The fireplace in the Laird’s Room is wonderful but a bit finicky. It needs to be serviced each year, likely because propane doesn’t burn as cleanly as natural gas so there’s some soot buildup on the igniter. Finding someone to maintain it out here has proved a bit of a challenge but have someone now that can us in with a few weeks notice.
This year he showed up on Dec 3. It took about 30 minutes to get things going again that Friday morning and all seemed fine. It wasn’t until the next morning I realized that virtually every surface on the first floor was covered with a layer of soot! Floors, counters, carpets, window sills, yada, yada, yada. I mean everything. Long story short, the vacuum that our service guy used wasn’t venting right so blew all the soot from the fireplace into the bedroom and it travelled around the house from there.
So the great cleanup began. Mopping floors, doing laundry, cleaning furniture, counter tops and every other horizontal surface in the house. I had to take the comforter from the bed to the cleaners because it’s too big to wash here and told myself I’d need to bring the Hoover carpet cleaner here when we returned next for the bedroom carpet.
It took all day Saturday and most of Sunday to begin to get a handle on things. We had to cancel going home for the symphony and will reschedule that for sometime next year but I had to at least make things livable again so had little choice. The next week we are leaving for Chicago so won’t be back here until mid-December and I didn’t wanted that time to enjoy the Christmas season.
So things are much better now. To his credit, my service man offered to pay for a cleaning crew but I didn’t want it to come to that. In fact, I cleaned many things that probably have never been cleaned before and as such were long overdue for attention. Hopefully by Christmas this is just a bad memory and I’ll have a cleaner place in which to spend my long winter’s nap!
