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The ceilings have finally been redone. It took a couple of days longer than expected, but the doorman and his brother did a great job — the new ceilings in the bedroom and bathroom are perfectly smooth. They wound removing the plaster from the entire ceiling, doing a skim coat, and then several layers of paint. I imagine it’s as good as it was four years ago, before the upstairs neighbor flooded her bathtub. Honestly, I don’t remember what it looked like then; the cracked and disintegrating plaster has been a part of the apartment almost as long as I’ve been there, and the holes had simply become features.

The problem now is the fine plaster dust that covers all the surfaces of the apartment, from the obvious floors and tables to the difficult to see legs of chairs. I’ve begun cleaning, and have made decent progress: the curtains have been washed for the first time since they went up, most of the furniture in the bedroom has been wiped down (though the tangle of computer cable needs to be rationalized, wiped, and plugged back in; the black power cables are now a shade of dusty gray), and the mattress and office chairs have been “steam” vac’ed (the Hoover Steam Vac Jr. just uses hot tap water, and doesn’t really make steam; it does a decent job of cleaning, though, judging from the color of the water in the disposal tank).

The mopping has been a failure. I’ve mopped the bedroom, the bathroom, the kitchen, and a good part of the living room. The wood floors, at least, are not convincingly clean. They look dusty, and I pick up the fine white powder when I run my finger across the boards. I have no idea how the plaster dust survived the mopping (hot water, Murphy’s Oil, and one of those sponge mops), but it has, leaving residue everywhere. Would scrubbing help? I’m not sure it would, as the dust doesn’t seem to be embedded in nooks crannies missed by the mop — I can pick it up with my fingers. A different cleaning compound, that’ll bind better to the dust? Vacuuming? No ideas. Maybe electrostatically: Grace has Pledge Grab-It packets. We’ll try a few things over the weekend. Or, rather, I will, since she has to study and sleep.

I can’t help but think of the white dust covering New York last year. Cleaning was a monumental task, and I’m not sure how the people living in Battery Park City did it. The perceptions and emotions are, of course, wholly different: the white dust in my apartment is merely an obstacle to be tackled, a sign that my apartment is a bit nicer than it once was, or at least a necessary step in that direction. The powder that my fingers pick up are a puzzle for cleaning techniques, and only that.

Posted on Monday, December 9th, 2002 at 11:35 pm and is filed under Apartment. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.