Moving on from spring

 Towards the end of April I wrote about moving on from winter - packing away our warm clothes, duvet etc. In May, we enjoyed slightly cooler weather than usual, and a surprising amount of rain. According to the Cyprus mail, rainfall was more than twice as much as normal for the month. But still there's a potential water problem, and hose pipes are still banned, other than for watering plants.

By the end of May, the temperatures were increasing, though the humidity was still low. It was time to start getting ready for the summer. By July I won't want to do anything much during the daytime. On the last Saturday of May, I did some extra laundry, so I could put away even our thinner jackets, as well as stray gloves and hats that were still out. 

We hang things on lines here, and they were all dry within a couple of hours. 

The wall that takes jackets in the cooler months looked quite empty: 

The 'winter' closet, however, was packed tightly. And I put away even our thin duvet, as by then we only needed a duvet cover at night. 

Richard went around the house with a ladder, thoroughly cleaning all the ceiling fans. In the summer I dust them most weeks, but they tend to get a bit grubby over the winter.

The other thing I did was to clean the kitchen cupboards that we use for food. I've often mentioned insects - large and small - that can appear in the summer. We had quite a plague of tiny ants last year.  I thought they came later than June, but wanted to be prepared. So I removed all the food, threw away a couple of open things that were well past their use-by date, and cleaned all the shelves thoroughly.

When they were dry, I sprayed liberally with 'clean kill' (formerly biokill), then waited while that dried  before putting everything back. We keep everything in sealed containers, but sometimes there are drips, or a lid doesn't get put on fully.  I wanted to be ready.  

As it happens, we started seeing a few ants a week or two later, not in the cupboards but on the work surface. If I don't put a used spoon in the dishwasher straightaway, ants appear within an hour. It's not yet a huge problem; I'm remembering to wash non-dishwasher things straightaway, and keep the work surfaces free of crumbs. I'm also back to mopping the floors three times a week.  Three times now we've had a sudden power-cut which was not a widespread one, but something tripping our power. We can only assume it's ants getting electrocuted behind the power sockets. 

The first Saturday of June is apparently my normal day for washing the curtains, something I do annually as they accumulate dust. So I did that for all the curtains on our main floor, and also cleaned all the windows. That was quite hard work, and I was very tired by the end, but I think it was worth it.

We had cleaned the air conditioners in our guest flat a week or so before the end of May, as we were expecting visitors whom we thought might like to use them. But we knew that the ones in our part of the house were well overdue for a full professional clean. This is supposed to be done every three years, but it's more like every six when we decided to do it. 

They were eventually booked for 9th June, and were here for a couple of hours doing eight air conditioners in all. They were very thorough. 

This is the equipment they use, with a pump to push water inside, and a trough to catch it. 

Here they are, cleaning the living room air conditioner after removing the front panel:

And here's my study one, which was one of the dirtiest, with extra sheeting as they prepared to do more cleaning than they had on some of the others. 

It's the one that is probably used the most during July and August when I 'estivate', so it's not surprising that it was dirty. We do clean them ourselves, of course, in the years when we don't have the professionals in, so that keeps the mould away. But we can't get at all the places the professionals so.

A couple of days later, I noticed that the thermometer inside our fridge was reading 9 degrees on the middle shelf, rather than the usual 5-6. Had we opened it too much? Was the fridge too close to the wall...? Were any of the vents blocked? I couldn't find any problems, and it didn't seem to be iced up anywhere. 

I recalled the lengthy fridge saga of a couple of years ago, when the fridge was running even warmer, and an engineer eventually came out to clean the very dusty filters at the back. Richard was pretty sure we could clean it ourselves with the aid of our mini vacuum cleaner/dustbuster. We had decided to do this annually, around the same time as we cleaned the air conditioners.  Last year we did move the fridge out but the filters looked pretty clean. 

This year, when he unscrewed the panel at the back, we could see that they were coated with dust, almost as bad as they were when the engineer came out. The dustbuster was almost full by the time Richard had cleaned the dust, and he used an old paintbrush to get at the awkward places. I took advantage of the fridge being moved to clean the inevitable dirt and gunk that had accumulated underneath, and to spray fairly thoroughly against insects.

It took several hours before the fridge temperature started to drop, but by the following morning it was back to the expected 3-4 degrees. 

On the second Saturday of June, I washed the bedroom curtains.  And when I changed our bedding, as I do every Saturday, I decided it was, already, time for just a sheet on top rather than the two layers of a duvet cover.  

We've used the air conditioning three times in the bedroom since it was cleaned, for just an hour. Combined with the ceiling fan, this is sufficient to keep it reasonably cool overnight. 

At least, it is until summer really gets going. I hope it waits until July.