July 2013: Cleaning the House, July 24, 2013

My computer was running too slowly last night, and it was pretty late, so I went to bed.  My company comes for lunch today, so I spent much more than a half hour, and still ended up throwing a lot of papers in a box that I'll have to deal with later (this afternoon or tomorrow, with luck!).  I was thinking today that in my previous job we were given an open office--no one had an assigned desk (you had an assigned "locker"--a filing cabinet in a bank of filing cabinets).  My desks at work have always been reasonably messy, because I had a tendency to save everything.  But when I was forced to carry things in a backpack, or had a very limited space (my job required me to keep a lot of binders of presentations from external sources), I managed much better, and rarely felt that I had missed something I had gotten rid of.  To be fair, we requested a lot of things to come electronically, rather than paper files, but the fact remained: I kept things under control much better.  I need to go back to that mentality.  At any rate, I cleaned my living room last night.  This included vacuuming cobwebs and cat hair from the walls, which was sorely needed.  I kinda forgot to vacuum the curtains.  Oops.  Such is life, though.

Here's two before pictures:

Yeah, you can see why I needed to clean.  And vacuum!  It's just crazy.  It already looks like I need to vacuum my living room rug again, but part of that comes from dirt stirred up when I (this morning, so not pictured) put the blankets on the furniture to protect guests from cat hair.  I need official slipcovers.  Maybe I'll add that to a future project.  Although, really, I need new furniture, too, so it makes me less included to make slip covers.

The computer will be put away (as soon as I finish this post, or my company comes, whichever comes first.  But at least it's reasonably acceptable.  I also did a bit more cleaning in the kitchen in terms of unstacking and restacking the dishwasher, so I have clean dishes in my cupboard, and dirty dishes in the dishwasher again.  After my company leaves, I'll disassemble the cat fountain, and throw that in with the dishes and run the dishwasher again.  I also have my ceiling fan on low, and turned my AC down, so it will be more comfortable for my guests, and not stir up so much dust and cat hair!  (I did vacuum the ceiling fan, but there's still plenty of dust and cat hair to be stirred up!)