You might want to clean that

You might want to clean that

We moved in today, and although there was a little stress when our movers arrived an hour earlier than expected, and further stress when we realised just how damn much stuff we had, this was little in comparison to opening the cupboards and being presented with utter filth.

To be fair, when we signed the contract we said our landlord had to remove all his broken down junk from the cupboards, and he had done that, but he hadn’t removed any of the filthy stains and rust marks and horrible looking trails of some brown liquid or other.

This is a bit aggravating (as is the failure to repaint properly) not least because if you don’t clean your flat properly before you move out, the landlord will hit you with a big fee for cleaning it. Although apparently either our landlord was super charitable to the last tenants (who were pretty revolting if the kitchen is anything to go by), or… Well, or what, exactly?

So, while the children gambolled with their friend today (we had then being looked after by friends so they weren’t traumatised or squashed by the movers) I was scrubbing at the insides of shelves with a scrubbing pad and a bottle of Cif. (Funnily enough, I then found a packet of scouring pads in a cupboard that would have been very useful. Unopened, of course.) The brown stains eventually went, but the amount of elbow grease required meant I only did one cupboard properly.

That presented a dilemma: it doesn’t make sense to move all our utensils into cupboards covered in god-knows-what, but we also can’t have the apartment filled with cardboard boxes of stuff forever. I thought I made a pretty good job of unpacking (perhaps compensating from being awful at packing this morning, where in an uncaffeinated fug I struggled to empty even a single drawer of a desk, much to my wife’s opprobrium).

Anyway, the house is about half unpacked, half cleaned, and I’ve had a bottle of alcoholic ginger beer and I’m intending on sleeping well tonight.


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