Disrupted

We had our carpeting cleaned this morning by Cook's Carpet Care out of North Manchester. This is an Amish-owned family business. Each of the cleaners presented us with a card bearing his name: Alan Cook and Brian Cook. I guess they really are part of the family. I am pretty sure we had at least one of these guys before. They are so polite and very professional. As Alan measured the carpet footage to calculate the bill, Brian went right to work spraying spot cleaner on the dirtier places. Each knew exactly what to do and started right in. They arrived at 9:15 and left a little after ten.

We spent part of yesterday and then this morning moving some of the lighter furniture out of the way: tables, lamps, hamper, rocking chair, ironing board. We put most of those in the bathrooms or the garage. The hardest pieces to move were the dining table and chairs and the love seat. We half carried, half shoved the love seat into the kitchen. We made a little nook for ourselves in the sun porch with a place to eat and two more comfortable chairs to sit in for reading or using the ipad for mail and games.

This is the first time we have had the area rug cleaned. It seems to be drying faster than the wall-to-wall carpeting which surprises me because it has deeper pile. Still, we won't be able to replace the moved furniture until at least this evening some time. We have the ceiling fans going and the central system fan running on manual (no heat or cooling). But it is a gray overcast day. No warm sun pouring thru the windows to speed things up. 

We left the recliners in the living area but turned sideways away from the dirtiest spots. When the Cooks offered to move them and then put Styrofoam blocks under them (the chairs in the den as well), I asked at the end of the cleaning if they would move the love seat out of the kitchen and put blocks under it. That makes using the kitchen like normal. In previous times we had to work around the love seat. They made the lifting of the love seat look like child's play. These are strong young men. We will have to manage the dining room set by ourselves again, but at least we eliminated the heavy love seat from our task list. We will be able to sit in the recliners to watch TV tonight.

I had the stain repellant sprayed on everything but the bedrooms this time. They even put it on the area rug. Lets hope that helps us clean up future spills more easily. Our carpeting is 9 1/2 years old and shows wear, especially at the seaming. I doubt it will be replaced during our residency so we need to take good care of it.

My husband has worked in the garage today on his projects, and I spent about an hour in the Grace Village library processing some books and shelving others. You can start to feel pretty limited space-wise when cooped up in a small area, but we are managing. Not doing some of the typical things for a Monday though, our schedules slightly disrupted. By tomorrow everything should be back in place.