Clean and Organized

I'm on a YouTube kick!

And I DO mean "mucking out." Stables ain't got nothin' on LouLou.

As you may have seen, Anhata and her husband Frank are adopting two little kids from foster care, tripling their children overnight! Since Josie moved into the downstairs guest room, Lou's had two beds in her room, the built-in bed that Jo slept in, and a wrought iron daybed. We gave Hata and Frank the daybed for their new daughter to sleep in until they found something else they wanted.

So we're taking the opportunity for a major mucking-out of Lou's room. So far, we've found long lost dishes, scissors she wasn't supposed to have, several reams of paper, rotten fruit, stolen packets of raisins and the lid off the caramel sauce, and we've collected a bathrooms' worth of laundry, some of it clean, some of it mine. What was she doing with my flannel sheet set and my Jayne Cobb, Mercenary t-shirt?!

John and I have been doing this thing in the past few months we call "Not That Guy." "Not That Guy" is the guy you wanted to be when you bought all that stuff for, say, scrapbooking. You wanted to be That Scrapbooking Guy, but you're not scrapbooking; it's all sitting there in the closet gathering dust and taking up space. You're Not That Scrapbooking Guy. So it's time to get rid of That Guy's stuff.

So far John has admitted he's Not That Woodworking Guy, and we sold the bandsaw and Shopsmith that have been taking up space in the garage, unused for five years. I have admitted I'm Not That Drumming Guy, and sold my beautiful quinto drum that has sat in a corner of Josie's room, unplayed, for more than 15 years.

(Quick side note: We discovered in this process that we are Those Biking Guys, however, and we took the money from the sales of Those Other Guys' things and bought some new bikes. I am now the extremely happy owner of an Electra Townie 21 speed, the Purple Poem one. Go get on a Townie, they will renew the joy of biking that you lost somewhere in middle school. And John converted his mountain bike to an Xtracycle sport utility bike, which is the coolest thing EVAR. He can haul a week's worth of groceries AND LouLou on that thing. And we have a tandem. I highly recommend tandem riding for couples, it is hella fun.)

The greatest thing we have had to acknowledge, though, is that we are Not Those Gardening Guys. I was That Gardening Guy, but that was before my illness. Now, I'm Not That Guy any more, and I never will be again.

After a lot of thought, we have decided to sell our extra lot, the yard next to our home. We had considered moving--we even looked at condo living--but in the end, selling the lot is our best choice. It severely reduces the amount of maintenance and/or guilt we face, it allows us to pay off our mortgage, and it puts us in a much better position to improve the house we have. It needs insulation, new, more efficient windows, a new kitchen (our kitchen is falling apart and we have no dishwasher--aagh!), and the laundry needs moved upstairs from the basement. If we did those things, we could stay in this house happily for at least another ten years if not longer. We love our neighborhood, and we want to stay.

So, Not That Guy. We wanted to be That Guy, but we're Not That Guy.

Well, this looks like a good site to blog about my struggles with housework, organization, my weight and my life in general.

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.

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!

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.

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.)

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.