One of the major tasks for the Fall Cure this week was to clean all the floors in the apartment. Because we have six pets, we already vacuum every other day (a used & refurbished Roomba was one of the best investments we ever made). Actually getting on hands and knees and cleaning the floor doesn’t happen as often though, so it’s not surprising that this went unnoticed for so long:

Instead of simply covering the floor when I painted this wall, I lazily let the paint splatter onto it, thinking it wouldn’t be that bad and I’d just deal with it later. But moving all the furniture out of the room made it really obvious and I wanted it gone. I’d purchased some Citrasolv earlier in the week to clean the floor, and it claimed to be able to remove things like paint, so using a metal spatula for a scraper, I gradually worked my way across the floor. It worked well, but was not easy. What would have been easy would have been to just cover the floor with newspaper or, imagine this, a drop cloth invented to cover floors and furniture while painting.

Finally, it paid off. It always looked dusty along that wall, and now it’s nice and clean. Next time: do the obvious thing and cover the floor.

Next, while I had all the furniture out of the room to clean the floor, I thought about replacing the side table here:

with something less bulky. I had this table in the front yard:

and had never considered bringing it inside because years ago a roommate had spilled hot wax from a candle all over it and I thought it was a lost cause. Did it bother me that it’s Ikea? Sure. But the desire to not spend any money pretty handily overpowered any disdain I might have for myself in having once bought it and in now considering using it. Besides, I could always spray paint it black to match the tray on the wall. First though, the problem of the wax.

Using barely diluted Citrasolv, I scraped away at the wax with a garden trowel (the spatula was a little too feeble for this), and after about 15 minutes, I had a newly clean side table.

Whew! It’s amazing what a difference cleaning every corner of the floor can make. On to week two!

This entry was posted on Monday, October 20th, 2008 at 9:17 am and is filed under AT Cure. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.