Daylight Discoveries

Last Saturday was the last time I did any real housekeeping, and I got a lot done - despite the fact that I was beginning to feel icky and my stomach turned over at the thought of eating the dinner I spend so much time preparing. Nevertheless, it was an interesting day and one I've been wanting to share some thoughts about ever since.

My sister was back in town, my babysitting duties were over for the time being, and I had shifted Thursday's cleaning-of-the-bedroom forward to Saturday morning. What a difference there is in housekeeping by day! It's amazing how much grime you can actually see when you're cleaning a room in broad daylight. I have a painted wooden nightstand in my bedroom and was startled to discover these rings of grime around the knobs. Where my fingers actually come in contact with the wood every time I pull a drawer open, I guess. It only took a damp cloth to clean them up, but *gasp* what other horrors must be sharing this apartment with me!

I've been trying to add a little something new to my routine in the bedroom each week. Here are the new steps added last week:

Dust high mouldings, door and window frames, window shades and Venetian blinds when necessary.

Dust high objects if necessary (mantels, high shelves, window sills, tops of bookcases, etc.).

Because I've been such a crummy housekeeper, I'm just going to take it for granted that these chores are always necessary. Better to be safe than sorry. Besides, my spartan living arrangements haven't left me very many of these kinds of things to dust as it is. No high mouldings, no window shades, no mantels, high shelves, or tops of bookcases. I do have some Venetian blinds that just attract dust like magnets. And my window sills were super grimy. Oh, yeah - here's another discovery I couldn't see when housekeeping at night: there were rusty colored stains on the wall beneath my window. Obviously water that had come in through the screen in the window at some point and dripped down the wall. I'd never seen them before cleaning the bedroom last Saturday! Just a wipe of the cloth and they were gone, but what a scary surprise.

One of the nicer surprises when cleaning during the day last weekend was hearing the sounds of cleaning coming from other apartments which look out on my courtyard. While I was unwinding the cord to my own vacuum, I could hear other people vacuuming their apartments. There was a kind of kinship in the fact that we were all spending this Saturday morning indoors making our homes a little happier. We tend to think of '40s housewives as leading isolated lives when they were at home day in and day out, but I'll bet they felt a kind of camaraderie as they watched their neighbors hanging the laundry out to dry or heard somebody in the building running a vacuum cleaner.

I did find a little clarification on the mattress turning question when I was reading the manual's tips on the care of innerspring mattresses:

Turn the mattress top to bottom one week, and end to end the next week.

Now if I could only think of a way to remember which direction I've turned the mattress the week before...