The best twenty dollars I have spent all year.
I have an addiction to YouTube videos. I've owned up to that many times over. One of my favorite genres is cleaning videos. Even the shorts they offer me on YouTube and Facebook skew heavily towards cleaning. I kept seeing videos of people using stiff, short-bristled broom/brushes to scrub tile floors, and I thought, I need one of those. Auriikaterina uses a squeegee on floors after she mops, and I tried a cheap one from Home Depot that failed. I took one more gamble with an Amazon purchase, and I won the jackpot. I got a twenty dollar combo deck broom and squeegee that has radically changed my cleaning success.
I have been using the broom on the carpets for weeks. It pulls up Great Pyrenees fur like nothing else can, and eases the burden off my stick vacuum. Today I tried it for its other purpose, and it was another revolutionary advancement. I've hated the tile in my kitchen since before we even closed on this house. Little did I know then how badly the grout would hold grease and dirt and be next to impossible to clean. Mopping just made it worse, not better. I tried steam. I tried bleach. I tried acids, abrasives, and peroxide (not all at once). I spent hours sitting on my bad hip on that hard floor, trying to scrub the crap off it. So it was with little confidence that I dribbled Dawn and water on the floor and started scrubbing. And scrubbing. And a little more scrubbing. It was labor intensive, but by the time I squeegeed up the brown foam, I knew it was working. It was a trick rinsing all the dish soap off, but the floor was an entirely different color with the grease stripped off of it. It took hours to do the whole thing, but finally I have slain the dragon. Only took me nine years to find the right tool for the job.
The whole time I was gone, the residents of this house were sick, so I suppose it's no surprise that little cleaning happened. It's Wednesday, so of course I had to spend the entire day getting the place ready for the game group. I had to prioritize what I wanted to tackle in addition to the above-mentioned tile scrubbing. I think I did all right in choosing most of it (I mean, it's October, I had to put the proper couch cover out). By the time the game started, I could barely move. I was stiff and sore, and it felt like the toe that was trying to pop out a bunion moved all the way straight in one painful lurch, and that has been distracting. I'm on the verge of complaining how I keep cleaning and cleaning and I never get ahead of it, but then I have to stop myself and recognize this is the human condition. I will never conquer this.
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