Cross-Contamination, Dehydration, and Other Fun Discoveries

Stuff I Don’t Post and Why My Socks Hate Me

Let me be clear up front: no one is following me for cleaning tips.
That said… I’ve probably learned more about cross-contamination, chemical dilution, and biohazards in the last 48 days than I have in my entire adult life.

And I don’t film any of it (I ain’t touching my phone with gross hands).

Because honestly? You don’t want to watch me change socks six times a day.
You don’t want to see me standing motionless at a doorway asking myself,

“Wait. Were these the shoes I wore when I walked through the piss room?”

You don’t want to see me crouched like a broken crab trying not to touch a wall with my knee because I haven’t sealed that side of the house yet, and I know for sure someone smeared something weird in that corner, but I don’t know what.

There’s no TikTok trend sound for that.

Gloves. So many gloves.

I go through so many gloves now that I should probably be buying them wholesale under an alias. Vinyl, nitrile, double-layered, maybe I’ve tried them all by now. I know which gloves melt when peroxide touches them (Latex). I know which ones rip when I pull them too hard after sweating through the third shirt of the day (most of the cheap Nitrile ones).

Gross hands means no touching the phone, so it’s film then glove and scrub, or it’s glove, scrub, wash, film, repeat, and I change gloves like someone working a deli counter in Hell.

Cleaning? I’d been doing it wrong forever.

I always treated bleach as bleach and soap as soap.
Now I read chemical usage instructions for bedtime stories. I dilute things based on surface type, residue potential, and fungal reactivation. I’ve experienced more first hand exposure to toxins I could probably walk into a leadership role at poison control.

It’s surreal.

I have a long list of products I didn’t know existed, and now I panic when I run low.
There are bacteria and mold signs I didn’t know existed that I now avoid like my life depends on it, because in a very real, insurance-doesn’t-cover-this kind of way, it might. The shelf I cleaned off for clothes has been completely taken over by gallon jugs of Odoban, Concrobium, Mean Green, and others.

What I expected vs. what this turned into

I came here thinking I’d maybe lay some flooring, paint a wall, and call it a rough little cleanup job.
Instead, I’ve been:

• Emptied a house full of toxic trash

• Scraping, crawling on, and sealing floors with respirators on

• Investigating tenant sabotage and trying to determine malicious destruction vs vandalism

• Filing police reports and insurance claims

• Researching biohazard classifications while scrubbing incense residue off drywall

• Peeling back layers of mismanagement from people I never hired but still have to fight in court

It’s been 48 days. It feels like 200.

I’ve done electrical, plumbing, legal research, hazard cleanup, therapy journaling (aka me complaining on TikTok), and light demolition, sometimes all before eating late lunch in my truck (since it’s the only place that feels clean).

And somehow… I’m still here.

Also: I feel like shit today.

I was fine this morning. Tired? Yes, but “just tired.”
As the day went on, the exhaustion turned to nausea, the nausea turned to sweating, and now I’m lying down writing this instead of doing what I wanted to post about, which was a sewer line update I researched yesterday.

I feel a little bad - not because anyone’s demanding an update, but because if you’re here reading this, you probably want to be updated. And that’s strangely awesome.

So thank you for that, and don’t worry, I think I’m just dehydrated and having trouble sweating out toxins because of it.

I just wanted to talk about the stuff I never show, the between-scenes. The reason it takes so damn long when “I was just going to wipe down the walls.”

Thanks for reading. If you're here, you're now already reading more of the real mess than anyone else.

Hopefully tomorrow I wake up with a little more energy, a little less chemical fatigue, and a better ratio of clean socks to clean floors.

But no promises.