Cleaning the Living Room Railing

Well, I cleaned the railing yesterday. Here's the picture of before I got started:

Pretty gross, huh? Our railing has this special problem; the paint is sticky. It just collects the dirt. Luckily, it's pretty easy to clean:

The cloth get's pretty sick though. This was a blue cloth that got bleached so it was kind of a pink color when I got started. Look how dirty the cloth and water are:

The part right up against the floor gets lots of dust on it:

See how white it's supposed to be?

My "Hermanita" (Pronounced like air-mon-eat-ah - It's the Spanish version of "Sis") wanted to help. How can you get after little hands like this that helped it get so dirty to start with?

Your guess is as good as mine as to why there was a ribbon tied around one of the posts. I'm guessing at one point it probably had a balloon on it. Nice for me, it wasn't tied on very tight so I was able to cut it off with my dollar store kitchen scissors:

Good thing it's my favorite color, green:

I had to move the piano (it's electric so it's not heavy) to get to the corner. Good thing because then I could vacuum underneath the piano too. I wondered if that had ever been cleaned before:

Yuck!

Doesn't this look much better now?

It took me about an hour and lots of elbow grease to get the end results. After five I lost count of how many times I rinsed the cloth. Now THAT'S what I call a home improvement!