more real than PBB

what would it take to bring six people with busy work schedules and active social lives to allot two days to clean a dust-ridden house? a miracle, of course. and a miracle was what happened last weekend, as my housemates and i, performed our annual (and much dreaded) general house cleaning.

added to the usual fare is the challenge of fitting another study table to our already crowded living room (we currently have 4 study/pc table, and i'm planning on getting my own so that i don't have to hog the dining table when i'm using my laptop. yeah, our living room looks like an internet cafe already :P )

i volunteered washing our shoe racks and scrubbing the floors (the bathroom was also my territory. as of the time of writing, i haven't cleaned it yet). i just love cleaning when there's water involved :) my other housemates washed the soap off the floors, dusted every imaginable surface and rearranged the furnitures (good thing we have three strong and able-bodied boys in the house to take care of the furniture lifting). by midnight, PBB was almost over, and so were we (at least for the day), and i was able to take a looong refreshing bath.



after the ordeal, my back was aching, my thighs were aching, my wrists were aching, my fingers were aching, the balls of my feet were aching -- every imaginable part of my body was aching. well, i'm kinda exaggerating, but you know what i mean ;) it reminded me that, as my roommate said, i'm "not getting any younger". but looking at our floor that was so clean i can lie on it, i tell myself that it was worth every single body ache.

the next day, it was our bedroom that my roommates and i took care of (the boys had already cleaned theirs the day before -- it was a prerequisite as some of the stuff needed to be moved to their room). to me, cleaning our bedroom was more difficult because: a) there was no water involved b) we've accumulated a lot, and i mean, a lot of stuff c) we've got such a small space. i wasn't able to clean everything in my area of the bedroom, but at least i was able to reduce by a third the space that my stuff occupied. that alone was a big achievement. now if i bought a study table, i can further cut that.

looking back, i can sincerely say that i enjoyed that house cleaning. we had a good time with my housemates cracking jokes every so often. everyone was cooperative (although there was a very long discussion about the furniture rearrangement) and even willing to make sacrifices (two of them volunteered to buy our dinner despite the heavy rain). and there's nothing like the quiet satisfaction of relaxing in a home you just cleaned. but make no mistake, enjoyable or not, general house cleaning is not something i would take up as a hobby :P

[All photos courtesy of Nez Fuertez]

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here's the more eloquent retelling of the event by my housemate.