Not for the Faint of Heart

Between food poisoning and traveling it had been a couple of weeks since I had done a really thorough house cleaning.  This afternoon I started to rectify the situation.  When we dust, not only do we have to dust the normal things, we also have to dust several of the doorways.  In three of our rooms the air is being continuously sucked out of the house— the two rooms that house our HVAC units, and one of the bathrooms.  The doors to those rooms stay closed most of the time, so dust and dirt collect in the doorway.  This is what it looks like after a couple of weeks:

Fortunately, it wipes away fairly easily:

But I'm left with super gross dust bunnies:

Since the doorways were particularly bad, I decided to check our air filters.   The washable filter came out first and it was almost completely black:

A good vacuuming mostly took care of the problem:

The HEPA filter, however, was in much worse shape.  We are waiting for a new one to come in the mail, so I tried to vacuum out this one to nurse it along.  Here it is with one corner vacuumed:

Even though the cleaning was only somewhat successful, the air in the room is noticeably better now.

Cairo consistently lands on Top 10 lists for air pollution, but it has never been at the top of the list.  I cannot even imagine what this chore would be like in Beijing!