July 2013: Cleaning the House, July 2, 2013

Today, a little work in the kitchen.  Alas, you don't see the unstacked and re-stacked dishwasher, because I didn't take pictures.  Besides, it's boring.  And it won't look that changed, but keep with me.

This is the before picture.   There are clean dishes in the dish drainer.  The tub I use for washing dishes is on the counter, filled with dishes. There are dishes on the store.  There are dishes in the sink.  There are pretty much dirty dishes all over all the flat spaces in the main part of the kitchen.  And, yes, you're look at pretty much my entire built-in kitchen there (beside the dishwasher (left) is the fridge and beyond that the wall to the living room.  On the other side of the stove (right) is the door to the basement).  I hate handwashing dishes because not only is annoying, especially in single-basin sink, but it also is painful for my back.   So I put it off too long every single time.  You can't see the other two burners, but trust me when I say there were more dishes on those.

No, I didn't finish the dishes.  But I did start to clean the cat fountain.  I have really hard water here, so periodically I need to run vinegar through it because of course it's brown and will show all the calcium deposits.  I'll let it run overnight, and wash it properly in the morning to rinse all the vinegar out, because I'm pretty sure my cats don't like the taste of vinegar, although I guess I've never asked.  I also have two of my crock pot pots soaking.  The smaller of the two on the stove I thought only needed a little touch-up cleaning after a trip through the dishwasher, but after removing the smallest crock from on top of it, I realized it had never been cleaned.  That will require a longer soak.  (My crock pot is neat.  It's one base, but can hold a 2 quart crock, 4 quart crock, or a 6 quart crock as needed for the food--one at a time, that is.)  The other two unseen burners are clean!

Tomorrow I think I'm going to run to Target to get a curtain rod and curtain for my back door. I'm planning on replacing my back door as soon as I'm gainfully employed again, but I can always move the rod and curtain to the new door.  The reasons are two-fold: one, it will cutdown on the sunlight shining in and will hopefully keep my stairwell from getting so warm, and two, my pantry is really shelves in my stairwell, and sunlight shining on food can't be good for it, so I hope this will help the situation there.