New Thing #240--A Fancy Figure

Today was my turn to vacuum. It's a pretty big job--we have carpet in almost every room except the kitchen (which has vinyl) the dining room (where hardwood peeks out from under a large rug) and the bathrooms. Even the finished part of the basement has carpet.

I love the look of a freshly-vacuumed room, but I don't like to put a whole lot of effort into the job. There's something nice about a carpet with visible vacuuming marks on it, but the effect only lasts until the first person walks into the room. When I vacuum, I usually try to finish the job as quickly as possible, but today I vacuumed patterns in the carpet.

I started on the second floor, but passed on doing the boys' vacant bedrooms. I vacuumed the hall in the normal way, then began my project in the master bedroom. First I went over the whole carpet as usual to get up the dirt, then I vacuumed concentric rectangles around the bed. By time I got to the edge of the room, there were four sets of lines (with a bit of extra unlined carpet at the far edge of the room).

I moved on the main floor and tackled the family room. Again, I did the normal vacuuming, then I went back to the center of the room and I radiated lines off to each side from the middle (like a palm frond). The last room was the living room. I put less work into this room, but tried to vacuum pretty abstract designs on the carpet. I got the camera and tried take a picture of my work; although the designs were visible to the eye, I couldn't capture them in a photograph.

When I was finished, I put the vacuum cleaner away in the basement. I came upstairs, and saw that one of the cats had already walked across the carpet; there was a series of paw marks from one end of the room to the other. This was quite the transient project !