Autumn Rains

When the cooler air of autumn passes through your area and the change of season rains come (God willing they come and are helpful.  Extremes of weather have plagued much of the American heartland, both flood and drought) and the out door allergy season is washing away, take advantage of a rainy day by dusting the walls.  The increase in humidity on a rainy day is great for keeping dust flutter to a minimum as you dust the big areas.  If you are really ambitious, get up on a foot stool and dump the dead bugs out of the light fixtures and wipe.  You will likely have to add something to the water on your damp cloth as you wipe the globes and fixtures.  Nobody gets to them very often and with the light going off and on, this area gets a lot of extremes of temperature turning dust to grime over time.  Be sure the light is turned off!  Don't wipe a hot lightbulb, OK?  This link is to my March 24TH post where I talk about cleaning chemistry.  "http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=7583717878240399293#editor/target=post;postID=227372766248215747

Dust, pollen etc sticks to wall paint really well and it's also spider season.  Around late summer, the spiders start to get really active and want to come inside to spin.  I use my cannister vacuum cleaner (because the wand and floor tool are light weight) to vacuum the walls and behind any easily moved artwork, draperies, furniture etc.  The floor brush that came with the machine was black plastic and left marks on baseboards, ceilings etc, so I wrapped the edge of it in masking tape.  The tape does need to be replaced once in a while as it wears off but, no more marks.  When I needed to replace the floor brush I bought a beige one.  A long handled swiffer would do a good job, just remember to take long slow swipes from top to bottom and slowly bring it back to the top.  The dust will be kicked up but the more deliberate you are about your movements the less dust gets away.  The spider webs are going to be sticky so hopefully the handle of the swiffer is stiff enough to be a practical tool.  The spiders will likely escape to the cracks where they live but that's not necessarily a bad thing.  Spiders eat a lot of less desirable insects.  If you really don't want spiders in your home, use the vacuum wand with the crevasse tool  (the narrow pointy one) and vac the edges of the walls and ceiling.  I covered my crevasse tool with masking tape, too.  These spiders are likely setting up housekeeping on and in your upholstered furniture so vac not only under the couch but vacuum the underside of your couch.  You will likely have to lay on the floor to get the leverage you need to vac the underside but I encourage every opportunity to get down on the floor and work muscles you may not use regularly.  Everyone of us will eventually loose everything we have: muscle tone, strength, health, family, we're all mortal, you know. So, if you can get down and get back up, do it all the time.  So, wipe the edges of your hard floors by hand once in awhile, lay down on the floor and look under your furniture at floor level.   See what you are doing instead of just vacuuming under things sight unseen.  If your knees are your weak link and you can't get up and down, see about delegating this chore to someone else.  It really needs to be done.  Teamwork, my babies.  

Now is also a good time to check under the stove and fridge for debris.  Use a long handled swiffer, a yard stick with a wash cloth secured to it or a really cool, flat plastic tool with washable dust cloths designed just for this task like what my friend bought for me... and swipe under the appliances.  I guarantee you'll be amazed at what you find...a Cheerio, sticky dust bunnies, a plastic wrapper, cat toys, a dried out blueberry....   ants and mice love this stuff.  You're not likely to find a Cheerio under the washer/dryer but wipe under there, too if you have a tool that will fit under.  Dryer lint is extremely flammable so take your time when you clean out the dryer vents.  Get a real tool for this, something designed with this task in mind.  We use dryer lint stuffed into toilet paper cardboard tubes as fire starters in our wood stove. 

By the way, most clothing now has polyester or other poly product woven into it.  That means a lot of the content of dryer lint is "poly" meaning plastic, meaning oil industry based.  The fumes from a dryer fire must be very bad to breathe.  Speaking of bad to breathe...

We spent most of this year getting our house ready to put on the market.  Paint fumes I was aware of and kept the rooms well ventilated.  My throat was sore just the same after several rooms worth of painting.  We rubbed furniture oil and dark stain into the newly revealed hard wood floors (if you can smell it, you are taking in the chemistry of it and I could smell it) after taking up terrible old and dirty carpets.  The ancient dust was not good to breathe either but we expected that.  This we didn't expect.  I deep washed the kitchen linoleum floor (I used murphys oil soap mixed thinly in water and the Magic Eraser to scrub) then I put a new finish on it.  I knew that the finish was "bad chemistry" so I ventilated the kitchen, closed doors so the cats wouldn't get near it and had fans blowing to aerate to the max.  The next day as I was in the basement, I got a whiff of ... natural gas?  We have natural gas for forced hot water radiator heat and for heating potable water (that's the water coming into your home from the city water system)  I didn't smell it again so I dismissed it as a whiff escaping the vent system but I remembered it.  A day later the basement was reeking with petroleum fumes.  We called the gas company and (thank you Lord for knowledgeable gas company guys) he determined that the fumes, even with the fans blowing and windows opened, from the evaporating poly derived floor finish, being heavier than the regular air, had sunk through the cracks and under the doors and down into the basement.  Every time the hot water tank was called upon to heat water, the pilot light would light the flames, the tank would draw in air, burn off the oxygen (flame breathes the same as we do) and leave behind all the other gasses , now heated through, to accumulate.  Awful.  Chemistry is relentless, it obeys the laws of physics to the letter.  The more we know about chemistry and physics the better housekeepers we will be and the better our quality of life.  Math and science, my darlings!  Spread the word.