Cloudy tank, white fuzz and trouble cycling

[Chill]

So I’m trying to do a fishless cycle and am completely lost.
I started cycling on 6/24/2019
I used pure ammonia to start the process raising the tank levels to 4 ppm. I have seen a rise in nitrates as high as 40 but have never seen any nitrites. also the ammonia levels aren’t going down on their own and only going down doing partial water changes. I’m confused because I thought I’d see nitrites and ammonia level drop to 0 before I would see any nitrates and that the ammonia would eventually drop on its own.

Also the tank keeps getting cloudy and never clears up and has white stuff on the decorations. We rinsed everything in the tank really good and used a brush on the decorations to make sure no paint chips were breaking off when we put everything in the tank. We also dont have any gravel in the tank that could be causing the cloudiness.

The current ammonia levels are around 1 ppm, nitrates 20 ppm and nitrites 0.

I’m not sure what I’m doing wrong and how to progress in the nitrogen cycle and why the water is so cloudy and what is growing on my decorations.

 

[SaraB]

The cloudy water is a bacteria bloom.
Maybe there isn't enough surfaces for beneficial bacteria to grow on? I've never done a fishless cycle in a tank without a substrate before.

 

[Chill]

We didn’t use a substrate because every time we tried to cycle or do anything to the tank it got cloudy so we tried without a substrate to make sure it wasn’t the rocks or decorations causing the cloudiness. Im gonna add the rocks back in today