Not helpful in a credit crunch...

[laligin]

There are times I stop caring about money, and figure, you want it, buy it. Not helpful when you're living on a budget. But so very freeing.

In other news, flatmates have driven me insane.

This (pictures beneath the cut) is the state they decided to leave the kitchen in.



Also, our flatmates have a tendency to go home for the weekend. These two foibles combined make for an unhappy Lali.

So yesterday I went absolutely ballistic on the kitchen. Everything was removed from surfaces. All dishes and cutlery, regardless of who they belonged to, were washed and dried and put away, which is the real problem. The worktops were cleaned. The dinner table was scrubbed with Cif. The coffee table was similarly scrubbed with Cif, since somebody had been putting their feet up on it, with mud on their shoes. The oven was attacked and scrubbed and cleaned, and the ash and sauce residue was removed. The bin was cleaned, and the lid repaired, though heaven knows how they managed to break it in the first place. The ironing board and iron were put away. The bin bags were at long last tied up and taken out. (Despite many repeated promises from our other flatmates, they never bothered to get round to this, so Shadowbyrd and I did it.)

And then I got to the communal cupboards.

Now, see, our kitchen has never smelt entirely great since we got here. We asked when we moved in for it to be cleaned properly, on finding a decaying apple core behind the TV set (which nobody dared to touch, so was left for the mythical cleaners). The cleaners never turned up - my cleaning spree marks more than a month since we asked, and they insist anything like that will be done within 28 days.

So I found what was making the smell. (And not that godawful overpowering airfreshener our other flatmates resort to, to cover everything up instead of cleaning it...)

In the cupboard with ironing board and dustpans and brushes, we have a mop and bucket. Said mop has never been touched by any of us since we moved in. So I can only assume that it was still wet from its last use by the previous tenants, last year. This theory was backed up by the state of rot and browning it was in. Also the fact that the smell most very definitely came from the mop...

Mop in skip. Mop bucket doused in Cif and very, very clean. Cupboard rather sweeter now.

And then. The cupboard under the sink, which has two shelves for the dishcloths and so on, and a rather gaping empty space above that so anyone can admire the plumbing and the various patches under the draining board. This one has also stunk to high heaven, despite many cleanings of the sink and the pipes, and frequent blasts of air freshener.

Down behind the shelves, as I discovered by oh-so-cautiously peering over into the Big Gap, there was lodged a metal bowl of some kind. With solidified cooking oil and some sort of burnt remnants attached to its surface.

Second source of smell located.

Bowl in skip. Cupboard Ciffed and clean. Slightly sweeter now...

And then I started picking up all the bigger bits of rubbish from the floor (I hasten to add, I was wearing thick rubber gloves through all of this, fear not), so I could hoover properly and get rid of all the crumbs I swept off the worktops and tables.

And I picked up the apple core.

Not actually an apple core after all.

Chicken drumstick bone. With little bits of decaying meat still attached. It left a rather large amount of brown dust on the floor when removed.

Oh dear.

Now. This flat is owned by the same group who had the nerve to charge me £20 for "extra cleaning" when I vacated my flat and left it spotless last year.

Hm. I see. They have indeed been very thorough and clean. I understand, now, how such charges can be incurred. Of course.

Still. I suppose I should be grateful to the flatmates for leaving the place in such a state, otherwise I wouldn't have been galvanised to act. And I wouldn't have had to fill in a request form for a new mop this afternoon...

Gonna go cook now. Let some mint sauce flavour the air a little...

Oh, and I've signed up to ficfinishing. In theory, Harkness, PI, and Jantolution 14 will be done for Halloween, and my next tw_calender fic will be shiny by its due date too. Wish me luck...

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[laligin.livejournal.com]

...eating scrambled egg, with a comb, from a shoe!

Ahem...

It's fine. My laptop's decided to be all weird about letting me have internet - it's taken to deciding that no, I don't deserve it at the moment...