so this week i could not get my BIL to really give me a firm answer on whether he needed help with anything. but I *could* get my middle-little sister to admit she needed help. Once i was here, of course BIL thought of some things he could use my help with, so I helped with those, but I'm staying with M-L and mostly will likely spend the rest of the week with her doing these projects.
So I'm at her house, helping with some repairs and, mostly, cleaning tasks. so I'm just going to go on about that a bit.
Her housemate has just moved out and she's now in a house she's realizing is slightly too large for her needs; it was purchased in conjunction with said housemate and so was kind of a compromise so it's not entirely ideal for her solo situation now in a number of respects. Also she has to refinance it to get former housemate off the mortgage, which normally would just be slightly annoying but now, with the entire world on fire and literally every industry in paroxysms of unprecedented failure, is actively catastrophic. She's waiting, of course, to hear on various final details, but it is very likely that current insane interest rates will mean that refinancing will mean that the mortgage payments will go up so steeply that the house will cost literally every penny she has every month, with no chance to save up anything for the highly necessary repairs. So she's bummed and stressed and it's in large part the fault of the current government, and there's a slight chance interest rates will sort themselves out but like there's also a slight chance I might spontaneously grow wings. The prospective mortgage company is now two weeks overdue on getting her a figure she was promised would take a matter of hours for them to generate, so that's also maddening; it might turn out to be fine after all, but current estimates are that it Super Won't Be, and no two employees of the mortgage company can agree on anything or keep a deadline to fucking save themselves, apparently. So once she knows that number, then all other decisions can be discussed, but as of now, it's fucking horrible because Nothing Can Be Decided And Anything Is Possible (But Probably It's Bad)-- *jazzhands*.
(Also. No real shade to housemate-- I'd planned on helping them move, and then didn't wind up being needed, so I'm just figuring this is me helping them move-- but they left a lot of things sort of... scattered around that we're now having to work around, and did mmmmmmmno cleaning, and in fact, bonus, left some garbage for us to deal with, which is slightly more hassle than in places that have trash pickup, as it means we have to haul it to the dump and have no truck so it's got to be a bunch of little trips in M-L's tiny electric car (we can't even take my larger vehicle with a rubber cargo liner because the permit is by license plate). It is no big deal really, but it is One More Goddamned Thing. I am going to try and collect the left-behind possessions into like, one single location, so that we can get on with cleaning/repairing/revamping the other locations. Probably the shed, which has enough stuff in it that it can't really be used for any other purpose anyway, so it might as well just be turned over entirely to storage.)
One good thing-- we put the broken lawnmower out by the road with a "FREE-- worked last year, now doesn't start, idk" sign on it (yes literally that's what the sign said, we're very eloquent) and some guy picked it up, so at least there is one large bit of trash dealt with. We tried the same with an office chair that had been deemed to be garbage and then left in the basement, but there were no takers. (That one's sign just said "free", though I made us both laugh (we were a little punchy) by pretending to write "runs good" under that.) I'll put it out again but not today, it's threatening rain today.
So yeah, things are kind of clusterfucked around here. M-L is considering her options including selling the house, but it needs numerous things done to be sale-ready, beyond even the fairly large number of things it already needed just to stay in livable condition. (Isn't it wild how entropy works! Ugh) I am discovering, however, that at least some things she's despairing over like "oh no that's in too poor condition and has to be replaced too" are things that just need to be cleaned better. Of course... then there's the basement. There was an apartment in the basement, which in hindsight was an illegal sublet. The guy who lived there had never wiped down a surface in his life, so it was already fairly nasty when they moved in. But then the septic tank had a problem, and as normally happens, the backup exploded into the house through the basement toilet. So now the place is even nastier than it was. So I'm going to try to clean it, because like.... it's not a particularly usable space, it's never going to be exactly nice, but as it is currently, it is an actively disgusting space, and whether it's getting torn out or refurbished or gutted or converted back into a garage or whatever, it at least has to be cleaned first.
I started with the stove down there, and let me tell you that was the World's Nastiest Stove. The stovetop had just never had anything wiped off it, and then it sat for three years. So. I have the kind of oven cleaner on it rn that you're supposed to let sit overnight, and so today I'm gonna go down there and pry the oven door open and see what it hath wrought. I hope for a miracle. The stovetop was mostly elbow grease and degreasing gel, and I've made great strides but it's clear the right front burner was his favorite, I may have to admit defeat. And the fridge was next to the stove and he just never wiped down anything that splattered onto the fridge, and now the exterior of that is entirely mildewed. But bleach spray sorted that out, and I'm going to go back and make sure that's actually really clean today.
So. Just lots of excitement and grunge. But if the things that are still usable are at least cleaned, it's then easier to figure out what can be repaired/replaced, what can be repurposed, and what just has to get ripped out.
Anyway who knows what the right answer to anything is, but I do know that pushing back against entropy is usually a good first step. Get it at least clean, then you can make your plans.
Yesterday sucked though because the like one thing we really wanted to get done was install this awning so that she can charge her electric car under cover, and the instructions were ridiculously unclear, we figured out how to assemble it, decided it was unwieldy fully assembled and thus sort of dangerous to try to wrestle up on ladders, so we put it up in two halves, only to discover once half was firmly irrevocably installed that it cannot be assembled piecemeal. It had to be fully assembled before installation; the wall gets in the way of getting the second part snapped in because you can't get it at the right angle to slot in. So there's no way to put the second half up. So just half of it is installed, it looks fucking stupid, and it can't be removed without being demolished.
Cool.
Oh well. At least I can keep going on cleaning and painting things.
Bah my timer's going off, I have to go attempt The Bathroom Of Doom now. I don't know how I'm going to get up the dried bits of toilet paper. I'm going to bleach the shit out of it but I know extremely well from years of food handling that you can't sanitize actual dirt. You have to remove the dirty thing and mechanically clean the surface first. And I just. Don't. Want to. But it's got to happen so it might as well be me who does it. And M-L has a like, conditioned horror response to bleach, idk why (i do but it's a dumb long story) so it really does have to be me, she's not going to be able to get that space sanitized. I put the Blue Dawn Magical Mixture on the shower down there yesterday and am going to see if I can get it to work any magic...
have you guys thought about how both frankestein's monster and phantom of the opera are people who were turned into monsters from misery and hatred from the others, but one ends well(ish) because the main character showed some pity and love to him, while the other ends terribly because the main character couldn't do it
