Decluttering is happening at the Smith house this month. If that’s one of your goals for this year too, please join me as I concentrate on decluttering for a month. Check out how week 1 went and see before/after photos.
When you’re trying to keep a tidy home for your family and you want to avoid nasty chemical sprays and cleaners, there is nothing worse than bugs showing up to crash your party! Gnats and ants are the most common party-crashers in the kitchen- but how do you stop them from visiting? If you’re like me and keep a compost pail or garbage bowl (Rachael Ray style!) on your kitchen counters, you may get some unwanted gnats or ants from…
Here’s my little secret that I don’t often share with people- I’ve been making my own deodorant for years. I’m not sure why that doesn’t come up in everyday conversations. LOL, homemade deodorant discussions are exciting! But the truth is, I have very sensitive skin and I’m allergic to many store-bought deodorants. They make my armpits itchy! Yeah, that’s not a fun feeling when you’re going about your day in public places around people. In my adolescent years, I didn’t…
Do you have a messy home and need to get it guest-ready fast? When you’ve got visitors coming and only a few days to get your home looking presentable, you may feel a panic attack coming on! Personally, I struggle to keep my home organized and can get tired just thinking about what needs to get done. And when guests are coming, a million mostly negative thoughts start running through my mind. Oh no! The house is a mess! What…
Our family spends a lot of time in the kitchen, and that means we tend to go through the soap in our in-sink soap dispenser every few weeks. The soap bottle under the sink is tiny and I hate refilling it as often as I need to! I always end up spilling (i.e. wasting) soap everywhere in the process of filling it. It’s also difficult to remove and re-attach the bottle because I have to have one hand above the…
I used to be completely disorganized at home until I read a book by Sandra Felton and Marsha Sims. These two are the founders of “Messies Anonymous” and really know their stuff when it comes to organization. I really relate to what they say and recommend them for clutter bugs like me. So when I found out that Marsha now sends a free daily email, I was immediately on board with that. I signed up and now get daily organizing…
So many boxes… So much clutter… Do you still have boxes of stuff that never got unpacked when you moved? Or a place in your home that seems to accumulate all the clutter? I am supposed to have a craft space in the basement, but it has become the cluttered catch-all area in my home instead. As you can see, it became the junk room and was wall to wall boxes, including some we never opened after moving in three…
I recently replaced the flooring in my parent’s master bathroom without any prior experience. If you’d like to read how that went, you can find the details here:Â Installing peel-and-stick vinyl tile in bathroom Since the first bathroom went so well, my parents wanted me to replace the flooring in their guest bathroom too. Of course, every project is a little different and this was no exception. I used a utility knife and flat head screw driver to remove the wood…
It is extremely important to clean the gutters on your home at least once a year. Twice a year is even better. You don’t want to skip it. Why? Gutter cleaning is one of those small home maintenance jobs that keeps other bigger and badder things from happening. However, it can be a bit expensive to hire someone to clean the gutters for you. For our smaller home, it would run about $100 per gutter cleaning. So I tried to…
Ah, the power of power washing! I knew the patio needed to be cleaned, but I had no idea how badly. My in-laws let me borrow their power washer and I set to work spraying it down this morning. Once I got everything hooked up correctly and figured out how to turn it on, things went smoothly. Well, as long as you don’t mind getting dirty. By the time I finished power washing the patio, I was covered in a…