Moving turned out to be pretty crazy. One of my former roommates is in Europe, and the other moved out in March. They left a lot of little things (and some not so little things…) that I ultimately had to take care of.
The roommate who's in Europe paid some friends to take away his furniture and "do a little cleaning". But since my roommate didn't leave a list for his friends, things didn't go very smoothly. The furniture was eventually taken care of, but the cleaning…not so much.
The other roommate had exams last week, so he understandably didn't want to come back to help clean. He ended up leaving his silverware, baking dishes, and a lot of other kitchen stuff because his parents bought him new stuff. He also left a heavy bookshelf and some other furniture for me to deal with, despite my nagging.
All told, I spent 25 to 30 hours cleaning. Six of those hours were spent cleaning the damn oven, which I used maybe twice during the three years I lived in the house. For future reference, if your baking leaves pools of oil in the oven, clean it before you bake the next time. At one point I busted out with a fork to scrape off the two centimeters of charcoal and grease on the bottom of the oven. Not even the steel wool was helping there.
I also had the pleasure of cleaning out the refrigerator. One of the drawers was filled with rotting meat. Some of the meat packages had leaked into the rest of the fridge, which was seriously nasty. I ended up having to buy two packages of official yellow trash bags (one package is $10 for five bags, including twist ties) to deal with the fridge.
There was a lot more damage to the carpet than I expected, including a number of stains that people obviously didn't bother cleaning at the time. I did my best with Resolve, but the landlord was not happy.
I'm thinking I'll bill my roommates for the cleaning time at my professional rate. Speaking of which, what do contract programmers make these days? I bet the total would be more than the amount we get back from the security deposit.
Since I haven't mentioned it, I found an apartment a couple of weeks ago. The timing didn't work out very well so I'm spending this week at home. The food is a big plus, the price can't be beat, but my room is too small. Ultimately the space and privacy factors won out.
So yeah, I'm still moving. I wish I could still fit ALL of my stuff in one car, sigh.
I wouldn't call it time well spent
Posted by dwc in Personal at 04:17 PM