Bolthole Blitz

The post title is Roy's invention and refers to one of the reasons we stayed another day in town. Primarily we stayed on Monday because we had to visit Dylan, our computer chap. Roy's birthday is coming up on Thursday and on account of his laptop having gone to its maker in the sky some 4 months ago, he is having a new desk top machine built. Therefore we had to take the laptop's disk drive back to Dylan to copy the files off, plus the lazer printer, so that he can find the correct driver to make it work with the new desktop. In the meantime we looked round the flat and suddenly realised that it must be quite a long time since we did any cleaning in it. That is not surprising, as who would be so stupid as to want to live in town in 40+ degrees Celsius? So the above mentioned blitzing had commenced on Monday morning.

We started upstairs which consists of the gallery, the upper bathroom and the box room. As we are having guests coming next week, I made the bed in the box room, told the teddy bears that they will have a couple of people to share the room with next week and then cleaned the stairs en route down.

Downstairs the work got harder. We use the downstairs more and the forest of cobwebs we found above and behind furniture suggested we have not looked in those places for a long time. When we had enough of this we decided that we take a break by getting to Dylan with the printer and the hard drive. He also wanted all the money up front for the parts, so we are now a lot poorer than last week.

On our return we started downstairs and while I was dealing with the bathroom Roy got on with the kitchen. Neither was easy, but work shared is always easier than having to battle on on your own. I have even discovered a brand new way of cleaning the shower cubicle's glass panels I have always had such troubles with. I grabbed a stiff floor brush, poured bits of cream cleanser directly onto the brush and used that on the glass. It cleaned all the hard water marks off in no time at all. Fantastic!! Why didn't I think of that before? It sparkles now as new!

The last two rooms to be done were the hall/understair and the lounge. Dusting, polishing, hoovering and washing produced a really nice, clean and tidy flat. Not that we have managed to do everything. Unfortunately we have not got to cleaning the windows, especially those two enormous 3m high ones. The other job still awaiting attention is taking out all the contents of the pidgeon holes, dusting, cleaning and replacing them. These are probably the next tasks, but we both think that we had done a sterling job this Monday on all fronts.

Finally this morning we got home to the country. We managed to get all our shopping done en route; once home we had the painter/decorator visit to discuss starting work next Monday on painting the walls and woodwork of 2 of the houses; had e-mail from Alwyn and Val that they are definitely arriving on Sunday and even Attila came and mowed the grass in our absence.