The cleaning lady came today for another two hours.
Inspired by her efforts yesterday, by the time she arrived I was already washing the windows.
Between us we scrubbed and polished and things are -slowly – beginning to look a little better. They are not looking much better yet, but it is helping.
I hoovered the living room floor and was horrified to realised that the carpet was changing colour as I went along.
Mark has not finished yet, but his mess-creation efforts have moved into the loft, and I am beginning to turn the house back into a house again, helped along by the cleaning lady, to whom I will owe an eternal debt of gratitude when we are done.
I can hardly say what a relief it is. It has been truly horrible.
It was very nice to be able to see out of the windows again, although I was ashamed to realise that the brillo pads were exactly where the cleaner left them last time she was there, roughly around 2008. It would appear that I have not used them since.
It is much nicer to clean things when there are two of you and you can chat whilst you do it. Also she is far too restrained to express shock and disgust when she touches something and her fingers stick to it. Those horrified little outbursts are all coming from me.
If it was somebody else’s house I would have been inclined to decline a dinner invitation.
In between cleaning I repainted the nice orange wall in the conservatory. This has become battered and horrible. We have been planning for ages now to stick an electric fire to it, but it was so bashed and covered in slug-trails that this was not going to happen. I have been waging a small battle against unwanted wildlife, and today I dusted the worst of the cobwebs away and repainted.
It looks lots better.
It will look better still with a fire sticking to it.
The fire in question is an electric affair which looks like a fire but is actually just a fan heater really. It is the sort of object at which Hilda Ogden would have looked doubtfully, wondering if it might be a bit tasteless. I can assure you that it absolutely is, and it will look splendid on the orange wall.
It will be splendid for the days when winter is upon us but we still want to breakfast in the conservatory.
We dug it out today so that Mark could drill some holes in the walls, and inspected the instructions. These appeared to have been composed by a Chinese person using Google Translate, and then translating them first into Polish before finally into English.
They advised us to take care with the abrasive washing for the by we might scratch the hat stand.
They explained that a person who might wish of a flame with different colour must be pressing the button with a circular motion of the finger. Obviously we tried this but there are only so many ways you can poke a simple on/off switch, and of course nothing happened so we decided probably some Chinese person was indulging in some distant but amusing ridicule of Brits.
The instructions for setting the timer were utterly and completely incomprehensible. I am studying a Master’s degree in English language at one of the world’s most prestigious institutions, and I could not even begin to understand what they were going on about. They started with: If the day might be Monday it is a D1 unless the Operator might wish it otherwise.
There was no button for D1. I checked.
In the end we thought we would stick to just switching it on and off with the button and throw the remote control away.
Mark has not put it on the wall yet. He is still waiting for the paint to dry.
It is very exciting. We are going to have a lovely, lovely house again. It will be warm and clean and painted and nearly all the spiders will have buzzed off somewhere else. I have not yet plucked up the courage to confront the one on our bedroom window, but that will have to happen soon. It is getting very big now and it is making a very horrible spider-poo mess all over the glass.
Maybe tomorrow.
