What a Week

I was looking forward to a quiet week this week. Nice summery weather too, so I was hoping to spend some time just relaxing and reading out on the balcony. That’s not quite how it turned out, though…

On Tuesday morning, going out to do my shopping, I found a notice on the entrance door, informing the tenants that “exterior cleaning and painting will be starting soon”.  Oookay… That was the first I heard about it, so I took this to just be an advance warning, and more information to follow.

The same afternoon, looking out through my kitchen window, I realized that ooops, “soon” in this case should probably be interpreted as “tomorrow”... Because by then they were already at it with pressure washing of the balcony side on the next building (or rather, the building that comes before mine, meaning we’d be next in turn). Even if their main target seemed to be the gutters and downpipes… watching for a while how they went about it, I realized that even if we had not been ordered to empty our balconies, it certainly seemed like a good idea to do so…

So there went my Tuesday afternoon/evening and Wednesday morning. Or actually, the rest of the week; with extra shoulder ache and rekindled “tennis elbow” as unwelcome side effect…

A pity really, having to clear the balcony so early in the autumn - but of course no point in putting most of the things back out again. My good sunchair and some other things taken down to the storage room in the basement, floormats removed and washed (which has to be done in a special washing machine for carpets, which we don’t have one in my building, so I had to take them to the laundry room in another building to do that); parasols down, one flower box emptied and cleaned, and two moved indoors for the day, the clematis plants on the trellis against the wall covered (for the day) with a thin fabric (made for the purpose of covering plants – I have no idea what you call it in English).

… And then of course cleaning the balcony floor after they were done (well, it was a good thing that I did take everything in!!!), and putting some of the things back…

… And now my sore elbow is screaming at me to stay off the computer, PLEASE… All right, all right.

If you don’t see me around for a couple of days, you now know why.

There are no photos of this whole mess because I simply had too much to do.

But my Clematis plants survived! :)