Vacuuming

Floor surfaces in my house could use some attention.  I mopped the kitchen's synthetic tile floor.  A two person job with furniture repositioning.  Most of my floor surfaces, though, are carpeting.  Sturdy synthetic nylon.  Most installed when we moved into our house in 1981, with a few more recentm additions.  By the advise of most experts on home maintenance, once in book, now online.  The vacuum with rotating brush head should be allowed to clean and restore this flooring weekly.  I use my bedroom and part of the living room and the exposed parts of the family room's Berber carpet daily.  As a reward to myself for passing Endocrinology Boards I treated myself to an elegant round rug for my office, since relocated to My Space with retirement.  I step on it daily.  About once a week I do my various loads of laundry, taking the dried clothing to the living room for folding.  Residue from the carpet finds its way to the surfaces of the clothing I had just laundered.  So I got out the vacuum cleaner to make long overdue amends.

It is not like the carpets never get cleaned.  In anticipation of Passover, we arrange for formal carpet cleaning of the living room, dining room, upstairs landing, and stairs.  In order to do this, the cleaning service has to vacuum all the surfaces first.  The bedroom and My Space have neglect exceeding one year,  I made the vacuum cleaner, a modern Shark Model with YouTube access guiding me in its use, fully functional.  Empty bag.  No suction without an empty bag.  Learned how to put the rolling brush in carpet mode.  Create Zones.  Easy:  upper landing, always kept clear, and my special area rug.  Hard Zones:  my half of the bedroom which needed subzones as I moved stuff covering the floor to expose carpeting, then vacuumed, then moved some selectively back to expose another section of the royal blue velvet pile.  Did this three times.  Slightly winded but done.  Wife's side of bedroom a lost cause, no carpeting exposed beneath clothing, books, and assorted surface priorities that she has.  Still, one-person job.

Living room: two-person job.  Moving and replacing a lot of furniture, creating sub-zones.  The area near the room's entrance had its carpeting tamped down daily with contributions of outside walking ground beneath the carpet's surface to its lower pile.  I vacuumed each zone in two directions.  Between the moving and replacing of furniture, negotiating the vacuum's excessively long cord, and long swaths of surface, each cleaned in two directions, I found this unexpectedly tiring.  But accomplished in a way that I could discern an improvement when this part of the project was completed.

That leaves me with two more sections.  The dining room will be fairly easy.  Mostly chairs to move and replace.  Finally, the stairs, walked upon multiple times daily.  This one needs the tools.   I found most of them.  Family Room judged lost cause.

Those are the carpeted surfaces.  There are other surfaces, including our tiled entry hall.  This might be better cleaned with a Swiffer Kit, which I own but need to make functional.  Laundry Room with kitty litter dragged by Priscilla the Cat into the adjacent powder room and across the living room surface.  Vacuum without the brush beater, followed by mop or Swiffer.

Having done this, and also recognizing some exceeds my capacity for doing more than on rare bursts of determination, I will need to engage a professional cleaning crew.  And sooner rather than later.