I am not buying that
Last January [Grief! Was it that long ago?] I told the sad tale of the flood in the sitting room.
Well, it’s not exactly a sitting room as there may be a fireplace, a couch and an armchair in it but no one ever sits there. It’s more of a hallway that takes up half the house – a sort of Baronial Hall, which even has its own Minstrel Gallery and stairs up to said gallery.
Anyhows Herself has been bitching about the carpet ever since the place flooded. I maintained that it was now dry and that no one ever goes through the place except the two of us, but this wasn’t apparently acceptable. She insisted that it had to be replaced as there was a large area of black under one of the radiator valves and a huge area of stain under the other. I suppose she did have a point as the high-tide mark was clearly visible [apart from the few sea shells and a bit of old fishing net that had washed up in the flood].
Now getting a new carpet would involve quite a bit of work. I don’t like work. I would have had to go into Skobieville and get some samples of carpet for Herself to stamp with a seal of approval. Then I would have to go back in again to order the carpet and give the measurements, which of course would be wrong. Then I would have to shift all the furniture out of the room but there is nowhere to shift it to.
I decided on another course of action.
I bought a bottle of stuff that sprays foam onto a carpet stain. I locked herself in the attic so she wouldn’t see what I was doing [she hates being done out of buying stuff] and set to work on the two worst areas. It worked very well. I surprised even myself. The black area was now gone and the high tide mark was no longer visible. I let herself out of the attic and she grudgingly admitted that I had removed the stains. But then she pointed out that the areas where the stains had been were now cleaner than the rest of the carpet and we’d have to get a new one.
Fuck!
Not to be outdone I phoned Daughter to see if she still had a carpet cleaner. She does, but it only vacuums as the water spraying bit was broken. I borrowed it anyway.
I spent a happy day dismantling the machine. First remove two bits of the handle. Then disconnect the power cable [found the first fault there – the Live and Neutral wires were wrong way around which could have been damned dangerous?]. Then remove a couple of bolts. Then remove a whole load of wires trying to remember which one goes where. Then remove another four bolts and finally – there’s the water pump.
I removed it and discovered I could dismantle it further, which I did. As soon as I removed an end screw it sprung apart and a tiny spring thingy shot across the room. Fuck! I found it in the end. I cleaned it all out and started reassembling everything in reverse order. I couldn’t remember which wire went where, but what the hell. Odds were that I would get them reasonably correct. I was knackered by then so I left it.
Yesterday I decided to test my handiwork. I filled the reservoir with soap and water. I switched it on. Water shot out of the nozzle in a spectacular arc that reached to top of the windows. As daughter would say – yay!
The carpet is now as good as new. I did a load of upholstery too including my favourite armchair [which was getting a little grubby].
Herself is furious at not getting a new carpet.
Thwarted again.
Poverty means I can now no longer afford to have “my little man” (you can take the boy out of the middle class…) come round and dry clean the carpets (been a fan of carpet dry cleaning since I was in charge of supervising office cleaners in a sensitive area….my but there is something wrong with that sentence…). So I recently acquired something like this https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/514J1DLT0cL._SL1026_.jpg on Gumtree. Which meant a drive though the Norfuck country-cide down roads that last saw a vehicle back when it was those chariots with blades on the hub. One of those villages so isolated, even by Norfuck standards, I wondered if I should have brought groats not pounds with me. Anyways it seems to do a reasonable job at cleaning however has two major faults: the spray nozzle is VICIOUS and ‘male’ in its aim (think about it-“don’t cross the streams”) and goes everywhere except where it should (doing the couch with it meant ‘kill room’ levels of plastic sheeting and bodge tape around the flat). However more annoying still is that using any amount, however sparse, of shampoo in the water leads to so much foam in the ‘dirty tank’ that the thing turns itself off within a minute or so of hoovering up the dirty water. Very hot water seems to be the best thing ,although next time I shall pour in some white vinegar….just to get that Chip Shop ambience.
We used to have a bloke who cleaned carpets in our wealthier days. Herself phoned him [without my permission] and she gleefully told me that he said that those kinds of stain are impossible to clean and we should get a new carpet. So my efforts had a bonus in proving him wrong. When in doubt, don’t call a professional.
Daughter’s cleaner is one of those chunky ones – https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/514J1DLT0cL._SL1026_.jpg. Its biggest fault is that there is no warning when the input reservoir is empty so you suddenly realise that instead of washing the carpet, you’re trying just to suck the stains off.
“office cleaners in a sensitive area” Were they Brazilian?
When I asked my loved one (the two legged female one) what she wanted for her last birthday, knowing full well that buying anything like a new vacuum cleaner, electric broom or toilet seat, is most definitely on the DO-NOT list, she looked up, smiled at me and said a carpet cleaner. Really? So I got her something like this — https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/514J1DLT0cL._SL1026_.jpg.
She hasn’t used it yet but knowing her she will. She’ll probably ban me to deck as well while she runs amok with it. At least she’s not clamoring for a new carpet?
Having an increasingly notchy mortice lock and fearing that I would become locked out someday soon, I set about investigating it yesterday. Like you with the carpet-cleaner, I take the view that ‘what a man put together, a man can take apart’, so proceeded to dismantle the mechanism – with the same result of springs, pivots, washers and tumblers flying out randomly across the workshop, landing who knows where. By some miracle I found them all (or think I did), reassembled the device with lots of grease and refitted it to the door – still as notchy, just a bit quieter.
This morning I strolled out to Screwfix and, for far less than a tenner, bought a whole new lock mechanism – should have done that yesterday and saved an hour or two of panic-stricken grief.
Lesson learned – when dismantling locks, conduct the exercise within a large plastic bag, a bit like Novichok isolation but without all the Cold War politics.
A tip. (Provided you have a digital camera or a phone with camera.)
As you dismantle something, take frequent photies.
Then as you reassemble you have a guide.
I did. The damned photographs were more confusing than the wiring!
Better still, video it, add some crap music then put it on YouTube and maybe make some dosh to buy a new one with. Then video the unboxing of that. Rinse and repeat.