In the "Looking a Heckuva Lot Better Department", Gretchen spent several hours this afternoon with the kids in the dining room, dispatching various things to places where they better belonged. Julie, unfortunately, has the same grasp of leaving paths in the basement that some people have for the entrances / exits to filk circles, so the tubs that went to the basement have completely blocked the path to the gift wrap. Something will be done about this, but not by me, and not today.

The dining room now looks a heckuva lot better. I have swept most of the loose debris up, so it is now possible to think about mopping the floor, although it may first be better to spend some time getting the acrylic kid paint off the floor. We will figure that out too.

But not today.

Today's holiday prepping included trips to Home Depot and Sam's Club. I was supposed to go to Michaels' with Julie to pick up something she needed, but she was busy until it was too late to go, so we'll try that tomorrow.

In the meantime, the kids spent some substantial time mopping the floor in part of the back of the house and cleaning up the kitchen. I prepped the stove so that Gretchen could finish cleaning it. The net result was that the kitchen looks a lot better than it has in a while.

I finally got upstairs this afternoon after doing some laundry and managed to launch the first of seven sessions for the computer division for the second half of the APBA season. My team cratered badly in the first half, finishing seventh out of eight teams. This appears to be largely a result of bad luck, as my Pythagorean record would have given me 46.5 wins in 84 games, while my actual record was an anemic 39-45. I am off to a better start in the second half, going 8-5 in the first 13 games there, but am still in second place, because one team ran off to a 10-3 start. But there are 65 games to go.

UPS says the new CDs should arrive on Friday. I am looking forward to seeing them.

K has been doing her own laundry for a while. Earlier this week, she announced that her (huge) load of laundry was still a bit damp when the dryer cycle finished, so she put it in for another run through the dryer. Ok, that was fine.

What was *not* fine was that she never went back to check on the laundry again. This morning, I took a load of shirts and a load of Gretchen's laundry down to wash and tried to trip over K's laundry basket in the laundry room. I checked the dryer and found K's still-damp clothes in it.

This was an exceedingly bad sign. Nevertheless, I figured I might as well give it a go, especially as the lint screen in the dryer was quite full. Maybe that was the problem. (I later checked the trash and concluded that K had not cleaned the lint screen before restarting the dryer, so another round of Dad-splaining is in order.)

I washed my shirts and then put them in the dryer, throwing Gretchen's load in to wash.

The shirts, unsurprisingly, did not dry. They are now hanging in the downstairs bathroom where they have dried satisfactorily. Gretchen's load is still in the washer and is going to have to go to a laundromat to be dried tomorrow.

And now we are going to need to get the dryer fixed, because it does not heat. I have watched the dryer repair videos and have concluded that I might be able to do this, but I don't feel good about any repair that requires removing the drum.

I am disgusted, because if we had known that the dryer wasn't working earlier in the week, we could have called someone in to *fix* it last week. But that would have required attention and communication from the last person to do laundry.

Ah, well.

In other news, Gretchen and I did some work on the dining room today and it is improved. Tomorrow, Julie is supposed to come help Gretchen put away all of her craft stuff that is on the dining room table.

And if we do that and then take the tubs of stuff out of the dining room and down to the basement, that might be a room again. There is still stuff to be picked up in the office and *all* of the bedrooms, but that can probably be done in fairly short order.

I think.

And then we'll see about cleaning.

I have a theory.

My theory is that if we get the house clean enough, we can then hire a cleaning service to come by on a regular basis and make it actually clean. I think this is a good theory.

The difficulty is going to be getting there from here. But we have not had a cleaning service in since before COVID hit, so it would be a really good thing.

This is factoring into my weekend plans...

Yesterday included not nearly enough cleaning. When Gretchen and I got back from lunch today, we set out to make sure that more cleaning happened. The kids were drafted into the exercise and have taken a number of things to the places where they hypothetically belong. We'll see how that went when we go upstairs in a while.

As is my wont, I grabbed a broom and went to sweep up whatever debris could be found into a pile for sorting. Since it had been a while since I did this, there was a fair amount of debris and a metric ton of dog hair. Maybe some cat hair too, but mostly dog hair. As part of the exercise, I was picking things of value up off the floor and dispatching them to better places as well, because sweeping is easier when everything is put away.

Once the sweeping was over, the second act commenced. We used to have a Swiffer WetJet. It turned out to be one of the lesser cleaning devices that I've ever purchased, as the little electric motor in it was exposed to the cleaning solution and corroded itself to death in fairly short order.

So I bought something else. In this case, it was an O-Cedar mop with washable, interchangeable mop pads and a liquid dispensing system that relies on a simple pump and trigger system with no electronics. Gretchen loaded it up with leftover Swiffer WetJet solution (we have a lot) and sent the kids to mop the hallway floor, because that is where most of the traffic passes through *and* we have not had a cleaning lady since before COVID hit, so mopping has been sporadic.

The problem is that the kids don't really understand the basic theory of mopping, which says that a dirty mop will eventually do nothing more productive than push the dirt around. After going through two of the mop pads, they announced that they were done, as no additional dirt was coming up.

I took the mop into the bathroom, washed out the pads -- which turn out to be nicely washable! -- and went back after it. And washed out the pads a few more times in the process.

But the floor is no longer "kid clean". It is now "dad clean", which is maybe not as good as "mother-in-law clean", but we're fresh out of those, so "dad clean" will have to do. It actually looks pretty good. As long as I was at it, I mopped a few more sections of floor while Gretchen was making dinner.

There is plenty more floor to be mopped, but I have washed out the pads and there will be more mopping in the future.

And more instruction on "how to mop" for the younger members of the household.