Cleaning and Organizing

As our (extended) family has grown, so has our collection of folding tables & chairs. They come in super handy when we’re hosting a big group for the holidays, but we’ve never had a great place to keep them all the rest of the time. For years, we stored them all in a bump out…

Over the last year or two, Haley has become a real “Lego Maniac.” She has always loved playing with building toys – and Lego is no exception. She especially loves the “girl Legos” – the Disney Princess & Friends sets are favorites. She has so much fun building the sets, spends hours playing with them,…

I think, out of all cleaning tasks, cleaning the shower is just about my least favorite.  It is such a thankless job.  For years, my solution was just to not really clean the shower much, but, since we remodeled the master bathroom and have a pretty tile shower in there now, I figure it’s a…

Throughout my adult life, I’ve tried a variety of approaches to cleaning.  I guess they were all basically successful – the house wound up clean for at least a little while – but I struggled to get into a routine that kept it in a basically clean state all the time.  Especially after we moved to…

I’m not exaggerating when I say that the chandelier in our dining room was nasty dirty and desperately needed some love.  It’s really no mystery how it got that way – we’ve lived here for almost 7 years and I think I briefly attempted to clean it once before realizing how much the job sucked…

Today, I wanted to talk a little about toy rotation & storage … and share what’s been working for us. After Haley had her first birthday, followed just a few months later by Christmas, I knew it was time to do something different about the toy situation.  I know we have far fewer toys than…

Shark Vac Then Steam

With all the construction work on the new entry way addition, our house has sure taken a beating over the last couple of months from a cleanliness perspective.  It seems like the entire main floor is perpetually covered in a layer of construction-related dust and the kitchen floor, in particular, is various levels of muddy,…

My Dryer Works Again!

A little over two years ago, when we moved into this house, we purchased a new washer and dryer set since our old ones had been included with the sale of our previous home. I really struggled at the time with which model to select, but it turned out that the decision had pretty much…

One Stinky Rug

A couple of weeks ago, we took a bunch of water in our basement … in the room we thought didn’t leak. We were lucky that we didn’t have a lot of stuff stored down there that we really cared about. Mostly, we just had the empty boxes from when we moved, but we’d also…