Carriage house cleaning phase I complete

By which I mean, the entire apartment has now been thoroughly mopped once with copious bleach. Each bucket of water dumped had turned black (and perhaps it was black in the technical sense, too: I didn't analyze the encrustations on the floor). There were perhaps thirty such buckets.

It's still not clean enough to kneel on the floor to do serious cleaning. But it's getting there.

In other news: I walked into the big house tonight for the first time without being hit by a musty basement miasma. I bought the biggest dehumidifier Lowe's sells about four days ago, but for a while the actual dehumidification rate was limited by how often I visited the house to empty the bucket. So I bought a condensate pump for the drain hose. But I didn't have a wrench, so the drain hose didn't drain very well, and the bucket still filled up and stopped the dehumidifier, just more slowly than without the drain hose.

I obstinately refused to buy a pair of pliers when I already have four perfectly good ones. They arrived last night, along with the rest of the Truck 'o' Stuff, and since then, the dehumidifier has run continuously for about 22 hours. And it works. Not only does the basement smell great, the walls are drying out. The entire house smells far, far better.

It's just a stopgap, of course, until I can get proper gutters in place and make sure the window wells are draining someplace other than into the basement. But it's an effective one.