Clean and Organized

OK, we were bad last fall--we left all the leaves down in our yard until spring.--read more

..So we don't have a washer and dryer here in apartment so we have to go out to do laundry. I was kinda hoping to boil some water over the stove and clean my cleaning cloths.--read more

What do u guys think is the best kitchen..I know people want to cook in a sanitary environment. Far too often kitchens get dirty and it becomes too late.

For 20 years now, I haven't had a closet with a door on it--the entire time I've lived in this house. When I lived in the downstairs bedroom (now Josie's), it came with a curtain over the door, which was the first thing I removed when I moved in. When we remodeled the upstairs, we ran out of money and space for a proper closet in our bedroom, so we made do with a couple of cheapo fabric-covered wardrobes that fell apart almost immediately. And yet we continued to use them, because we had no alternative.

Until now.

Last night we finished up installing two lovely new wardrobes from IKEA. (Heilsa IKEA!) And now we have not only enough room to hang all our clothes, but also a proper shoe rack, and room for John's large collection of boots. (One of his nicknames is "Imeldo.")

What makes the wardrobes the most lovely is that they have doors. Real doors, with, like, hinges and handles, and they're made of wood, or a wood-like substance anyway. We still have room for shelving in the wardrobes, which is a project/IKEA run for the week.

aah. adulthood at last.

Well, we've been mucking out the front bedroom, it's fairly empty in there right now, but most of the stuff that was in there is now in the dining room or in the living room.--read more

Is anyone trying to do a deep-clean before the holidays? I am in the process of it now, and I realized it would probably be easier if I had a good vacuum cleaner. Does anyone own an Oreck?--read more

Hi...--read more

Last night for the first time--since I'm FLYing right now and the kitchen was in some semblance of order--the girls were able to do the dishes!--read more

Hi Everyone ---read more

Let's have a nice new thread

Does anyone have any recommendations on how to clean a spot on a decorative pillow?--read more

I got a box full of this stuff just now. It's still freakin' me out that people are starting to just send me stuff to review. (Please, someone send me a check for $5000 to review. ) Now I'm trying to find out what the heck's in it; I don't want to use it if it's going to fill my house with fumes. The dry stuff has washing soda as one of its components and "organic acids" as well, whatever they are.

Ellen the Organizer came over today and we had a good long gabble and figured out what to do next to get me back on track. We figured out where my bottlenecks are: Work, dishes and laundry.

Work: I work too much. I've been worried about money. And I'm overwhelmed and it's easier for me to just dive in and do something I'm good at (writing) than look around the house and give up. Which leads to...

Dishes: Not having the dishes done throughout the day means I have a hard time getting dinner prepped at night and breakfast prepped in the morning. So before I do anything in the morning, if the kitchen isn't clean enough to function I have to take care of that first, and then get breakfast assembled ready to cook, before I open up the house and sit down to read email. You have no idea how hard this is going to be for me.

Laundry: My main concern with laundry is to make sure John has clean clothes without him having to wash them when he comes home from work. His commute means he is away from home nearly 12 hours a day, poor thing, and I don't want him to have to stay up half the night doing laundry. The bottleneck is getting stuff folded and put away. He often has clean laundry, he just doesn't know it.

This dovetails with his long-established habits, which are to get dressed and undressed in our spare bedroom, which also becomes piled with his stuff and makes me crazy. So we're moving his clothes into the spare bedroom, which has plenty of empty drawers, and I'm going to start doing his clothes separately so he always knows which basket is his in case I don't get things put away promptly enough.

We decided this is plenty for now. I'll keep this thread updated as I work on these three things.--read more

HI!--read more

John has stripped away enough of the laurel hedge that all four of the lines of my clothesline are once again usable! No rebuilding, no moving, just lovely loads of laundry flapping in the sun. (This is somebody else's laundry, I had my hands full.)

Louisa helped me hang the first load. Since she couldn't reach the line, I set up a little wire rack for her to hang undies and socks on. Josie got into the act a little later, using a scrub board and tub to wash doll clothes and hang them up to dry.

Today was a good day. I did two loads of laundry, got one out on the line to dry, folded and put away two others. Did three loads of dishes, cleaned the kitchen. Fed the chickens, spun a little yarn. Started a pot of broth. Wrote. I'm exhausted. John was worried it was my heart, but no, I just worked really hard today.

It was a good day.

Since last week's first experiment with washing soda, I've done a lot more research. I discovered our instincts were right about the stove pans, that's one of its primary natural cleaning uses.

Washing soda is not only ideally suited for baked-on grime like stove pans, it can STRIP OLD FLOOR WAX AND PAINT! Yikes! Don't use it on anything you want to retain a shine, like waxed floors, painted walls, fiberglass and the like--anything with a finish, essentially.

Washing soda is caustic, and if you're going to have your hands in it for any length of time, wear gloves. I should have said that last week--I knew this from dyeing.

