D-Day + 21: Coronavirus Curses

Pandemic

Contagion

Infestation

Pestilence

Vermin

That pretty well sums up our weekend, the fourth such weekend of our shelter-at-home days.

It all started innocently enough.  Our housekeepers, who come every other week, do a good enough job.  But not really a good job.  We accept the status quo because they are reasonable, reliable, fairly priced, and very fast.  But in our day-to-day lives, we frequently comment on the things that they miss.  The dusty baseboards.  The cobwebs not removed.  The dusting that only goes so far. 

We had been thinking about the need to do a deep cleaning sometime soon.  After all, we moved into this house five years ago, and have not really done a serious cleaning since then.  So when we asked the cleaners to stay away when their normal cleaning day rolled around a couple of weeks ago, we took this as the opportunity for us to tackle the whole enchilada – just like millions of other Americans.

But millions of other Americans are not project managers.  Unfortunately for Ed, I am.  That means that I put on my PM cap, and out came the scheduling plan.  To better ensure success, I knew we couldn’t go with the Big Bang approach, where you have one task that is “clean the whole house”.  Nope.  I went with a task deconstruction that loosely follows the Agile approach which is the rage among project management philosophies these days.  Now we have a schedule with every room, and every subtask by room – all broken down by phases.

Like any good project management approach, there are metrics associated with completion.  I run a daily stand-up meeting (pretty much with myself, sometimes including Ed; good staff is so hard to come by these days) to determine what tasks to take on next.  This flexibility helps to ensure that we continue forward progress even when the resources make themselves scarce. The project has been running pretty well to plan (the only deadline is to get the damn house cleaned before we both give up, or – hopefully – get released from this quarantine).  

We started out with an easy room – the dining room.  Easy Peasy.  Nothing much there except, well, the usual dining room stuff:  table, chairs, rug, windowsills, a couple of shelves.  The success of that task led us to take on increasingly more complicated and difficult tasks.  Bathrooms.  Piano room.  Guest bedroom.  Our master bedroom was the first real test of our fortitude.  We took the bed apart and pulled it out from the wall.  Our two cats had deposited a prodigious amount of fur under the bed, at the baseboards, anywhere they could.  But thanks to a hardworking vacuum cleaner and fresh attitudes, we got ‘er done.

Then a week ago Saturday, we tackled the library.  It’s a small room.  But some imbecile (I plead the fifth on this one) decided that we needed to take all the books off all the shelves in order to properly dust the room.  The other moron on the team decided to use the unshelving/reshelving process to ensure that our alphabetic filing system was accurate.  A full day and 1300 books (give or take a few), we survived.  It’s amazing how decisions about books one will never read (or never read again) become easier as the shelves get fuller and there’s really no place else to store them.  Goodwill will thank us.

Our next big weekend challenge awaited us this past Saturday:  the HPC.  The HPC is our Harry Potter Cupboard under the stairs.  We don’t have a basement, so this handy closet on the first floor is our catch-all.  It’s chockful of stuff.  A few tools, spare lightbulbs, futon mattresses for the pullout couch, bedding (ditto), old towels, rags, spare cutlery and water bottles.  The big air mattress that we use once every ten years or so.  Cat carriers.  Extra cat food. A little of this.  A little of that.  You get the picture.

We knew that the HPC was going to take all day.  But that was before we discovered that little brown moths had infested the closet.  Little brown moths, moth nests, and – most disgusting of all – little white worms trying to become moths.  Ewwww.  Dear Lord.  Our Saturday was spent pulling every single thing out; vacuuming the bejeebers out of all the surfaces; washing down all the surfaces and spraying everything with a concoction Ed made out of water, isopropyl alcohol, and lavender oil.  We ran 8 or 9 loads of laundry in hot water.  We filled our trash dumpster with wrapping paper and bows and tissue paper:  for some odd reason, those gross little buggers loved the tissue paper.  So out it all went.

At the end of the day, we got the HPC reassembled.  It’s all nice and shiny now, and there is actually room on some of the shelves.  There’s room to walk into the closet now.  We even rearranged so that stuff is mostly easier to access.

It was a big job, but by Saturday night, the rest of our living space on the first floor looked livable again.  We rewarded ourselves with a happy hour out on our front porch, opening one of the bottles of wine that we had rescued from the HPC.  We settled in a bit later with some dinner and a movie on Netflix.

Before going upstairs to bed, we went to the HPC and opened the door to – again – admire our handywork.  And there – up high – on a wall that was beautifully clean and white just a short time earlier – was a freaking little brown moth.

Son of a bitch.  Coronavirus Curses.