Aug. 21st, 2004

katallison: (Default)
Greater love hath no woman than that she spend a beautiful Saturday afternoon cleaning her laid-up sweetie's rental unit, so that the new tenants can move in tomorrow to something other than a pigsty.

(He said, "I *think* [former tenant] probably did an OK job cleaning, but--can you just check it out?" And I said, "Sure thing," knowing in my heart that [former tenant], being a feckless young single male, was likely to be afflicted with Young Single Male Syndrome, Lack-of-Basic-Cleanliness Subtype, and -- yup, I was right.)

I didn't actually mind the cleaning so much (except for scrubbing the bathtub, which had a fine collection of random pubic hairs, eeuuwww eeuuwwww eeeuuwwww), but--the place is so sad. It's not a Fraser's-Chicago-apartment kind of dump, but it's basically cheap student housing in a saggy older building, and though it's reasonably well-kept, you still have ... oh, you know, the baseboards and molding that are thick with innumerable lumpy coats of dingy paint, and the hideous ceiling light fixtures, and the places where the baseboards have pulled away from the floor over the decades and an impenetrable residue of gnir has accumulated in the crack that cannot be vacuumed out. The ugly contact paper inside the kitchen cabinets that is vaguely sticky, and has begun to curl up dingily at the corners. The scuffed wooden floors that are speckled with white paint (because whoever did the last paint job apparently never heard of that new-fangled contraption, the dropcloth) and hence always look dirty, no matter how much you sweep.

I have lived in so. many. places like that, in my earlier years, and being there today brought back dismal memories of all my bleak old apartments and rooming-house cubicles, and my hopeless efforts to brighten them up on the cheap, with thumbtacked posters and rattan screens and whatnot. I guess they're not too bad if one's young and full of vim and hope and "whee, my own place at last!"--and I tell myself that after all, that place is better housing than most of the world's population inhabits--but still. Sadness.

I came home, peeled off all my clothes, took a long hot scrubbing shower, and am now wandering around with a beer, loving my house. My beautiful, elegant, well-designed and well-built house. It's kind of a mess right now, but it is free of contact paper, and there's no paint-spackle anywhere, and all the baseboards (maple, clean-lined, unpainted) meet the floorboard snugly, and I love it. I'm so very lucky. And I shall clean up here tomorrow.

Profile

katallison: (Default)
katallison

November 2009

S M T W T F S
1234567
891011121314
15161718192021
22232425262728
2930     

Most Popular Tags

Page Summary

Style Credit

Expand Cut Tags

No cut tags