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.
Here you see my office setup, complete with comfortable dog. She's just happy to smell that shell chair again. I'm just happy to have my second monitor again.
Here's the window well on the south side of the east end of the basement. As you can see, it has drainage. Unfortunately, that drainage is into the basement, which experts consider suboptimal, even somewhat gauche. There are two reasons for this drainage situation -- there are no gutters on the south side of the main roof, but there is also no external drainage on the window well, which is about eight inches to a foot deep (I haven't measured, and there are leaves in it, so it's hard to say more precisely than that). All I can figure is that the right way to do this, besides putting gutters on the roof of course, is to dig a drain out to the street, and put a real drain in the window well. Repeat for all the window wells, although this is the worst.
That 20 by 40 feet seems big when empty, but put a household's worth of stuff in it, and it shrinks amazingly.
Whilst prowling around looking at the absence of downspouts, I noticed that there are drains for them. (I should mention that the city has combined storm/sewer drains and that the water in the local river is unsafe for that reason.) But there are no downspouts. My dad says that this is because they've probably been stolen for the metal. I hadn't considered that, but it may be true.
This is a tankless water heater. It retails for $764.99. The way these work is that instead of heating water up and leaving the hot water in a tank, they blast the water up to working temperature right when you need it. This is a tradeoff, of course. If you want to take two showers while doing the laundry, you're going to have really tepid showers. But the upside is that it's cheaper (because you heat water only when needed) and if you don't use too much water at once, you never run out of hot water.