Looking for a reason, weekend

So I got it in my head that I wanted to get the carpets cleaned in the house last night, a rather ambitious plan for a Thursday evening.  Cleaning the carpet is a task that just never gets done as much as it should be, especially with the dogs in the house.  I bet it has been 3-4 months since it was last done if not longer.

So after setting the Scooba loose in the kitchen, I pulled out my 4-5 year old Bissel, filled it with fluid and wheel it back to the bedroom to get started.  I immediately notice that I see no cleaning solution getting sucked into the machine.  A little more investigation revealed this was because there was no fluid getting shot out of the nozzles.  I also saw that the guts of the brush area was very dirty, stuffed with dog hair and other organic matter. Great, the last thing I felt like doing was fixing the steam cleaner.

So I start pulling it apart and clean it the best I could.  I cracked the case body apart and pulled the two spray nozzles.  When I pulled the solution trigger with no nozzles I was only getting fluid out of the right side.  Well that was all I really needed to flip the “fck it I will just get a new one” switch in my head.

I have never really liked my rug cleaner.  When I bought it I opted for the less expensive model.  It had a small cleaning head and a small solution tank that I wound up having to refill 5 times to clean the house.  The water heating feature it supposedly had required you to let the unit sit for a couple minutes before using it and even then, didn’t appear to heat the water at all.  Hence, the idea of putting it on the curb for a problem that I may have been able to fix myself was a no brainer. When Cindy got home I told her she didn’t have to worry about dinner prep, we could eat at Panera and then shoot over to Target to get a new rug cleaner.

This time I went for the bigger, better Bissel model.  We got it home and within 15 minutes I had it together and had started the rug cleansing.  The first thing I noticed was the new cleaner is like a heavy tank compared to what I used to have.  The big solution reservoir, especially when filled to the top with cleaning solution makes the rug cleaner very HEAVY.  I told Cindy that carpet cleaning from this point on should exclusively be man work because of the force required to push and pull a machine of this weight several hundred times.  Within the first 5 minutes my right shoulder started to burn.

Other than the weight, everything else about the new cleaner was all good.  The heating system is obviously much improved over previous models, the solution felt warm right from the get go and never varied.  The 10 rows of brushes in the wider cleaning head did a great job of refreshing the carpet.  I also was able to be more efficient cleaning since the wider head and much bigger tank let me clean more footage per swipe and go much longer in between tank fills.  It took me just over two tanks to clean the master bedroom, main living space, the dining room and office.  This model also comes with a head attachment to clean hard surfaces as well so if my Scooba bites the dust I am not relegated to scummy mop and bucket cleaning duty.

Of course trying to half heartedly fix the old cleaner and then running out to buy a new one pushed my cleaning late into the night.  I didn’t finish up until after 9:30.  The amount of dog hair that was pulled out of what appeared to be pretty well swept carpets was pretty crazy and made the effort seem worthwhile.

This weekend I have a number of things that could capture my attention.  I would like to replace the wire on the top of the auxiliary chicken run as it is getting brittle and has already broken at several places.  Cindy and I also have a Sunday Rural King run planned to further augment our chicken care supplies.  We also plan to let the chickens out to roam the yard some on Sunday, under our close supervision.

Saturday night Cindy and I will be going out to see Transformers with our buddy Sean.  I have had a love hate relationship with the movie series over the years.  Some aspects of the films are really cool but they are almost always balanced out with an equal amount of stupidity.  Having Marky Mark in this latest film should definitely be an upgrade over Shia LeBouf IMO.