Cleaning House

Yesterday, Matt and I made the early drive down to Tucson to do some work on our rental house there. Our old renters were 4 nice girls who had been in there for nearly 2 years. The last of them was moving out this weekend, and one of our new renters was moving in the same day. So needless to say, we had our work cut out for us to get the place ready in time. We packed up an arsenal of tools and cleaning supplies and headed out early in the morning. The place looked pretty good on the surface - the girls had scrubbed the bathrooms beautifully, which was actually the area I was most worried about. But there were quite a few issues that needed to be addressed:

The girls told us that the garbage disposal had stopped working so we were anticipating having to buy and new one to replace it. Expensive and time consuming. But Matt's awesome detective skills found that the disposal was actually just badly jammed with something. Cue my small hands that could fit down the drain plus 5 minutes of disgusting digging around in there. The result: a soda pop tab and some popcorn kernels that were holding up the show. So that saved us a few hours and a couple hundred dollars - woo hoo!

Next - holy fire hazard!! Apparently the smoke detector batteries started to die, which causes the alarms to chirp a warning every 30 seconds or so. Instead of replacing the batteries, the girls decided to just pull the detectors down and leave them unplugged. Really? So we threw some new batteries in to those to get the house back up to code. Another hazard (although not as drastic) was that there must have been 15 washes worth of lint in the dryer lint trap. Literally an inch thick. Did anyone else's mom tell them that you have to clean that bad boy EVERY time, or else risk burning the house down? My mom sure did.

Then we spent a good number of hours dusting, vacuuming (with my NEW Bissell!!) sweeping, mopping and scrubbing all of the rooms. The kitchen was by far the worst, but that's to be expected.

Next it was time to tackle the weeds. I am fortunate to have a hubby that keeps our yard looking fabulous by performing a little preventative maintenance every week. These girls apparently gave up on the yard because the weed situation was out of control. I spent literally 2 hours pulling and bagging while Matt took care of manicuring the spiny plants and changing out door locks. Our hands are killing us today.

We finished up around 9:00 at night and drove back home to Chandler. Even though we were exhausted and felt gross, we were so happy that we completed the whole thing in one day. And honestly, I don't think the house has ever looked better. Last round, we hired some maids to come in and help and even they didn't do nearly as good of a job as Matt and I did! So by putting in the time and elbow grease we saved a lot of money and (hopefully) made our new renters very happy.

Tonight, we're going the celebrate the fact that we don't have to do this again for at least another year!!