The reason for the aches and pains are twofold - first off I did a huge amount of sorting out, but then I also decided to give my car a thoroughly good clean.
My initial plan for the weekend was just to do the sorting out, but I it was a little unrealistic to genuinely think I could do it all. I mean, to be frank, it's one of those jobs that never ends, but also I'd forgotten that my landlord was going on holiday, so there was no way to get anything into the attic.
As well as this I discovered I still didn't have enough plastic stacking crates - I must own more than 20 of them now, but I still need more! See the problem was I tackled the stuff under my bed and I had forgotten just how much was under there. In the end I ended up filling 7 of the smaller crates and putting them under the bed. They work quite well, but in order to support the bed beams (don't ask) stuff has to be sticking out of the top. This means that I need spare crates for if and when I take them out.
This is also the issue for quite a few things - I kinda realised it was one thing to transfer all the stuff I've had in big cardboard to stacking crates, but what about all the stuff I use day-to-day? That needs to have boxes ready and waiting to.
Does that sound odd? I guess it comes back to the point that my landlord want to decorate the flat, which means that everything needs to be able to go in the attic, even if I'm using it in the meantime. I need that extra capacity so I can just chuck it in the boxes and then stick it away in the attic while he decorates.
Also, I'm having a bit of a problem in that the boxes, although great for lifting stuff and convenient, aren't as space efficient as cardboard boxes. You can fill and stack a cardboard box so that it's 100% full and takes up no unnecessary space, but a plastic stacking box 'wastes' space because of how they go together. It's not a big deal, but it does mean I keep underestimating how many I need, hence the need for more.
But the key thing is I am on the very cusp of having boxes for everything. I can do the other type of sorting out (deciding what to keep, throw away or sell) in slower time.
The car cleaning was partly a way of doing something productive in my box-deficient state and partly because my car really needed it.
It was a full-on clean:
- Full alloy wheel clean and polish.
- Full car body clean and polish.
- Full hoover out and surface clean inside.
The first and last were pretty much without surprises, but cleaning the car body turned out to be rather more painful than I'd expected.
The problem was tar spots.
Basically, I think what's causing them is all the road patching they've done to fill potholes. I'm guessing loose bits come off as you drive over it and your tyres tend to fling it back. All of the tar-spots were in a similar area just behind each of my wheels.
I'd noticed them a while back when I gave the car a quick wipe, so I decided I was going to sort them as part of this big clean. There are several products you can use to get rid of them, but I think they're all essentially turpentine-based solvents. It doesn't damage your paintwork, but dissolves them tar.
Well, eventually it dissolves the tar. What it turns out you also need to invest is a lot of elbow grease, as you need to really rub it on. Twice. See, you rub it on and it starts to dissolve it, then you have to run again to really get rid of the spots. And this is all at basically ground level, so there's loads of rubbing while bending over, so you can see why, combined with all the box-lugging, I've buggered up my wimpy muscles.
Don't get me wrong, though the product itself was good, it was just that I hadn't appreciated how hard it would be and just how many tar spots there were.
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