Month: July 2023

I bought a cheap camping chair from Amazon and it arrived today. It assembles in about thirty seconds and it folds up almost as quick.

It was a hot evening tonight and at one point it was 29 degrees Celsius in my apartment. I ran my AC for a while, at least until the sun went down. I stopped it because I’m cheap. Of course it went back up to 27 degrees.

To test out my camping chair, I brought it out to my balcony. I’m sitting in it right now as I type this on my phone. It’s comfy enough. The most important thing is that it feels so much cooler outside on my balcony. There’s a nice cool breeze that comes through once in a while. It’s just so pleasant to be sitting out here.

To quantify how pleasant it is, I also brought out my portable weather station with me. It doesn’t take measurements every second but in the few minutes I’ve been out here, it’s told me it’s at least three degrees cooler outside. So it’s just not my imagination.

I’m gonna go back inside in a few minutes because I have inside stuff to do but this was real nice. I didn’t hesitate to come out here because I wasn’t gonna sit on some dirty, disgusting patio furniture. This was a good lesson to learn. Maybe I’ll be out here more often.

Having my balcony power-washed and needing to bring in my disgustingly dirty patio furniture inside made me think about how I might want to use my balcony going forward.

A large part of the reason I don’t like going on my balcony is that it gets dirty really easily. Something about being this high up, the prevailing winds, and some other unknown factors makes it so that dust and dirt accumulate on my balcony really easily.

How do I keep it clean? I’ve already mentioned several times that I can’t just dump a bucket of water and mop it. The water drains over the side and onto the balconies below me. The only alternative is sweeping and using a blower. I have a blower that I bought that I normally use to clean out electronics like my computer. It’s fairly powerful and can easily be used to blow away dust and dirt from my balcony.

The key, however, is to sweep and blow away the dirt and dust regularly. Once all that crud has had a chance to settle and bake in, it’s a lot more difficult to sweep or blow it all away. So I need to clean it every few days, which for a lazy person like myself, is gonna present a challenge.

Another reason the balcony sucks is that the furniture out there just gets unbelievably caked on with dirt. It gets so dirty. Even if I managed to clean it at the beginning of the summer, I’d have clean it weekly at a minimum if I wanted to sit on it and not ruin whatever I was wearing. What pain to have to clean all that furniture weekly, even if I wasn’t planning on using it that week. One solution would be to put a cover over everything, the chairs and the table. Where do I get a cover like that? Do I use a tarp? Wouldn’t the dirt just get underneath the cover and get everything dirty anyways? Eventually the cover would get gross anyways.

Another solution would be to go totally minimal on the patio furniture. I wouldn’t have anything out there permanently. If I wanna sit out on my balcony, I’d bring out a camping chair and use it for my time out there. Once I’m done, I fold it back up and bring it back in with me. It won’t get dirty because it’s stored inside and not exposed to the elements. This option isn’t perfect, but it solves a lot of the problems I’ve faced and requires a lot less effort in trying to keep patio furniture clean.

Anyways, all this is good thinking for when my balcony repairs are done, which is going really slowly by the way.