Search Results for: blog fitting in the spring cleaning

Letting Spring into Your Home and Your Life

When the season changes and becomes spring, it is an opportunity to let new things into your home and into your life. Here are some ways to bring a sense of renewal to the place where you live. Your whole family will notice the difference. The first place to start is to open the windows and let all of air fresh spring air into home. It is a great way to welcome the new time and will help you physically and emotionally, not to mention airing our your home and releasing all of the stale smells. Next bring some more … Continue reading →

Fitting in the Spring Cleaning

With three young children and a work-at-home job, it can be difficult to get the spring cleaning underway. As much as I would love to take a weekend to just complete it all at one time, that is nearly impossible. So I find myself sneaking up on the spring cleaning here and there as I can. Today, I actually started with a bit of the actual cleaning part of the spring cleaning. I have been organizing and de-cluttering along the way in the last two weeks, but outside of normal day to day cleaning, very little deep cleaning has been … Continue reading →

Frugal Cleaning: Using Lemons

Put those lemons to good use in your cleaning to save $$$$! Who doesn’t like the scent of lemons in a nice clean house? Practically every commercial cleaner out there on the market has a version that contains a lemon scent. Sometimes the scent is not just lemon, but “fresh lemon.” I have even seen a cleaner with the scent of a “fresh lemon breeze.” I’m not sure how breezes get to be lemon scented. Perhaps they hold the lemons up to the kitchen window? Regardless, there is a reason behind the lovely scent of lemons in cleaning solutions. Not … Continue reading →

Spring Cleaning: What To Do After You Purge Your Closets

Currently, it is –5 degrees Fahrenheit in my neck of the woods (-26 degrees with the windchill). Nowhere near spring-like temperatures, but that’s not stopping me from continuing my “spring cleaning” project. Last week, I told you that I was purging my home in an effort to find space for all the goodies we received over the holidays. Today I worked on the front closet and my daughter’s closet. The latter was a lot more challenging than the former. My daughter had a major growth spurt during our recent trip to Hawaii (she went from fitting into 2T’s to now … Continue reading →

How to Clean Green

Having a clean home doesn’t mean that you have to expose yourself and your family to tons of chemicals that can linger in your home and may negatively impact both your health and the environment. The old days of strong chemical cleaners that eradicate everything in their paths is gone. Welcome in a new era of cleaning, one that will leave your home clean and smelling wonderfully without causing harm. First, let’s talk a little bit about the traditional cleaning solutions that are on the market. Most of them are petroleum based, which we know is not a renewable resource. … Continue reading →

Completing Home Improvement Projects with Children

One of the reasons that I think our house isn’t getting improved as fast as we would like it is the fact that we have three young children. Projects are constantly interrupted by the needs of the kids, and it is usually hard to find a long enough block of time for larger, more time consuming projects. But believe it or not, things can get done. Just yesterday, we were able to build a new fence, apply teak oil to some outdoor furniture, clean out a couple of boxes of clutter from the basement, build a log holder from a … Continue reading →

The Perfectionist and Clutter

When people think of someone who tends to be a perfectionist, they don’t dream that this same person could be hiding mounds of clutter in her or his home. In fact, clutter isn’t the bane of just a hoarding personality. Perfectionists can be just as likely to have clutter, although for different reasons. Earlier today, I had about forty minutes to do laundry and attack and area of the basement that is just piled with clutter. When we moved into our home two years ago, the basement became the sort of staging area for things that didn’t yet have a … Continue reading →

Organizing Shoes

I admit that I have never been addicted to shoes. While friends of mine have overflowing closets full of footwear, I have exactly five pairs of shoes and sandals, plus two pairs of sneakers (one of the pairs is for yard work) and one pair of work boots that double for the winter. I’m always worried about the expense and the practicality of treating myself to shoes. My daughter has no such qualms about acquiring shoes. At four-and-a-half, she has never met a pink, feminine, or sparkly shoe that she does like. Church shoes, jelly shoes, sandals, princess sneakers and … Continue reading →

The Biggest Home Storage Mistakes

If you want to save yourself some big headaches when it comes time to organize, then avoid these common storage mistakes. You don’t want a big mess on your hands. Storage Containers When people are ready to organize then tend to run out and purchase lots of storage containers. A bette idea is to first figure out what you need to store and then plan out what types of containers you want to use to store all of your stuff. You may find that you can de-clutter enough items to require fewer containers than you thought, or you may have … Continue reading →

Easy Tough Love Tips for De-cluttering

While getting rid excess stuff seems like an easy thing to do (just start in one place and keep going), for many of us de-cluttering is tough to do. From not knowing where to start to having an emotional attachment to our stuff, we can be our own worse enemies when it comes to having an organized home. One thing that may help in your de-cluttering efforts is to practice some tough love with yourself. Practicing tough love means that you establish certain rules for yourself and then follow them most of the time. Notice I said most of the … Continue reading →