Ensuring any household move leaves the appropriate aftertaste – it ends with cleaning. You think you’re done – and then you have to put on rubber gloves to explore crevices you didn’t even know you’d rented. Vladimir Lenin Landlord had made the schedule clear:
You give back keys at noon, then leave.
Stringent stuff, but I was happy to oblige. Monday was a gong show moving day – which left 6 daylight hours yesterday morning to turn The Cave into a Lysol commercial. *Shiny*.
A month ago, I’d planned to move apartments with an efficiency worthy of Eisenhower’s attention. Similarly – I had a vision for cleaning day.
On cleaning day, I’d channel Longoria – not Dugger.
How’d that pipe dream pan out? Oh, just about as spectacularly as I imagine the rest of the project will unfold…. not exactly. Nice try, honey pie.
For reasons I’ll outline later – outsourcing got vetoed and we cleaned it ourselves. Like with actual muscle power. And unlike Dumpy Dugger, I don’t have 50 kids to…project manage.
Abhorrent. Anyway.
- The Cave is 550 square feet or fewer – we figured we’d be sailing with a 4-hour window to wipe it clean before the inspection.
- 2 of us. That’s 8 hours, right? An insane amount of time for city dwellers to scrub and Swiffer.
- We’d be opening the bar by 11, latest – toasting bye-bye loser landlord, hello ugly baby.
I. Am. Delusional.
6:15 a.m.
Paolo attempts very valiant and almost adorable wake-up call.
6:30 a.m.
He tries again, this time with coffee. Success.
7 a.m.
Return to The Cave. Paolo tackles the bathroom unasked (good lad) and I reinvent the kitchen.
7:30 – 11:59 a.m.
We scrub our way through an entire box of Mr. Cleans, until his magic erasers are nothing more than crumbs in our rubber gloved-hands. Walls get washed, windows are Windexed. Oh, right – and we clear our entire balcony of the hundred plants (and other random crap) we’d forgotten.
Not super stressful but, in essence, full of suck.
So why’d we do it ourselves?
Answer forthcoming. For now – would you rather:
- Sleep in when impossibly tired?
- Or drink all the wine?
Stay tuned – mad science to follow.
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Photos found here and here. Photoshop efforts meant in the kindest of ways.
Hey, you want a s'more? Some more of what?
Wow, I am impressed! At least you are cleaning up your grime. What grosses me out is cleaning the new place….Will you outsource for that?
The new place was cleaned for us – wahoo! That is…. as clean as a 40-year old carpet can really be? I refuse to touch it with bare skin. It’s got to go – and fast!
When we moved into our house 9 years ago, the kitchen cooktop had food crusted all over it and there was pink mold in the shower. DIS-GUST-ING. Living with your own dirt is bad enough, but living with someone else’s dirt…. BARF!!!
So, kudos to you and Paolo for making your old place sparkly clean for the new cave dwellers
I’m not a wine drinker and I’m don’t like to sleep in too late…. but I would definitely drink all the daiquiris
Kelly
That’s sooooo foul. We didn’t have tremendous choice in our cleaning frenzy — the landlord actually did the White Glove Test! Presume failure would have involved a ticket to somewhere Siberian and gulag-y.
Our former landlord “cleaned”, yet I found her hair in the bathroom cabinet drawers, uncooked rice on the kitchen counters, and LOTS of dead flies stuck between the window and the windowsill. Oh, and old grease and dust on the dining room blinds. AND nasty clumps of dust in the grooves of the popcorn ceiling in the living room. That swayed ever so delicately when the living room ceiling fan was on.
It still makes me shudder. I disinfected everything I could that first night we had the keys.
Ewwww — “heebie jeebies” is the technical term, no? I can’t watch that How Clean Is Your House? show! Assuming this was a rental if a landlord was involved? Hope you got cash back.
It was a rental, and I didn’t get cash back. But I did tell her she could keep the deposit in lieu of the last month of rent, so I could break the lease early. She didn’t have much to say about that because she didn’t have the deposit money saved up, as she should have. And I knew that valuable tidbit because she made the grave mistake of giving me too much info, too many times. Ugh, I still hate her.