Spotless

So I've been moving the last four days. Not that big of a move, in fact it's only a couple of 100 feet. Kelly and I have been sharing a studio apartment with our two cats for the last year, plus a few months. Our new apartment is a one bedroom, and needless to say this is a move long overdue. We agreed with our landlord that we would clean and fix up our old apartment so that we wouldn't have to pay any more into our deposit. The agreement went like this: we move in to the new apartment on Sunday and Monday, and have until Friday to clean up the old one. It's been going good, but as a 22 year old I haven't really had the chance to experience what it takes to clean an apartment top to bottom. All of the places I've moved out of have been those permanently rotating roommate situations: by the time everyone has moved out (which will be years after , the place is too changed and decimated to even consider getting the deposit). It'll be nice not to have to pay twice for something we can do ourselves.

But also—and this is probably more important—we're not slobs. We don't want to look like slobs, either. Thanks to the internet you can see a lot of worst case scenarios that are so messy that they sort of put you in a "yeah, I guess I'm not that bad" state of mind. But later—this is at least for me—they influence me to clean up even more. I don't even want to be anywhere near those people. Like the infamous Houston incident: a woman abandoned her apartment around when Hurricane Ike hit the Gulf Coast, and though the apartment was left untouched my the hurricane, it might as well have. The sight has to be seen to be believed.

But it gets worse, and much closer to home. A few months before I moved in here local papers went nuts over a unit in our building that was home to 80 cats. The place was understandably filthy: the closets used as litter boxes, piles of garbage bags everywhere. There were never cockroaches in the building before the incident, and only two of the 80 cats survived (the apartment is still vacant, by the way).

We're not like that, thank God. Scrubbing down this old place has been a long and difficult three day process and it's totally redefined my definition of "clean" as being something totally and completely spotless. I reek of chemicals! As the new year sets in we're ringing it in with a clean slate and an apartment just as immaculate. Here's hoping we can keep it that way.

[Image provided by Flickr User Tray and used under a Creative Commons License]