Category Archives: Home

*scrub* *scrub* *scrub*

Cleaning, Home, patience, perseverance, Restoration/\Decoration

 

I wish I were Merriweather at this point. She’s got the right colored dress (BLUE!), and she’s got a magic wand to help her with the cleaning. Unfortunately, this is reality and the only magic I really have to take on the scrubbing I have to do is a good attitude. You’d be surprised how much magic a good attitude has in it. If you have the right mindset, even the most daunting of tasks never seems that bad.

Last time, if you recall, I was really in a lather about being handed a dirty place to live. Well, like most of you have pointed out already, it’s more productive to let the cleaning supplies do the lathering and remember the simple fact that Momma Kitte pointed out:

If you do the cleaning yourself, you know it’s clean and done properly.

(Kitte’s so awesome. Major thanks to her for the reminder and attitude adjustment!)

So, after a frustrating weekend of waiting on the internet company to send out a crew to install my service (they never showed up, btw) I headed out to the store because I had one heck of a list of cleaning supplies to fill. $161 later, I had a cart full of cleaning supplies: mops, brooms, a bucket, a BIG thing of liquid Lysol, a jug of bleach, oven cleaner, toilet cleaner, toilet brush, scouring pads…you get the picture. If it was a cleaning supply that filled a purpose, it went into the cart.

The one thing I got clued in on…this time props go to Rezree…BLEACH PENS! I didn’t even know they existed until she told me about them! As I was shopping, three of them found their way into the cart because the kitchen counters along with kitchen floor and bathroom grout is stained, dirty and in more dire need of bleach than anything I’ve ever seen. (You know it’s bad when I can’t come up with a metaphor to describe something. One look and ‘eww’ and ‘STAPH’ and the phrase ‘CREEPING CRUD’ come to mind. ‘THE FUNK’ is also a good descriptor as whomever lived there before me were definitely dirty people to let the place fall into such disrepair. *Shudder* ‘The Funk’ is a death knell. If I am down to saying something’s got ‘the funk’ you know it’s near on to horrific.)

So with the thought of ‘the funk’ running around my house unchecked, I got everything home and began to put it all away, making time to add the cleaning supplies I already had to the storage area that now houses some major cleaning muscle.

I truly wish I had the words to describe the daunting task in front of me. I am faced with disinfecting the two rooms in any home that should be the cleanest: the kitchen and the bathroom. Now, I want you to take my luck into account, which means that (you guessed it) they are the two filthiest areas of the house.

So after organizing the cleaning supplies, I got the bleach pens out, grabbed an old toothbrush, cleaned off the kitchen counter next to the sink, put on my big rubber gloves and began to work. Never having used a bleach pen before, I found it wonderfully easy to outline each tile with the bleach pen, wait a few minutes, then begin scrubbing the mildew and dirt that had embedded itself in the grout (which seemed to have never been properly cleaned since it was installed years ago).

Just to do a single counter top felt like a major endeavor, but at seeing the grout go from black and grey to white was quite rewarding, making it a gauntlet-thrown challenge to see whether or not I could finish the area before the tendinitis in my elbows forced me to stop.

But happily, I got the one patch done and upon getting up this morning, it was a joy to see clean, white grout instead of thinking I was going to catch something if I put anything on the counter unprotected.

It’s one area at a time, learning the quirks and idiosyncrasies of my new digs. It’s like Kitte said, “If you do it, you know it’s clean.”

Anyone have any thoughts on cleaning grout? I’d love to hear your take on how you make sure your grout stays clean and free of ‘funk’.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Bramasole West

Fortitude, Home, patience, perseverance, Recovery, Restoration/\Decoration

After almost five years and an abundance of obstacles later, I am finally in my own place again.

I’m grateful and thrilled to have four walls that allow me to fully decompress and recharge. Looking around, I believe this place has the potential to become a very special space.

To give you a proper visualization/idea of this new place, if you have seen Under The Tuscan Sun, it is pretty much how Katherine describes Bramasole at the beginning of the film: “Run down, but redeemable.”

The previous tenants of this condo were, (how does one put this gently?) maliciously careless with almost every square inch of the property. They and their canine companion left behind massive holes in the drywall (sheetrock to you Southern people out there), destroyed carpet, demolished baseboards, broken plumbing, undusted doorframes, beneath the fridge yuck, enough mildew, mold, discolored grout and Drano damaged sink (among other issues) to make Happy Quinn on Scorpion go “Not good.”

Because of time constraints and other issues, I had to move in before the completion of all the repairs which means that, yep, you guessed it, it hasn’t seen the final deep clean you would expect to be done before moving in to a new rental; leaving me with moldy toilet tanks, splatter painted toilet bowls and all kinds of fun smells to tackle on my own until the repairs are completed.

Welcome to Bramasole West. Like it’s namesake in Italy, it just needs some tender, loving care.

But tender, loving care was the very last thing I thought of when I walked in to see the unscrubbed tub, the dirty grout and so forth after an exhausting day of moving. At that point, I sat down on the newly-laid wood floors and cried. Then, before I became completely hysterical, I promptly got a hotel room for the night.

Laying in bed at 2am trying desperately to calm my 20-on-a-10-scale triggered PTSD, I remembered what Frances said about Bramasole upon moving in:

Buyer’s remorse is a very common affliction among new homeowners. Just because you have an acid stomach and a sudden urge to weep, that doesn’t mean you’ve made a mistake.

Everybody knows old houses have their quirks. Especially 300-year-old houses.

I have inherited 10,000 empty wine bottles, one grape, every issue of “La Nazione” printed in 1958, and assorted previous “tenants.”

The trick to overcoming buyer’s remorse is to have a plan.

Pick one room and make it yours.

Go slowly through the house.

Be polite,
introduce yourself,
so it can introduce itself to you.

So, here we go. Bramasole West, meet everyone. Everyone meet Bramasole West. I am hoping after the final repairs are done, a cleaning service will come in to attempt the undertaking of cleaning up what is left of what the previous tenants left behind. If not, it’s going to be me and enough cleaning supplies to choke a metaphorical horse, going room by room, introducing myself, so it can introduce itself to me.

I am open to advice (that’s what the comments section is for) and donations so I can hire the proper people and/or buy the mountain of cleaning supplies required before I can even THINK of bringing in my sister in to start the interior design. (If Nan saw the condition of this place right now, she’d have a coronary! So, I am waiting to bring her in AFTER the repairs are finished and it’s been properly cleaned and disinfected.)

This is definitely a case of “Restoration BEFORE Decoration” because the very first time I went to the bathroom, the toilet overflowed as a “welcome home gift,” leaving me scrambling, trying to prevent water from seeping into the cracks above the tile and into the walls. Well, at least I don’t have an owl in the house or have to witness a washing machine being electrocuted by a storm.

With the right attitude, it’s doable. It’s a great cautionary tale of how NOT to treat a rental. Most of all, I am going to treat it as what it is: an obstacle to overcome. And when I leave, I hope this place is infinitely more beautiful than how I found it. That’s what having a restorative strength is all about.

And just in case you feel like donating to this daunting project, here ya go: 

If you want to send a mop or a bucket or grout cleaner, let me know in the comments so I can tell you where to send it!

For song of the day, from the Under The Tuscan Sun  soundtrack, here’s “Buyer’s Remorse.”