Hello friends! Today's slice of life blog is about ✨mold✨
Well okay, it's not entirely about mold.
The week started off okay. I realized a life hack a few days ago when I went to change the bedsheets, inspired by a Clean With Me vlogger I like on YouTube. She's Aurikatariina, and she deep cleans basically hoarder apartments/really dirty apartments for people who are struggling with health issues, and she does it for free because she is sponsored by a couple of cleaning product companies plus her YouTube income, which is awesome. Anyway, she is in Finland (tho she sometimes cleans in other places), and it seems to be very common there for people to have thinner mattresses, more like what USers might call a futon mattress or something? Because when I watch her change bedsheets, it's always a thin mattress, maybe three or four inches deep, which she can easily flop around to tuck sheets underneath.
Here in the US, mattresses are usually big spring mattresses (there are other types that are usually the same thickness, but they are SPENDY), so they are very heavy and awkward to move around. With my health issues, it wears me out to change the sheets some days, as trying to lift it to tuck sheets under makes my heart pound and I get dizzy. So, I unfortunately have developed the habit of not changing sheets for a long time (like, I should probably do it once a week or so, but I totally don't).
But now, I have added the foam pad to my bed, and at first I fit a sheet around it AND the spring mattress, but finally I had an epiphany: why can't I treat the foam pad like Auri treats the futon type mattresses, and just put the sheet on that?
So I put a mattress protector sheet that I happened to have but don't usually use on the spring mattress, and then put my regular sheet just on the foam pad:
the white part is the spring mattress, the blue part is the foam pad
Oh, so much easier. So much easier! I can now change sheets like a regular person instead of feeling like I've just done a HIIT cardio workout. Now I just have to get in the habit of changing sheets more frequently, now that I can do it without dying. 😅
Yuan has been a sweet cutie as always:
Laeg would like to know if you have any snacks:
But yes, now we have come to the story about the mold.
There was a shit demon fly in the apartment, and I went to go get the fly swatter out of the storage closet. That's when I discovered a cardboard box soaked through and everything in it covered in mold, wetness on the floor, and white fuzz on the baseboard:
That closet is "Hi I am the Grandmaster of Closet Tetris" full, so I didn't have the energy to take everything out of there right away. I had been hearing the sounds of water in the wall and I had let the super know already, but I hadn't gone digging in the closet until this point. Finally, when I emptied it, I saw more:
So maintenance came in, and bleached and sprayed it with Kilz, and then the next day they came back and cut a hole in the drywall of the ceiling there to check for mold inside the walls. Thankfully, there was none, but he did say it was damp. So it is being left open for now to dry out and to see if more leaks out of there when they run water upstairs. The real suspect though is all the rain we've been having, as apparently I'm not the only one with problems, so they are trying to find a roofer to make repairs.
Keep in mind that there are two stories of apartments above me, so if I've got drips in the walls all the way from the roof, so does upstairs.
Anyway, thankfully most of the things I had stored in that closet were stored in plastic, but still I went through some things in cardboard boxes and tossed a good pile of stuff that felt damp or looked moldy. Most of the things I tossed were more damp than moldy, but I wasn't taking any chances so I treated it as an opportunity to purge stuff I wouldn't have otherwise purged and went for it. Some things were really moldy, though:
Declutter by necessity:
These are most of the things that I tossed.
So, there's still a hole in the drywall right now as I wait for the next steps, but at least it's being taken care of. And I decluttered! So that's progress, right? ;)
My living room is currently still stacked with all the rest of the stuff from the closet though, and probably will be for a while.
So that's been the chaos around here of late. I hope you all are having a great week! :)