Cleaning Up

This past week I finally started doing something I've been putting off for 5 years: CLEANING MY CARPET.  You see, I live in a 60s era apartment building near Piedmont Ave. and all the units have the same bland grey carpeting (I have some friends in the building so I know what their places look like.)  This grey carpeting is fine, generally, except that it accumulates dirt and shows stains after a while if you don't clean it.  Especially when you are the type who likes to cook on their own or fix their own  bikes inside their apartment (even if I tried to use newspapers to catch the grease - it didn't always work.)  So then you have all these GREASE STAINS and they make the carpet (and therefore the place you live in) look crappy.  Yet, if you're like me, you just sort of ignore it, realizing that the effort needed to actually deal with the problem would take more time than you are willing to spend to fix it.  And to be honest, it never really bothered me much, until somebody pointed it out.  Which somebody eventually did (almost 2 years ago, to be exact).  Actually, it was more than one person.

So, recently, over Memorial Day weekend, I was invited up to dinner at my friend Tom's house in Crockett.  (if you ever wanted to see a "ghost house" you should go there sometime.)  Tom showed me his carpet cleaner and this led to me thinking maybe it's time I gave it a try and clean my carpet like others have told me to do.  At the same time, I can dispose of different junk that I have accumulated over 5+ years living in this place.

Now if I had been smart, I would have taken some "before" pictures of the carpet and then also the "after" pictures to impress you with the result.  As a matter of fact, I do have some sections of the carpet still uncleaned (because most of the furniture needs to be cleared, it's a multi-stage process with me.)  So here they are:

The above picture (from my entrance) shows some of the dirt spots.  You will also note the lighter area, where I had an area rug covering it up.  Below is what it looks like now, after cleaning:

It's actually quite liberating cleaning your carpet.  I feel like, beyond the dirt I am ridding  my carpets of, I am also cleaning up a mess I've made in my personal life.  Of course that is not true: though the carpet is cleaner, my personal mess (from a recent break up) remains.  However, I can at least take heart that not everything in Mundus Kentus is a mess.

By the way, there is no environmental angle to this post.  I could have at least used an eco-degradable carpet soap, but alas, I just bought whatever they were selling at Safeway (there were only two choices: OxyClean or Pet Odor remover.  I chose Pet Odor because I used to keep some cats here for a friend.)