Monday, November 28, 2005

Nancy Drew: The Case of the Sooty Ceiling

Since it's the holiday season, and we have holiday candles that we've had in storage for 3 years ("No, I don't want to burn these candles, they're the special Christmas candles") that have begun to deform, we've been on a candle-burning kick. It's great. The house smells like pine tree and cinnamon. It's great.

But Saturday night, one of our candles had a wick problem, as in the wick was too long. Or something like that, anyway. The flame was like 4 inches high off this candle that's like 2 inches in diameter. It was producing tons of soot. I'm taking so much soot, that I walked into our bathroom which is one long hallway, a bedroom, and three corners away from where the candle was burning, and the white toilet seat had weird black shapes forming on it.

Our white measuring scoops are rimmed in dusty gray patterns.

Our white bowl covers have black and gray spots on them that the dishwasher won't remove.

When I blew my nose, black stuff came out. (Sorry, probably too much information there, but for posterity's sake, I figure you need to know.)

It wasn't until Sunday morning that we understood exactly why.

Sunday morning, we looked up at the ceiling in the living room, which is the room the candle had been burning in. There were black spots all over the ceiling, except for a perfect circle around the ceiling fan. The ceiling fan that had been spinning all night Saturday night while our sooty candle burned. Drat.

So, these black spots were in a really strange pattern. Stringy, sort of, along our bumpy ceiling, because it's one of those ceilings with all that crappy bumpy stuff in it. Turns out, we've had a few more spider guests in the house than we realized, and all the webs they've woven across the ceiling attracted that soot like nobody's business.

So, the good news is that now I can see exactly what needs to be cleaned on my ceiling. The bad news is that I have to clean the ceiling. I just have to figure out how to clean up to 12-foot-high ceiling with my 5-foot-6-inch frame, a vacuum, and a serious lack of ladderage. I think a long-handled broom might be the answer, but then we get ceiling crap all over the place. Double Drat.

In case you're wondering, Mr. Honey and I tossed the evil candle. It won't soot up my house again. But now I know how to identify errant spider webs on the ceiling.

Posted by Honey :: 9:08 PM :: 5 Comments:

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