all domestic up in here

My work schedule is like this: I work seven 10 hour days straight and then I'm off for seven days straight. It's a pretty nice setup, but during those seven days of working, I don't get much done around the house. Besides a bit of laundry or dishes, I generally lack the energy or motivation to do anything else. That's why on my days off I like to tackle most of the household maintenance, chores, run errands, etc.

On the agenda this week was cleaning the carpets. We were finally done with dog sitting for a while and I had gotten a carpet cleaner as a birthday gift so I was ready to try it out. I know. I don't know which makes me older: getting a carpet cleaner for a present or being excited about getting one. Anyway, I cleaned all of the carpets in the house which is thankfully just in the three "bedrooms" (which are in actuality, one bedroom, one video game room, and one office). The little carpet cleaner worked like a pro. It was perfect for my small rooms and easy to maneuver. I've rented a carpet cleaner once before and the thing was this big clunky behemoth. I can see how if you had a larger house with bigger rooms how my carpet cleaner would get to be a pain. The power cord isn't very long, and even between cleaning my small rooms, I had to dump the dirty water and refill the clean every time. Anyway, it was great for my house and easy to operate. I got the job done in under a hour. There were some very bad things lurking in my carpet apparently. I was a bit shocked by exactly how dirty the dirty water was when I dumped it in the sink.

I think I'll clean my carpets more than once every four years now that I have my own cleaner.

This week I also decided to look for a new comforter for my bed. The one I had was three years old and looking a little raggedy. I envisioned a new plain white comforter, since back when the video game room was a guest bedroom, that bed had a white comforter and I really liked the look of it. There's something very clean and inviting about a bright white. I was planning on just looking and not buying quite yet since most of the comforters seemed to be in the $100 to $150 range and I guess I'm just cheap, because that sounded kind of expensive to me. However I did find a white comforter that was just $50 while I was grocery shopping so I felt compelled to throw it in the shopping cart too. When I put it on the bed I felt there was a bit too much white, so I bought a light green flat sheet and pillow cases to break it up a bit. I do wish the green sheet was a bit softer, but all of the higher thread count sheets weren't quite the shade of green that I was looking for. I guess I can just try dousing it with a bunch of fabric softener the next time I wash it. All in all, I'm pretty happy with how it turned out. Here's the before bed:

and after bed:

I don't know if I like it better than the one I had before (I really liked my old one) but I think it's just as nice. The main thing is that it's new, which means it's fluffy and snag free, unlike the old one.