7 Things I’ve learnt from my latest rent inspection

Whoowee, it’s rent inspection time! Which means in casa Almigo, it’s been a thumpingly solid three weeks of mowing. And vacuuming. And dusting. Oh and window washing, mopping, hack, weed whacking, bench top clean, sorting, stacking, hosing and just about every other cleaning term known to man to keep the owners and real estate company happy.
And while I’m tireder than tired, I’ve learnt a few strange things along the way…

Rent inspection: When someone from the real estate agency pops round every few months to make sure you haven’t decided to mow your own name into the carpet or turn the third bedroom into a meth lab. This time around for us though the owners of the house have asked to be included and we’re not sure why. So we’ve gone above and beyond in our usual ‘spruce the place up’ duties to insure they’re happy for us to keep paying off their mortgage.

Also see Rent inspection: One of the banes of my existence. How wonderful life would be without rent inspections.

1. I’m going to turn rent inspection cleaning into the latest fitness trend.

And I’m going to charge a small fortune for it too, so I can buy a house and never have to worry about ever going through a rent inspection ever again. Because after everything and I mean everything I am beyond exhausted. I haven’t done a single exercise session in a while because I was too busy with this stuff and too pooped at the end of each day to even think about cursing at a kettle bell.
I’ve got a sore core from lifting and moving things around. My biceps are bulging after attempting to mow down the jungle out the back, as well as weld the great buzz machine of 2023. This morning I woke up with very sore legs and I couldn’t work out why until I looked through the nearest clean window and remembered I’d spent an hour on tip toe to get to some of the corners around the house. And I’m sure if I weigh myself, I’m probably a couple of kilos lighter than usual even though good food eating goes right out the window when you’re doing something like this, not having enough energy to cook something wholesome or healthy at the end of the day.

rent inspection
You can do it, put your back into it!

And so my genius plan is to hire myself out to do rent inspection house cleans and on the day I’ll get some fitness fanatics to pay me $25 per hour for the chance to clean the place and work every muscle in their body like I have recently. I’ll wear them out with plenty of tasks, all while providing the occasional morale boosting platitude like ‘Getting cleaner, getting leaner!’ and ‘If you can’t stand the cleaning heat, time to clean something other than the kitchen! In the end we’ll have a clean house and a fit cleaning crew ready to tag each other on Instagram over the bonding experience and I’ll get paid by two different parties in the process. Genius really.

2. My daughter had an insect graveyard behind her door.

Yeah I’m not exactly sure what was going on here either, other than a small army of tiny insects that decided to congregate on the wall directly behind her bedroom door and then figuring that was more than enough effort for their tiny lives, they didn’t bother to do anything else until they died on the spot. I couldn’t find any food, voodoo totems or honey flavoured paint to warrant such a gathering and a quick wipe down cleared the area pretty well, but yes this was a mystery and she has no idea either.

3. The universe decided 5am was too early to clean.

Rising for my breakfast radio day at Stupid O’Clock (circa 4:30am) does allow me a big of wake up time before I have to put my mouth and brain in motion. And today I decided to capitalise on this by taking in the spare bottles to be recycled and donate some clothes to charity before my show even started. This way I wouldn’t have to wait behind the long line of can collecting entrepreneurs with overflowing shopping trolleys cashing in their cans and neither would I have to dodge Centrelink traffic from the very busy building directly opposite the op shop.

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Yeah, so much for this idea then..

Only no, it turns out you can’t do either of those things at around 5am. The bottle recycling machine even though it’s automated doesn’t actually want to start working until 8, so there went that idea. As for the clothes? Well once outside donation bins were now inside donation bins, solely to combat idiots dumping all sorts of useless rubbish in them. Which meant if I wanted to donate spare clothes to the homeless, well I’d have to come back during opening hours – and try not to get run over by a Centrelink punter exiting stage left from across the road.
I’m trying to help the planet here universe, why are you throwing up roadblocks here?

4. The one red hot trick to clean oven racks is…

Not oven cleaner. Well it was for me until the can decided that halfway through it’s contents was a good a place as any to stop spraying. And no matter how much I threatened it and reminded it how close the rent inspection was, it still wouldn’t come forth with the caustic goods. And so I went back to the supermarket where they’d stopped selling the foaming stuff in a can and opted for the liquid stuff in the bottle, which turned out to be completely useless.
So the next step was to explore whatever I had in the shed that I could use and the winner turned out to be..a sanding block.

Bought to help sand down our kitchen table project, I had a spare clean pad just lying there and lo and behold, it chewed through the baked on stuff with only a bit of effort required without leaving any marks on the stainless steel. Just a bit of elbow grease and water brought them back to shiny condition (and considering we had to talk them through a noise the oven was making, having it super clean was ideal!)
So when in doubt, time to sand!

5. The kids helped…for all of five minutes

The good intentions were there. But so was YouTube. And Netflix. And Disney Plus. Oh and ‘There’s too much stuff to clean in here, can you do it?’ Plus they wanted to go to the park because: Swings. Add that to the issue of nothing clean staying clean for too long anyway and it wasn’t long before I wondered how good the cat would be at vacuuming instead.
Maybe it’s time for a robot vacuum instead? (Amazon affiliate link)

6. I’m now off Spiderman’s Xmas card list

I don’t have an issue with spiders at all, especially if they’re up for an all you can eat fly fest because over summer those swarms came though thick and fast (and if they could take a stab at the annoying mosquito population I’d be eternally grateful). But no, apparently all cobwebs must be vacated come rent inspection time and so I made busy with the broom and destroyed a lot of spider houses.
Sorry about that guys – feel free to come back and gorge yourself on fly guts anytime you like.

7. I never wanted a leaf blower…until I used a leaf blower..

A big shout out to my over the border best mate Heath who lent me his leaf blower while I looked after his dog Holly. And not only did this particular Ozito leaf blower look something straight out of Aliens, it turned out it was some kind of three in one job that blew leaves and chomped them into tiny bits too while you vacuumed the earth which was equally as awesome.

rent inspection

The only problem this one has was lack of catching bag, which meant leaves got sucked up then crunched up, but exited right out of the bottom of the machine before I realised ‘Wait, I probably should have something catching stuff there..’
Still, the blower function made short work of tidying up the garden path so that was one easy job (on a list of many) and so something like this will definitely be on my shopping list soon for the sheer fun of waving it around like I’m a marine smart gunner from the Alien’s universe..

So how’d we go?

After three weeks of weeding away the jungle, the owners pointed out during the rent inspection that some of the small trees I’d saved were actually a different type of weed and needed to go. But they’re also more than happy for me to go hog wild with a hedge trimmer if I feel the need so I’m happy with that.
We explained the noise from the oven by turning it on and having the on again off again rattling issue suddenly appear and drown out the kitchen with enough noise to put the Foo Fighters to shame, so they’re sending a tech through for a look.
Sadly they opened the walk in closest, the one you can’t actually walk into currently given the tonne of junk we through in there. Oh well.
Thankfully nothing else exploded while they were here so looks like we’re in the good books and now we have permission to savagely attack the garden (which needs it, even after three weeks of taming.)

All and all, success! Phew!
Now time to sleep and let life get back to normal. Well until the next one of course..

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