Floor to ceiling

We spent the day cleaning out the rental apartment, post-obras, which was more of a task than I thought it was going to be. The walls are freshly painted and the lovely wooden beams and new electric installation shine above, but below, months of dust and paint splatters and plaster and sticky stuff are congealed onto every surface. The refrigerator was a smelly mess (the workers left it unplugged and closed). We carted out bags and bags of trash, cleaned all the dishes and all the furniture, bemoaning the horrible treatment it received at the hands of the workers (for starters, they left all our chairs and pieces from our antique bedroom set, the one with gorgeous inlaid wood and marble tops, sitting outside over a very rainy weekend) and brought more antiques back to this apartment (which is, believe me, the last thing we need). We installed new kitchen drawers, rearranged furniture, and made many trips up and down the six flights of stairs. Ugh.

I never will understand the system of numbering floors here. That apartment is technically a fourth-floor apartment, but since there is an "entresol" and "principal" before even getting to the first floor, the flights of stairs really add up. Same thing goes for our apartment here; second floor by name, it's really four floors' worth of stairs. In both apartments, all the building's neighbors have agreed to pay for and put in elevators (a verrry expensive proposition, especially when it's times two), but given the pace things move around here, we won't be riding our elevator until we've already schlepped years' worth of groceries and possibly infants and strollers and whatnot up and down these dadgum stairs.

Now we are dusty and sore in the lower back. The Mister's allergies have kicked into high gear in from all that dust. The rest of our Saturday night is, I have a feeling, going to be spent sprawled out on the sofa with a newspaper and possibly a movie. We like to live large.

Today I am thankful about the apartments. As much of a headache as owning is, we were very lucky to have stumbled into two amazing fixer-uppers, giving us a lovely place to live as well as a welcome stream of rental income.