Living room

Day 3:  The Living Room

Our house has what's called an open floor plan.  I'm not entirely sure what that means in architectural terms, but it appears to mean that the common areas -- living room, dining room, and kitchen -- are all basically segments of a single, large room.  It makes our house look bigger, but it also made decorating a bit of a pain.  It also means that my first few days' effort at cleaning the largest part of our house required me to tackle a different portion of the same room each day.

The living room is longer than it is wide, so we have partitioned it off with a couch and a book case.  One side is considered the actual living room, and the other side is our office/play area.  Today, I tackled the living room itself.

Here's the action plan:

1.  Take down and wash curtains

2.  Attempt to clean the blinds AGAIN

3.  Wash insides of windows and window tracks

4.  Clean fan and light fixture

5.  Clean fireplace

6.  Dust all furniture

7.  Vacuum floor

8.  Steam clean carpet

After cleaning the breakfast nook on my first day of work, I knew what to expect with the windows.  When I removed the curtains, I encountered dust and cobwebs.  That didn't particularly please me, but I also wasn't surprised.  A quick trip through the washing machine ended up taking care of the curtains, but I still have yet to find a successful way to clean the blinds.  I earnestly tried to wipe each individual blind piece down with a cloth, but they still didn't come clean.  My Love says that this size blinds cost $5.95 at Lowe's; there may be a few new sets in our future.

Cleaning the fan and lights was an uneventful task except that I was unable to hide the fact that I was climbing something from the kids.  Mini-me stood at the base of the chair and kept up a running dialogue: "Mama, what are you doing?"

"I'm cleaning, sweetie."

"What are you cleaning?"

"I'm cleaning the lights and the fan."

"Oh...how did they get dirty?"

"They just did.  They got dusty, and I need to get the dust off."

"Oh...can I help?"

"No, honey, you're too short."

"But I can climb up on a chair like you and reach them."

"Sweetie, you'd need a bigger chair than this one to be able to reach the lights."

"Well, you could go buy me one."

Eventually, I set she and Cuddles down at the dining room table with some play dough that they had found in an Easter egg hunt at their grandparents' house over the weekend.  They were content to make "crackers", "pancakes", and "pretzels" for the next half hour (at which point, obviously, it was time for lunch).

The "most dirty place in the room" award goes to our fireplace.  I found that incredibly interesting, since it hasn't been used since we moved into the house over four years ago.  It doesn't really get cold enough to need fires around here, and we also don't want to worry with cleaning up ashes or keeping little fingers out of the grate.  I figured I might find some dust in the fireplace, but no real dirt.  Oh, was I wrong!   To begin, I removed a decorative candle stand that we keep in there to keep it from looking stark.  The top few coils were laced with spider webs covered in dust.  As a side note, I abhor spiders.  They make me scream and run the other direction.  I almost stopped cleaning right then, but the fact that the webs were dusty led me to believe that the spider had likely already met his or her demise.  I was correct; I later discovered his/her body underneath a candle that had been lit at Valentine's Day.  As to the task at hand:  I wiped down the candle stand with ACV, which was equally effective at removing dust, spider webs, and ash.  I then wiped down the inside of the fireplace itself.  To my surprise, our flue was open (and I have no idea how it got that way).  I closed the flue, and when I did, a shower of ash fell into the fireplace.  It was actually quite a chore to wipe it all out; when ash gets wet, it simply makes gray and black streaks, so I went through multiple cleaning rags and bowls of ACV in order to get it clean.  My last fireplace task was to dust our screen.  This proved to be the most difficult thing I've done yet other than cleaning the blinds.  Dust particles clung to the mesh screen when I wiped them with the ACV.  I ended up brushing the screen vigorously ("Mama, why are you hitting that?") to dislodge the dust.  That just made the dust float in the air, but I was hoping that whatever surface it landed on would be easier to clean.

A quick pass over the furniture with Pledge and a rag, and I was ready to vacuum.  Yes, again...the Beast had left a trail of dog food crumbs from her bowl to the couch, and the floor looked just as dirty as it had before I vacuumed yesterday.  There was no help from the kids today, as they were busy with peanut-butter-and-local-honey sandwiches (which they would rather than than just about anything else I could make).  And then I paused; in a strange twist of events, steam cleaning the carpets has become My Love's job.  (The one time I tried I left puddles in the carpet.)

It was really pleasant for me to discover that most of the house isn't going to be as dirty as the kitchen was; dusting and vacuuming are chores I actually keep up with pretty consistently, and I'm hopping it will pay off as I work toward having the entire house cleaned at one time.