A Scrubby, Grubby Day

The mental list of things in my house that needed to be actually *scrubbed* had gotten serious. I left my workout clothes on this morning because I was going to get dirty.

First Frederick's cage came apart in about seventeen gigantic metal panels. A chore that's best tackled outside in the sunshine with a big bottle of soap and a garden hose, but I wasn't waiting any longer for that kind of weather. I know, disgusting to do it in the house but everything was thoroughly vinegarised afterwards. Whew. Much better.

The floor behind the woodstove where the mysterious black liquid by-product of a wood fire drips onto the floor when I'm not looking. Whatever. It's clean now.

Then. The kitchen floor, by hand, with a brush. These floors are very soft pine, with most of the finish gone. The thing about scrubbing them is there's really no end to what you can scrub off with a stiff brush--it's actual wood coming up. So you take up as much as you think the floor can spare, balanced by how far down the stains go. The floor's a little thinner now, but that description you always read about tables in the flagstoned kitchens of rural England, and how they're scrubbed white? That's what I did, but only where things were really bad.

And now they're really good.