Desert Sands

Today's To Do list included moving the boxes of our summer clothes up into the attic, so I spent the morning with the shop vac in the attic/third floor cleaning up the 250 year old dust left over from the roof removal. It may seem like obsessive compulsive behavior, but I assure you it was not. Later, I used the shop vacuum to clean out my regular vacuum cleaner.  That was obsessive compulsive behavior.

There are no ceilings in 80% of our house. Until the chain of renovations is complete there is no point in moving into those parts of the house.  Dust is still settling weeks later from the removal of the ceilings. For  bonus fun, when David hammers on a project upstairs, debris caught between the floor upstairs and the ceiling lathe downstairs will drop down to the first floor.  Sometime it's just boring old chunks of plaster, but my personal favorites are the corn cobs. Cleaning anything anywhere seems pointless.  It would be easier to sweep sand out of the desert.

So really why bother to clean at all? That's why I had to clean out the vacuum cleaner.  Don't look at the pile of sawdust in the hall.  Those are not nail filled planks in the dining room. There is not a layer of plaster dust on the floor in the Soon To Be Maizie Bedroom.  There is only this vacuum cleaner.  This vacuum that spews a cloud of dust when I turn it on. I couldn't take it anymore.  I prepared for battle.

First the front canister was opened, then a good rinsing in the bathroom sink.  The foam filter went into the water next.  Ick doesn't come anywhere near what came out.  Anything else that I could unscrew and remove went in, too.  There were still crevices in the body of the machine that held onto the dirt.  The shop vac still rested in the hallway, waiting to be called back to action.  It did quite nicely. At least now the regular vacuum only sucks, instead of blowing.