SPRING CLEANING…Part 3

That was appreciated. But this weekend began with a problem on the power doors on the garage. Just as I was going up my ramp with the dogs, I heard a distinct "clink". I went back down to check it out and found that a large bolt had just dropped on the garage floor. Picking it up I relayed the incident to my husband and handed him the bolt. What had broken? The electric door opener? Fixing that was clearly not a housekeeping problem, but it demanded his attention. First was finding the tall stepladder and climbing up to having a look. After looking around the garage and out on the porch, it was finally located in the cellar where it had been used last. Apparently the brackets which held the closing mechanism up on the wall needed to be replaced, requiring a trip to the Home Depot store. This incident was accompanied by a grumbling complaint about how the thing "was never installed correctly". Doing it right this time would not be difficult, but it would take up part of the weekend.

Now on Sunday, waking up an hour earlier to comply with the government's declaration of Daylight Savings Time, we set about making coffee and looking through the newspaper together. Next was going through Email and planning the day's cleaning chores. It was my husband's idea to clean one room at a time beginning with the TV room. To that end, he moved out the electronic items in their black cases and began clearing off the hearth so that it could be vacuumed. I began dusting off all the objects there, like the coal scuttles and ash sifter. The pine cones that I had saved over the past few years were emptied into a crock so that they could be seen. The box of store-bought fire logs was opened and the remaining two logs were taken out and set down nearby. My next job would be to dust anything that I could reach from the wheelchair. I could reach the TV stand from the floor and the shelves of the pine book case up to the second one. I arranged the photos of my family and my children so that they could be seen. Then I took the vacuum out to begin the rug only to be interrupted by my husband. "That's my job", he said, and took over for me. I was grateful since handling an upright vacuum from the wheelchair was difficult. When he was finally finished, he showed me the contents of our "bagless" tool. It would need emptying AGAIN, and this was only after one room!

As we drank cans of soda, my husband indicated that our NEXT room would be the foyer. It had a brick-patterned floor that showed the dust easily, and this was made worse by the fact that I kept the cats' litter box there. Although there was a scuff mat for their feet when they exited, there was still litter that clung to their paws and got tracked all through the house. Since the front door is not used (I cannot go down stairs with my wheelchair) and the decorative wood on it is literally separating from the door revealing the original color, NO ONE uses that door. My job list for the spring will be to remove the front doors and replace them with new ones which I will NOT PAINT PINK! In the meantime I had several entry mats that I didn't use pushed underneath an antique dry sink that had been my mother's. The dust under there would keep us both sneezing for days. In order to do a thorough job, the dry sink would have to be emptied to make it lighter and then moved out to vacuum underneath and behind it. I was guessing that along with the antique chest (which would also have to be emptied to move away from the wall) we would fill up the bagless vacuum again.