Housekeeping XV: Surfaces and Stains

Stain removal: Ganges style 

Dining dust 

Only myself to blame for the stain

For some reason this photo has taken me half the day to upload -
the washing took a little less time than that to dry.

Good as new

                           
I know I said no more housekeeping but..., it keeps coming! I forgot a few aspects. I would like a total record and inventory, ultimately.

What I left out, for starters, was surfaces and stains. The kitchen is a series of surfaces, so is the dining and living, to a lesser extent. Keeping surfaces clean is a big part of domestic housekeeping, I don't know why it took me so long to blog it. 

This surface is our dining table. It is not my favourite table of all - used to be M's father's boardroom table, no less. Usually lives beneath this rather elegant lace table cloth, the deep rust colour showing through rather prettily. The cloth was a wedding present all those years ago (25). Unfortunately it lets the food through, though not all of it. The larger spills are caught on top, unless entirely liquid. If it was permeable I'd be cleaning it more often but would not have to wipe the table down once every couple of weeks.

The house is also a series of stains, or potential stains in the making. Just off the top of my head I can think of the table-cloth, the bed sheet, the underwear..., the carpet, the everything where our poor old puss with the weakened bladder control is concerned, the shirts and the trousers, skirts and dresses. 

The stain is our faithful table-cloth stained by my own hand when spilling the berry crumble afternoon tea last weekend (five days ago!). I put off cleaning it. Shame on me.

I have now scrubbed the stain off with soap, hot water and gentle rubbing. I've thrown the cloth, along with some hand towels and other kitchen laundry, into the machine on a short wash. I will hang them up later and hope it doesn't rain. There's a bit of a wind up.