OK - story time ... we haven't had one in a while.
When I was in college, there was a retired math teacher who hired a student every summer to do a spring cleaning on their house, it was a 2 week position and he paid 2x the minimum wage. He used that 2 weeks as a mini vacation and went fishing, worked in his wood shop, just basically got away from the house every day. His wife was sick and couldn't cook or keep house and he was doing it all by himself. He was not much of a housekeeper so a thorough cleaning was needed! One summer, I was hired to do this job. I started at the front door and moved on through the house room by room. She visited with me as I cleaned and we reminisced, told stories and laughed. As I finished the first room, the living room, I did a quick wipe of the wall around the light switch - the walls were actually white not yellow! Years of cigarette smoke had built up on the walls. I couldn't in good conscious leave a white spot on the wall, so I stripped everything off the walls and washed them down. I sprinkled baking soda on the couches and vacuumed them off really good to get rid of the stale odor. This was way before Fabreeze was invented. He couldn't believe the difference when he got home that evening. It was as if I had turned on a light in a dark room.
The kitchen was really scary - my shoes stuck to the floor as I walked through. First thing I did was to wash the windows - Oh My - sunlight made it look even worse. I used Pine Sol and water 50/50 that I put on a 1 foot square section of the linoleum and let it soak while I scrubbed another section. I used 2 buckets of plain old water to pull up the Pine Sol and dirt on each square. After scrubbing the cabinets, the stove, the counters and everything on them, I washed the floor 2 more times.
The 2 week job turned into 2 1/2 months, as they kept finding more for me to do.
