Holy mother of God...where did my kitchen go?

Appologies in advance for gnawing your ears off regarding my rediscovery of housecleaning. It was either this or a NaBlo entry, and the prompt for NaBlo today was "Are you scared of being in open water" the answer to which is a simple "I'm afraid of being in any body of water larger and deeper than a hot tub" and would not have really satisfied my concience as an actual entire blog entry!

Well, I am well and truly exhausted. After yesterday's introduction to this Beat the Heat challenge where I expressed irritation at my own laziness, I did indeed draw up a daily schedule for chores, errands and chill outs (so the later would not overcome the former) and I've been quite busy all day. In fact, I don't actually know where the day so far as gone to. Now however is blog time.

I mentioned using the FLY lady system of doing chores and how it's helped me in the past. Well, one of the things involved with this system is that every week you focus on a new part of the home, each a different "zone" and this week happens to be zone two...the kitchen. Now, I grumbled a bit because for some reason I always start on a kitchen week, and my kitchen is one of the few places in the home which I'm generally (not 100% mind you, but generally) happy with. There's no dish problem, the surfaces are wiped down twice a day if not more, everything has its place (even if that place happens to be thrown in the back of a cupboard where they can't be seen). Never the less, I'd scheduled an hour of cleaning in the zone, next week will be a new zone and whatever that zone may be, fine, it gets done.

I figured I'd do the pots and rinse off the draining board and sink. Our draining board, somewhat counter intuitively, sits on a slight incline away from the sink. As such, all the soap suds from our nice clean dishes drip drip drip onto the board and after a while they form this horrid smelly, soapy scum. Whilst I waited for the breakfast dishes to dry so I could clear the drainer (I've found myself in a position where all the clean tea towels are in the laundry cause I'm a dufus like that) I started decluttering the end of the counter top which had collected more detritus. Then I realised some of the small appliance cables were a bit sticky and dusty from being around the general cooking area so I decided to unplug everything and give it all a quick once over....

Are you seeing where I'm going yet? I ended up completely ripping out otherwise pretty much stationary appliances and gadgets that I had always considered to be in their correct and rightful places and just...wow. It never occured to me that dust and detritus and general all round filth and muck can collect in such quantities underneath all of your stuff. It wasn't just a case of dusting down the kitchen radio...it required damp dusting with tiny amounts of warm soapy water. The surface underneath it required neat flash just to, euch, wow, I mean really seriously, I pride myself on clean counter tops but euch this was horrible.

Yes, the kitchen will be gutted and dusted from top to bottom this week, and the next time it's a zone two week, it will happen again, though hopefully not with the same "ewwww gross" reaction as it managed to get from me this time (because I will of course be on top of it all!)

Of course, if I thought from the surface appearence that the kitchen was clean and tidy, but it turned out to be rather foul, what are the bits of the flat that are obviously not clean and tidy? I shudder to think what I'll dig up over the next ten weeks of deep clean...