Thursday, January 16, 2014

Thoughts Pondered While Vacuuming the Stairs

1.  Someone should invent something that makes vacuuming the stairs easy and effective.  Lord knows I've googled and searched and haven't found any brilliant solution. I'd pay a lot of money for something like that.  IS there something like that? .

2.  Wait, is that called a house cleaner?

3.  I should have rescued a dog with fur that matched the rug.  Or planned carpeting that matched the dog.

4.  In a household with a black dog, a gray cat and a white cat, I can't win.  No matter what color something is, SOME pet hair will end up showing on it.

5.  With all the dog hair drifting around, am I inhaling a bit every day?  Like pet dander?  Do doctors find people with pet hair in their lungs?  How is it I'm not coughing up furballs?  Ack. 

6.  Let me pause a moment and appreciate that the dog hair is on the stairs and not in my lungs.  Small gratitude moment.

7. Maybe my next dog should be a non-shedding poodle.  Or doodle.  Or a hairless dog. 

8.  On second thought, I'd rather have uncarpeted stairs and a big furry dog. 

9.  I wonder how much it would cost to rip the carpet off of the stairs and put hardwood on them.

10.  I wonder how much fabric and art supply stuff I would have to not buy to save the money for replacing the stair carpet with hard wood. 

11.  Vacuuming the stairs = Life Evaluation + Animal Companion Philosophy + Physical Workout.

So, I'm cleaning today.  What are YOU doing?!  And what do you think about while you do it?!

7 comments :

  1. bwahahahaa...this is AWESOME!
    I pay $2 for the kids to vacuum the stairs. It is a job I loathe. Our staircase has this "birdcage" thingy too (which is where the spindles wind around in a small spiral)...ugh...ANDDDD the stair case is the absolute FIRST thing you see when entering through the front door, so it's not like I can ignore the fact that they need to look OK (like I do w/the basement stairs...heh).

    Gee, I think you may have hit a nerve ;)

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  2. With all the cats in this household I could probably make another one with all the fuzz they shed!

    #11 is spot on! Love it!

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  3. When I empty the vacuum cleaner unit that collects dust, etc I am regularly appalled at how much fur comes out. A spinner could probably have spun quite bit of yarn by now. It also seems like I could have assembled more than 1 dog and 2 cats from the fur that I've thrown away. I used to think that having a Dyson vacuum where you SEE what you vacuum up was a good thing (satisfying and reinforcing during cleaning) but now I'm not so sure. :-)

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  4. I did rip the carpet off the two landings and planned to do the stairs. It's been a year. Why not ? Because my two big, clumsy labs skid on the wooden floor of the landings and whomp into the wall. I'm afraid if I take the carpet off the rest of the stairs, they'll kill themselves!

    Question: have you thought of a Roomba and do you think it will work with dog hair? And do you think my two dogs would ever stop barking at it if I got one?

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  5. Loretta! I'm so glad you raised this because I was thinking it wouldn't be an issue on the stairs but now that you mention it, I can imagine Gemma sliding into the stairwell wall over and over. A year ago I had the downstairs flooring replaced with laminate wood floor and all she does is slip and slide. I had to put enough runners and small rugs around so she could go from one "island" to the next. Phew. You just saved me a bunch of money. :-)

    I had a Roomba for a while (and currently have a different brand of same sort of thing. For those people (ie, not you and me) whose typical dirt consists of dust and the occasional bit of debris tracked in from shoes, they are probably great. But for anyone with shedding pet hair, I find them useless. the dirt-catch area is about the size of an apple and instantly fills up with dog hair so then it sits and beeps. It's easier to just get out the big vacuum and clean than it is to have to go un-beep the robotic thing. Oh, and it gets stuck all sorts of places so more beeping.

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  6. I think maybe they perfected the Roomba recently.

    http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/23/technology/personaltech/review-the-roomba-880-from-irobot.html?ref=technology

    Hope to see you sketching sometime soon Diane! It's better than vacuuming any day! : )

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  7. I think maybe they perfected the Roomba recently.

    http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/23/technology/personaltech/review-the-roomba-880-from-irobot.html?ref=technology

    Hope to see you sketching sometime soon Diane! It's better than vacuuming any day! : )

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