My Simple House

Day 1 – Demo and Cleaning – Part 1 (cleaning)

By Tara - Saturday, October 13th, 2012

Being on a tight budget for this rather large project, we plan to do as much as we can ourselves. Two major components of the DIY part are demo, and clean up. I mean, if you’re tearing things out and demolishing stuff it’s a lot easier (and less professional skill requiring) than building things back up. That’s what the pros are for! And cleaning? Remember the peeling paint and nicotine stained walls? Anyone can do that it just takes a little bit of elbow grease!

So, I’ll leave the bathroom demo tale to Matt, but I have a few choice words to say about cleaning the living and dining room… The plan to start was to wipe down the walls and ceiling with water & TSP to start getting the nicotine and other stains off the walls so the place could start to air out. When I refer to ‘other stains’, to be honest I’m not sure exactly what they were. Sort of looked like someone threw coffee at the walls in random places. If it wasn’t coffee, I don’t want to know what it was!

To be able to reach the top of the walls and the ceiling (ceiling height is pretty high which is nice) I decided to use a mop. Filled up my bucket of TSP and water dipped the mop and ready to go! Yes, I did mop walls and ceilings.

OMG!!!! The walls and ceiling looked to be a dark mustard yellow type color but were in fact a pale cream or off white color. So gross! How much chain smoking and non cleaning does it take to get to that level of build up?? It took me 6 hours and two large size containers of TSP to do a once over of the living/dining room area. It’s going to need at least two more cleanings for sure!

I am by no means a neat freak but still sometimes I think my house is dire need of cleaning… It so does not even compare.