Mortiferous Monday

mortiferous ~ death-bringing; fatal

So ... when we last met over the soap opera that is my life, my vacation was a bust but my bookcases were pretty much finished. Life was beginning to return to normal. More or less.

Over the course of the week I began weeding out books and knick knacks we don’t need/use/are tired of to donate to charity, further de-cluttering the house. I gotta admit, it was nice coming home after babysitting to a tidy house.

This lasted for a week.

Late Saturday afternoon, the hubby decided to sand the kitchen ceiling in a prelude to painting it. I might not have been quite so willing to go along with this had I realized he was going to be using the electric sander. Don’t ask me why, but I had the impression there were only a couple of spots he needed to sand and he was going to do it by hand.

Anyway, he moved most of the stuff we had on the counters onto the dining room table, and then I helped him tape up plastic over the doorway, over the fridge and stove, over the shelves above the pantry, and over the passthru and doorway into the dining room.

Doesn’t matter whether you’re sanding filler, drywall, or painted walls, when you’re using an electric sander the dust is super fine and super insidious. While most of the house was spared, thanks to a six inch gap in the bottom of the plastic over the dining room opening, everything in the dining room had a fine coating of white. Inside the kitchen the plastic over everything helped somewhat, but the dust still got into the cupboards.

I might mention at this point how much I hate dusting. I would rather scrub the public toilets at a chili cook-off than dust. Needless to say, I was not a happy camper. And he’s not done yet.

I’d been working in my office when this started, and at one point I was going down to the basement for something and I noticed the living room looked a little foggy. I quickly blocked the gap in the dining room with some boxes, which helped, and the living room wasn’t too badly covered.

My office came out of this the best, mainly because I worked with the door closed (which the cats really hated) and when I had to have it open I had the fan on the bookcase in front of my desk pointed towards the door. It’s still going.

Sunday morning I had to dust off the coffee maker and the stove to make breakfast, and then I discovered the dust had made its way inside the cupboards when I had to dust off my plate and coffee cup.

Going forward, I’ll dust what I have to in order to use it but I’m not going to worry about the cleanup until after the dust has settled. Again.

And if the hubby ever feels the urge to sand walls or ceilings again, he’s going to find himself wearing that electric sander where the sun don’t shine.

Fair warning.