It's also quite alkaline, which makes it a very effective water softener for laundering. Using it in hard water areas will cut down on the amount of laundry detergent you have to use.

And it's also a great descaler. We've successfully used it to remove gunk from the coffee maker. Use one tablespoonful for every 8 oz cup of water your maker holds. Be sure to rinse well! We usually run one "potsworth" of washing soda solution through the coffee maker and then one "potsworth" of vinegar water (half and half), and then a couple of pots of just plain water.

This is the first in what will be daily posts on the topic of the day, which today is Clean and Organized. Tomorrow, the topic is Home Cooking.

Isn't this pretty? It has nothing to do with cleaning. It was my dividend for cutting back the roses along the gazebo. I got so many roses off the prunings that I have four vases full scattered around the house. This is the biggest. The scent is positively filling the place.

On to today's topic!

We're always trying for two things around here:

• healthier living...
• ...and saving money

It's why we go through so much vinegar and baking soda. We use vinegar to clean our unfinished wood floors and our windows, as well as in the laundry, and we use baking soda in the laundry and elsewhere.

I read an entry on sew green on making laundry soap, and of course I'm interested in trying that at some point soon. But Nikki also wrote about using washing soda, one of the main ingredients in the laundry soap, as a hand dishwashing agent.

As it happens, we have a HUGE bag of washing soda, aka soda ash, in the basement. I use it for dyeing cotton, and it was a component in the dishwasher powder I used to make back when we had a roll-around dishwasher. So we got a jarful out of the basement and conducted some quick dishwashing tests.

We found that it does work for handwashing dishes, but it takes a LOT of water to rinse. It also leaves a film of grease on the water itself. The best results we got were on pans with some burnt-on grease. Right now we can only recommend it as an emergency dang-we're-out-of-dish-soap measure.

Last night we conducted a test of how well it would clean the bane of my existence, the stove pans. I put a heaping soup spoon of washing soda in very hot water and put the pan in to soak. To the top left is the "before" picture, and here to the right is the "half-after" picture. John took a copper scrubber to half the pan, and you can see it removed the burned-on gunk quite well. He says he didn't have to scrub that hard, either.

The big flaw in the experiment, of course, is that we didn't put a pan to soak in plain hot water as a control. We'll try that in the next couple of days. God knows we've got stove pans that need cleaning. And we're going to keep experimenting with washing soda around the house and see where we get results and where we don't.

Update: More on washing soda.

For instance, using:

• olive oil to shave
• a coffee filter to diffuse a camera flash
• lemon to get sticky stuff off a grater
• a dryer sheet to prevent thread tangles when hand-sewing
• newspaper to deodorize reusable food containers
• baking soda to erase crayon marks
• vinegar to wipe salt stains off of boots
• a ziploc bag to keep your hands clean when kneading dough
• velcro to hang pictures
• salt to remove clothes iron residue

...just ten of 101 uses Real Simple came up with for those ten everyday items. Worth printing out or at least bookmarking. [via]

TNH's edition of "The American Frugal Housewife" from 1832 is now available in wire-bound paperback. It's $9.95 from CafePress. The ebook is available here at TNH for $1.95, 10% discount for members, 75% discount for subscribers. (Discounts don't apply to paperback editions.)

New Thread!

That when my husband said, "Oh, I fixed the toilet"

he meant: I replaced the cracked white vinyl seat with a pretty new mauve vinyl seat.

He did not mean:

You know that thing that results in the toilet overflowing like Old Faithful on Steroids if you insist on abnormal behavior like flushing? I took care of that.

FOR GUESS WHAT?

I've got an admittedly very pretty toilet which just flooded most of downstairs. The mess has been dealt with. I'm just waiting for the steam to stop shooting out of my ears.

Help!--read more

Front load washer and laminate floor???--read more

*ring ring*

"Mom? We're running the self-cleaning function on the oven..."

"Wow, have you ever done that? I thought you were nervous about the wiring."

"That's been fixed, so we figured it was time."

"You really should run that thing more than once every five years, Lynn."

"We weren't sure about it, we just weren't sure what to do. Plus didn't you do it when you were here this summer?"

"(sigh) No, I just wiped it out."

"Is it supposed to smoke like that?"

"I wait for a sunny day so I can open the windows. Wait, how much is it smoking?"

"Well, we can still see each other..."

---

Three hours later, it finished up; it smoked for some time but subsided by the end. We gingerly opened it up and viola! a clean oven! An oven filled with ashes, but clean! gosh darn, what an invention...--read more

New Year ~ New Thread!

Sorry if I named this post something other than I said I would...it took me a bit to find it (due to fetching a syrup bottle out of DD1's hands!!) Hope this is what you were looking for, if not, mayb--read more

I remember getting a link to a downloadable organizer put together by a couple of moms. It was available for purchase for a few bucks. You print out the pages and punch wholes in it for your planner. The system has you doing a few things every day to keep things in order.--read more