Monday, February 11, 2013

Beam Me Up Scotty

Our old house had a Beam built in vacuum cleaner and when we moved into this house the Broan was installed but I soon realized it wasn't working properly. That was evident when you saw the baseboards and the dirt which accumulated while the renter lived here and either did or didn't vacuum. 


You can see how dirty the carpet is in certain places but image thinking your vacuum works because you can here it making the sucking sound but it really isn't because it's not sucking up any dirt. As it turned out, the rubber rings were not on the doors of the wall sockets to create a seal. Image, not even thinking to check them. Yes, we moved into a house where the floors were not vacuumed for some time. That would explain the smell and the dirt. Gross isn't even a word which remotely comes close to describing it. 
Well, I promptly went out and bought a Dyson because I'd heard such good things about them. 
They are very pricey. It worked great for the time we needed. I could clean the carpets and I used it on the lino just as it was. I didn't need to use the floor attachment because I wasn't worried about wrecking the lino, the lino was coming out when the floors were replaced. It does a wonderful job of sucking up dirt and such, it is very loud. After a while what I didn't like about the vacuum was that I couldn't vacuum under anything, like my bed. Our Beam had a wand that bent and it folded flat so it could go under the bed and dressers. Loved this feature. The Dyson's bulky ball and canister get in the way. Like I said, the vacuum worked well for a time but when I went to use it on the hardwood floor, the attachment for it was cumbersome and I had to bend over when using it on the hardwood and it was uncomfortable and hard on my back. My physio therapist wouldn't be happy with me if he saw how I was leaning over the vacuum. I also always felt like it was going to scratch the hardwood as I pulled the large canister around behind me. 
And doing stairs was a HUGE pain. I don't care if the uprights claim to do stairs but they really don't. 
I longed for my old Beam built in vacuum. So we looked and thought about whether we should take back the Dyson and use the money towards a Beam but I still really liked the Dyson so I came up with using it in the basement since all the floors are carpet and I don't have to vacuum under anything and the built in would be used upstairs where the flooring is hardwood, carpet and soon to be tile. 
When we went to Quality Vacuum in GP he said he was putting a vacuum on the local radio station (Q99) auction. It was a larger model, it does a 10,000 square foot house (Who has a house that big?) but also more money than we were intending to spend. 
We bid on it all week and eventually won the bidding war, thanks to Darcy for staying at the store for the last hour of bidding. Someone would call in and he would up his bid. He, he, he...we ended up paying $1000 for the extra hose and stair nozzle. If we hadn't won we would have paid over $1500. That's a substantial savings.  

Darcy installed it this weekend and it's fabulous. It's so nice to have a vacuum on the level you use most often. In our old place, the hose and attachments were in the basement which meant going down 3 sets of stairs if you wanted to vacuum the bedroom on the top level. It was a pain to say the least. 
I'm happy with the Beam, now does that mean I'm going to vacuum more often? Well the jury is still out on that. 



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