Ridding Garbage (aka House Cleaning)

Cleaning up in the process of moving house is perhaps one of the most difficult jobs there is for anyone to take on.

You just don’t realized how much stuff (and junk) you have accumulated throughout the years until it’s spring cleaning or moving out time.

We are moving to our new house end of this year (hopefully!) and I am bracing myself for the horrid task of deciding what to keep and what to discard.

Sometimes, the best thing is to just chuck out everything that is STRICTLY not necessary for your new home and start fresh.

What is so clear for the head is however less so for the heart.

Often times, there are things that you just can’t find it in your heart to throw out, and as such store it somewhere nice and quiet.

The headache is even bigger if you are cleaning up another person’s home; let say, a second hand house on as-is basis through an auction, for example.

I bet there’re makeshift attics even in our non-attic typical homes which second as store and forget storage space.

My wife’s house in Ipoh has one above the second bathroom located in the rear and it’s a place I don’t wish to go poking about.

However, if you are the brave (curious?) type who do bother to dig deep, you may just find some gems – old portraits, memorabilia of one kind or another, records, books and magazines; basically stuffs that its owners are keen to hold on to but at the same time, unable to do so.

Usually it would be a case of finders keepers, but common sense says personal items (especially those with familial links) should be returned if possible.

What you hope – nay, pray – for is that you don’t end up making discoveries like those chaps in Stephen King’s Graveyard Shift (1970), though, but most of the time there will be the odd nasty finds.

(Which is also ONE reason why I’m only peeking at what’s within the aforementioned shelf aka makeshift attic cum storage space of our house in Ipoh!)

This is especially if the house owner or tenant before you is one behaviorally-challenged (aka nasty) person, someone like the unnamed narrator in Edgar Allan Poe’s classic, Tell-Tale Heart (1843).

News reports of late seemed to suggest the same kind of headaches being faced by our leaders: municipal, city, state and Federal level, mainly from the tumultuous March 2008 general elections results.

For example, the Sun reported today the KL Mayor cancelling a three-year contract worth RM32.4 million to supply flowers.

Among other, the report said: “the current Mayor is unable to focus on the job at hand as he tries to clean up the mess left behind by previous administrations – both at DBKL and the Federal Territories Ministry levels.”

A whole lot of mess is out in the open these days: the PKFZ scandal, Penang’s Kampung Buah Pala, the alleged exorbitant practices of a former minister, the Lingam tapes, the “RAPID”ly rotting buses in Rawang, and many, many more.

Major headaches for anyone tasked with cleaning up all these mess left behind.

Can’t we just chuck everything out like the junk that they are?

Of course, the rats that infest the garbage should go too.

If they have become as big as those in the Graveyard shift, then it’s time to call in the exterminator. (ex-Terminator?)

You don’t keep rats. Rats carry diseases. Fatal ones.

Hmm, who would you call?