Summer Job

This summer has not been the norm. I realized my tenant was moving out of my rental property. There is a repair job that needs to be done and the taxes have to be paid. I had enough saved from the rent to pay either the taxes or the repair job. I had been thinking that maybe I should have gotten a part time job this summer. But my time is so extremely scheduled during the school year that I refuse to have much of a schedule all summer. Two days after I began processing all this, I got an e-mail from the school that the board had tired of doing the floors at school and were willing to pay someone on staff to do them this summer. The amount after taxes are taken out that they were willing to pay for the job almost exactly matched the estimate of the repair job. I decided that God wanted me to work hard this summer, but He was supplying what I needed. Therefore, I took the job. There was no schedule. I could go whenever I wanted to go, work as long as I wanted to work, and come home whenever I wanted to. No one needed to know when I was going to be there and when I wasn't going to be there. Some mornings I went as early as 4 or 5 and then left early before the hotest part of the day. Usually I started by 6:30 or 7 and worked until sometime between 12 and 2 P.M.

These were the basic tools that I used. I had three buckets and three mops: one for soapy water, one for clear water, and one for wax; and those were never mixed. The first thing that needed to be done was move everything out of the room so I could clean the floor. Next, I dry mopped the room. Then, slopped soapy water onto the floor and allowed it to soak while I got the floor machine ready to go. The next step was the floor machine with the black stripping pads on it. I went over the floor 3-4 times with those pads.

Then it was time to get down on my hands and knees and do the hand scrubbing. I used the centers of the black pads for that.

When I was doing the main hall, Mary came to help me one evening after supper because there was so much pitch on the floor from the new parking lot and lots of scrubbing needed. I hand scrubbed every block from the front door to the office.

After I was finished hand scrubbing, I ran the floor machine with the red pads over the floor another 3 times. The next step was mopping the floor with clear water until the water when I was finished was still clear water. That usually took 1-3 moppings. It depended a bit on how well I could get into the corners with the floor machine.

The rewarding step was putting the four coats of wax on the floor and seeing it begin to shine. When I was finished with the fourth coat of wax, the floor looked like it was wet when it wasn't. Several times I had someone coming to talk to me stop at the door and touch the floor before walking into the room. I knew then that my floor looked like it was supposed to look: wet. The last step was moving everything back in place in the room.

I started cleaning floors the last week of June and finished the last week of July. It took me 97 hours to do the whole school.

The question that remains: "Will I do it next year?"