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Saturday, May 2, 2020

A weird problem to have

Have to have the rent house finished tomorrow. Since my shoulder is so bad, I hired a woman to help. I did one bedroom, she did the other. I did the kitchen, she did the living room. Well, I hadn't previously, in all these years, noticed that my inability to bear down on the scouring pad was leaving the floors less that clean looking. Now the line between her work and mine isn't acceptable. No time to redo my work.

Another thing, I learned from my helper is to spray heavy and let it sit for awhile. Then it comes off easier. I was always using as little as I could to reduce fumes, and always hurrying to get done. Not paid by the hour like she is. LOL

Helper's work before any work done to floor, and after
It would be fine if the whole house had been done by her, and now there isn't enough time before the new tenants are scheduled to move in. So here's my work compared to no work and her work. Left: mine, Center: no one, Right: helper. Obviously my work isn't acceptable beside hers. I always thought I was getting the floor as clean as it was possible. I didn't have a clue.


My work always looked good. Got lots of compliments on it. Tenants were happy with it, but it won't look good at all beside hers. Obviously I'll never be scouring another floor.

In my defense, here's a photo showing the house I scrubbed several weeks ago beside the one we're working on. (We haven't leased it out yet only because the previous tenant broke a hole in the fiberglass bathtub. My Austin son is coming next week to fix it.)  I thought the floor looked good and there's no difference between the work I did on it and my work on the one we're doing now. It'll get waxed like the one on the left has been, of course.

If you look at the next photo closely you can see the kitchen areas on both houses look similar (other than the wax and replacement tiles.  And one has a black range and the other has a cream colored range). Then on the right photo (current project) there's a dark strip between what my helper did and what I did. What I did looks like the previous house, other than the wax and replacement tiles.

If I could have physically done the whole house alone I would have. My shoulder hurts real bad, but I didn't take anything for it. My helper did take Tylenol for hers.

Photos taken with room lights on after dark. Previous
 two photos in bright daylight with no indoor lighting
UPDATE: I called my helper and she said she'd redo the kitchen floor tomorrow. Really, we don't have a choice, and I'm going to try to blend the doorway between the living room and hall (not on photos). I just hope she is able to do the job. We're obviously in a jam right now. I'll take more photos tomorrow during daylight, hopefully one with this floor clean and waxed.

Deer at our ponds this evening at dusk. I was driving past and just had my cell phone on me, so not a good picture. Just didn't want this post to be nothing but floors.The houses (and floors) are just across the street from the deer. What a contrast!




2 comments:

  1. Do you or your husband have a drill or orbital sander you can adapt to use for the job? Google power drill and/or power sander hack for mounting brushes appropriate for scrubbing floors or tiles.

    Recently I had to get my house power washed - mildew is a problem over here on the humid side of TX ;-) - and the guys I hired scrubbed my driveway with a big lawnmower-type machine that made it clean enough to eat off of, I swear. I already own a wimpy little Hoover FloorMate but now I fantasize about getting the same exterior machine that did such a great job on my drive. I could do my whole house in one pass in about twenty minutes! Alas, I don't think that machine would fit through the door.

    I'm not handy, but I've been thinking of buying a heavy duty power drill or orbital hand sander just to do the floors properly once a year & then use the FloorMate the rest of the time for maintenance. Scrubbing by hand is so, so very hard & time consuming.

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  2. We have rented a floor scrubber before. It's a killer for us to handle and makes a big wet mess on the floor to clean up. My helper came today and finished the job and redid the kitchen floor to match. So all is well. Tomorrow my husband is going to wax it and I'll take pictures to post. The bedroom that I did is not great, but was always fine until we had something better to compare it to, so we're not going to redo it. Hopefully we'll get them sold and not have to do this again, but if we do, the woman I hired will hopefully be available to help. One thing I was doing wrong was not leaving the oven cleaner on long enough before scrubbing. She pointed that out to me and it makes a big difference and takes less shoulder pressure.

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