House Cleaning day

Today we tackled cleaning DakotR.  Normally, I would not mention this but this was like a spring cleaning… .in August.  It had to be done, what with the recent bloom of spiders and their webs this time of year.

Also, lots of pollen and such but its mostly because of the almost constant forced air from the A/Cs and the ceiling fan. The fan has been a great addition. The original 30” fan was too close to the ceiling so it never really moved any air but it had to be that high to clear the tops of the opposing slideouts. The replacement is only 24” and fits nicely on its stalk between the slideouts when they are closed. It can even be used like that.  It does keep the air stirred and balances the temps both summer and winter. The other one never really kept the things evenly tempered.

But, it does move a lot of dust, too, and despite the apparent slickness of the ceiling and wall surfaces, they do snag lint and pollen like a wire brush and so have to be cleaned more often. I guess that is proof that this fan works. Never had to vacuum the ceiling and walls, before.

I handled the high stuff, like ceilings, valances , cabinet facings and doors and all the other “up high” stuff.  Merrily used a second vacuum to do the floors and carpets (one of the few perks of still sitting in the back yard of our stix and brix).

But after a couple of hours of this, I am pooped and soaked with perspiration from working over my head so much. I really need an extension hose to lengthen it so I don’t have to pick up the vacuum so much to reach up high.  Its a Hoover self propelled so its not light but it is good.

I have gotten the hardest stuff done but still need to do the entry area, bathroom and bedroom “up-highs”, tomorrow.  I also need to do my regular clean and sanitize of the bathroom, kitchen and hard floors.  I will work on that some, tomorrow, too.

Normally, I can keep up with this on a fairly regular basis but with the gobs of extra attention that I have been paying to changing our hot water heater for a tankless and planning the smart car loader and bed for Clifford, I have just not stayed on top of it all.

I really appreciate it when Merrily offers to pitch in on her day off to help me get caught up, again. She never complains about it nor chastises me for being behind.  She just says “lets get the place vacuumed and cleaned up a bit when we get back from lunch” and I never say “no.” She is more than just a gem of a person, she knows me better than I do myself and if I have learned nothing else in our 30 years of life together, its that she really is right more often than I am and I had better listen to her when she has an opinion or a suggestion.

On another front, it is clear that it’s time for a PIBWIB day (Put It Back Where It Belongs).  One fact of living in 400 sq ft is that a lot of things have to be kept in unhandy places.  When they are needed, they come out of the closet, basement or wherever they normally hide. Once used, it is often anticipated that the item will be used again, “shortly”, so it is kept out and handy.

Eventually, it will be joined by brothers and sisters, aunts and uncles and non-related items all retrieved to be “handy” with few returned immediately to the places of their storage after use. The bad news is that any flat area will become a temporary home for this growing gaggle of gear. The good news is that every flat surface will eventually reach equilibrium and things will start falling off as the overloading continues.  I call it Flat Space Fungus (FSF) because it does behave much like a fungus growing and growing until it spawns new piles on flat surfaces below it as they fall off of the primary surface.

The other bad news is that human nature being what it is, no one item falling off is enough justification to put them all back where they came from. Its much more expedient to just pick it up and find another way to place it back there with a little more “clout”.

Ah, but I digress… the point is that PIBWIB day is when all waifs and orphans must be put back where they came from for the sheer sanity of it. However, there is bad news here, too, for some of us older, wiser folk… these items will have been out of place for so long that their original storage locations will have been forgotten!  Imagine that!

So, putting it away becomes a matter of engineering new storage places for this stuff and thus restart their lifecycle anew, and that takes a lot more time and is harder to initiate.

The other thing that happens on PIBWIB day is that all of those empty boxes that stuff came in from a store (shoe boxes, tool boxes), UPS or USPS that looked like they would be just what I will need to store….. something (I don’t exactly know right now but it will come to me). 

They tend to have their own growth cycle but will probably be moved and moved again many times to get at things legitimately stored in the cabinet behind them or under them.  They will also be opened many times when looking for something else that was not where it was supposed to be and that had either become part of the FSF collections or been “aggregated” into some empty box for temporary holding until the box could be sorted or a PIBWIB day rolls around.

It is important to note that aggregated storage like this means that there is absolutely no indexing system of what’s in there or any discernable associative relationship to any other item in the box… its just there because company was coming and it looked bad “out”. It also means that at the time of aggregation, one’s mind was likely not their own and the pressures of “straightening up” prevented any and all transfer of temporary memory to permanent storage. Thereafter, all attempts to find anything that has been thus aggregated will require looking through all boxes, empty or not, until the last one, which, of course, is where the item being sought will be.

I guess its time to sign off. Between the actual work and this recap, I am bushed and getting hungry.

ttfn