All Day Cleaning Extravaganza

We’ve had this day on the books for a while: on Saturday, Liz and I spent all day working on cleaning the first floor. More specifically: we meant to clean the entire first floor, but ended up spending all our time in our kitchen.

As some of you may know, we’ve been working on our kitchen for some time. And in the meanwhile, we’ve made a temporary kitchen in the dining room (sink and all).

It’s been… a while, since we last cleaned. So the task was to literally clean everything in our temporary kitchen: review everything in our pantry, clean every surface, fridge, microwave, you name it.

Liz tackled our pantry, which was markedly fuller than this when we started. Found a lot of old stuff, threw away a lot of things. A lot of “dusting things off,” as you’d be surprised how dirty things get when you’re doing demo work in the next room.

Fireplace mantle cleaned off, as is our new/old sink.

With no actual stove to speak of, we’ve been making do with an electric one.

We pulled off everything in the shelves here, and wiped it all down, washing nearly every item anew. With the demo happening on both sides (in the kitchen and the adjoining bathroom), this little area got hit with the worst of the debris and dust.

The drawers below this were caked pretty badly, and those all got pulled out and cleaned as well.

The fridge and microwave that were salvaged from the kitchen. They’re not permanent, but will hopefully serve us in the short term – between now and whenever we do finally finish up the kitchen. We didn’t go so far as to clean every piece of silverware, but did just about everything else.

A fun break during the day: we got a knock on the door around 4:30PM, and it turned out to be Seth – our realtor! He happened to be in the neighborhood, and decided to stop by to see if we were around, and to see how we were getting along.

I’d say it’s easily been at least a year or more since we last saw Seth, so it was a lovely surprise to find him knocking on our door. He told us he didn’t want to look up the actual address, and set about finding our place by visual memory – which he was able to do!

We gave him the nickel tour, and we talked a lot about what’s happened since we moved in. He seemed very impressed with the work, and we had a nice time catching up. Liz and I were running low on energy prior to Seth’s arrival, so it was a very serendipitous thing to have happened.

Though we only got about a third of the way through our plans, we did end the day with a very clean kitchen area again. Now the hard work will be to try to keep things clean, for as long as possible.

Oh and, uh, to clean the other rooms on the first floor. Eventually.

Related:
New Temporary Kitchen Sink
Waking Up to the Sound of Running Water
First Family Dinner