Anyone who knows me well knows that I abhor cleaning.
When I
was a teenager, Mum would have to wake me early on Saturday mornings to help
her get the cleaning done before we went to do something that I was looking
forward to doing. Corey has been wonderful in supporting my allergy to cleaning
and was the principle cleaner in our home for the first several years we were
together until I decided that I would pay for someone to clean our home. I hate
doing it, Corey is busy enough, and the cleaner makes her money cleaning so in
my opinion, it was a perfect arrangement. When we first moved to Kelowna, we
had an amazing housecleaner named Krista. It was unfortunate that she was the
first one we had because she set the bar so high that we have never been able
to find anyone else that even comes close. But at the end of the day, when we
come home and the house is clean, I love my housecleaner.
Our home on Buziga Hill is massive. Maybe not by Kelowna
standards but by Erika standards, it is huge. The bigger the house, the more
cleaning it requires. However, because the lower floor is technically the Kabojja
Conference Centre, Ediga (who we are now thinking is Edgar but pronounced as
Ediga) is responsible for keeping that section clean. He comes in every other
day to collect the garbage and wash the floors. He brings in a bucket of soapy
water and a big towel, dunks in the towel and then bends at the waist to soap
up the floor. He then wrings out the towel and repeats the process but wiping
up the now red with Ugandan dust soap suds. He also washes the balcony and the outside
landing so that we don’t track more dust into the house. Maybe it helps but
even so, whenever there is a smidge of moisture on the floor I start tracking
red footprints all over the place. Once week he also dusts all the surfaces and
windowsills with another damp rag. It is really the only way to pick up all the
dust.
The first week we were here, Ediga came in and washed the
bottom floor and then disappeared. We thought he had left but then found him
repeating the process upstairs in our living quarters. We thanked him very much
but insisted that he was not responsible for cleaning our part of the house. We’ve
had to have the same conversation about him washing our shoes on a weekly basis
too. He hasn’t returned to clean our part of the house and hopefully he didn’t
feel that we didn’t like the way he cleaned!
I am not so dedicated to cleaning every other day… hard to
believe but it is true! I have decided that Sunday is my cleaning day and as
the laundry spins (as long as we have power) I set to work on trying to
eliminate the layer of Ugandan dust that has coated everything. Our windows and
doors are always open so the dust is impossible to avoid but the size of the dust
bunnies makes me wonder if the cockroaches make them and leave them under our
bed as punishment for chasing them away.
I have developed a system that seems to work quite well and
it keeps the process fairly short. All it requires is a broom, a microfiber
cloth (thanks to Ellen who left two when she was here), rubber gloves, and a
container of Vim powder (like Comet.) My process is this:
1. Put down the microfiber cloth and lay the broom
head on the cloth. Sweep a room with the cloth then gently fold it up so that
all the dust and dirt caught in the cloth is trapped inside. Walk to the
bedroom balcony and shake the living you know what out of the cloth. If you are
lucky, the wind is blowing in such a way that the dust is carried away from you
and not all over you or back in through another window. Repeat in all rooms
shaking after each room and the hallway. Do not be tempted to do more than one
room. The cloth cannot handle that must dust.
2. Rinse the cloth in the old cracked bathtub in
the guest bathroom. It’s a stand-alone tub so we use it exclusively for cleaning.
There would never be enough hot water to have a nice bath anyway. The rinsing
will take a while as the cloth will have turned from green to red. Once the
water is running almost clear, wring out the cloth and fold into four.
3. Dust all the surfaces in the house. As you have
8 surfaces of cloth, you should be able to get all the surfaces done without
having to rinse the cloth again (depending on the wind that week.) Don’t use a cloth
quarter for too long as you will start to make clay out of the moisture and
dust you are wiping. This leaves long red streaks on the surface you are
dusting.
4. Rinse the cloth once more, put on the rubber
gloves and get the Vim.
5. Wash all the sinks in the four bathrooms. Try to
make sure that you don’t knock the sinks off the wall by scrubbing too hard.
Many sinks are just held on by nails in the concrete.
6. Scrub the shower floor that is now red with a
week’s worth of dust being washed off your body. This comes off quite easily but
as the drain works at a very slow pace, it has to be done in small sections so
that the dirty water runs down the drain and doesn’t sit on the shower floor
and stains it again.
7. Scrub the three toilets. Again, don’t scrub too
vigorously as one toilet has already fallen off the wall and needed to be
re-attached. It is now very secure but the other ones are more fragile. Make
sure you don’t hit the little valve at the top of the tank that does who knows
what. If you accidentally hit it so that it faces down, the water refilling the
tank will come pouring out of that valve and onto the floor.
8. Throw the one rag into the laundry sink for
washing.
It’s a good process that doesn’t take too long to do and it
works well to get the dust picked up. As for the floors, they get washed
several times a week when we leave red footprints everywhere. There is no set
schedule for that. Not having carpet certainly makes life a lot easier here. I
can’t imagine what we would do if we had a big area rug like the ones we see
being sold on the side of the road. I haven’t seen a vacuum for sale here. It would
certainly slow things down if we had to drag a rug out each week and beat it.
I still don’t like cleaning but this works for me. I doubt
it will transfer for a desire to clean when we get back home though. I’ll be
looking for a great cleaner once we get back!
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