Cleaning Decorative Marbles

Hubby got me flowers for Valentine's Day. I love Carnations!

They last forever and they smell so clean and fresh, just like spring.

And in the torn apart kitchen, they were a welcome sight.

I use those decorative glass pebbles to hold the flowers in place after I've arranged them in the vase. I always like to clean them after the flowers have died. I'm pretty sure it kills any bacteria growing, which means the next time I use them they will be clean.

To clean them, I put them in a mesh strainer and put them in the dishwasher. This only works well if you don't have any food left on the plates. Food on the plates gets caught in the strainer.

Nice and clean! After they dry I'll store them inside a vase or a ziplock bag, depending on what I can find first in our torn apart kitchen.

Yes, those are light globes. I washed them in the dishwasher, too. I'm not sure what I will end up using them for, but they aren't going back in the kitchen as lights.

Cleaning the Closets!

I really needed to spend bunches of time on choir music.....

but when the going gets tough.....

the tough clean closets...... right !?

I should have taken a before picture of our linen closet. It didn't really have very many linens in there. It was full of milking equipment, extra milk jars, plastic bags, aluminum foil and plastic wrap, and my cheesemaking equipment.

But I NEEDED a place to put towels and sheets!

So I cleaned the closet--two closets, in fact.

I cleaned the coat closet that housed a bazillion empty CD cases, some old kites, too many mismatched mittens, and a book case.

We believe in "Fix it up, wear it out, make it do, or do without". We also try to re-purpose things so we don't have to spend unnecessary money.

So, I cleaned out the coat closet, and cleaned out the linen closet.

This shelf unit came out of the wash room. I had another shelf unit that worked well in the same spot--but would never have fit here. All of this was in the linen closet! My favorite thing.... to the left of the shelf is my parchment paper hanging from a skirt hanger! I have never been able to find a good way to store my parchment paper so that it wouldn't get wrinkled or folded! This is perfect!

I also hung up all my tablecloths and placemats using skirt hangers. Yay! No more wrinkles! I have a really ugly counter top in the kitchen so I almost always use placemats to cover it up.

One day I'll paint it. But right now I'm just really glad to have room for some towels and sheets! You can still see the extra milk jars at the bottom, but that's okay. I have room!!!

We haven't bought new towels for years... about 10 years. One of our local stores had all clearance towels (really nice ones!) for $4 each--so I got some new towels! That means if we have guests they can have a towel! A nice one! Not just an old one that we use for kidding season (don't worry--we never really did that to our guests, but there have been times when it was a close call!)

It's funny, I usually like closet doors closed, but I leave the closet door open a little. I walk by the coat closet so many times every day -- and I love taking a peek inside because it is so nice to have it organized and neat!

And then I tackled the choir music....

Still Cleaning With Rags

I really, really like these t-shirt rags! Here is a link to my original post about cleaning with rags.

I decided that the 6" rags were much too small for me. I like the 10" rags much better. I also found that I don't like dark colored shirts for cleaning. When I use them on the does udders, they leave some color behind in the water. If I have a little bit of bleach in the cleaning water in the house, it does the same thing.

I saw a bag of rags at the grocery store... they were charging $10! And it wasn't a big bag of rags!

The very next Saturday Prion and I happened on an Annual Church Fundraising Yard Sale. It was "Whatever you can fit in a grocery bag is $2" day. Yay!

Of course I went searching for t-shirts and managed to fill my bag with about 12 white and gray shirts with as little printing on them as I could find. One woman asked what I was doing with so many t-shirts. I told her I was going to cut them up for rags. She said, "Maybe you should look for some older ones...." Since it was the last day of their Yard Sale, I didn't think that anyone would miss a few t-shirts from 8 huge tables of clothing!

I took them home and cut them up. I get about eight 10" rags from an adult t-shirt. I throw away the sleeves and around the neck, since they are smaller than I like to use.

Here's my stack ready to do some bathroom cleaning. This is a newly cut stack of rags. They don't lay as nicely after they are washed. But I store them in an old bucket in the washroom, so it doesn't much matter to me if I don't have to fold and stack them.

The bucket on the left has dirty rags in it, the one on the right has rags in cleaning solution ready to be used.  I love how my cleaning water stays clean the whole time I am cleaning the bathroom! No more yucky rags wiping down the next surface.

A Green Idea (aka I'm a Cheapskate!)

I modified this idea from a friend's blog. I tried it out the past few days and it works really well.

She (and I) love the wipes that you can buy to clean bathrooms and kitchens. But they are expensive and it seems like a waste to use them once and then throw them away. I hate using a washcoth or sponge and a bucket of cleaner. Yuck! All the hair and gunk from the bathroom seems to stick to the washcloth or end up in the bucket. Nasty!

Her idea was to cut up old t-shirts into 6" squares and store them in an old baby wipe container with a spray bottle of homemade cleaner next to it.

Here is the link to her blog post:
J&LSelman

Then she throws the dirty t-shirt wipes in the wash when she washes her whites.

What a great idea!

Except I didn't want a bottle of cleaner sitting there.

So, I cut up the t-shirt, put the squares into the wipes container, and poured enough cleaning solution to get them good and wet, but not dripping.

Wow! It was great having some re-usable handy wipes to clean the bathroom!

The next modification will be to cut the t-shirt into 8" squares instead of 6" squares. I think I would like my homemade handy wipes just a bit bigger.

Here's the recipe for homemade cleaner. It's found lots of places on the internet.

1 gallon water
1/4 cup vinegar
2 tablespoons lemon juice
squirt liquid dish detergent (I like Dawn, you may have to use a bit less if you have soft water).

Here's a great site with lots of home made recipes for cleaning supplies (and other tips):
TipNut

There it is, a green idea for cleaning! But really I like the idea because I'm a cheapskate!

One Clean Closet

This is probably the only time Son1 will have a clean closet, before he even gets home.
I finished all the laundry, put all his clean clothes in his closet, made the bed, and dusted. He will have to put away his books when he gets home, other than that everything is ready for his return on Monday.

It would be nice if more of our closets looked this tidy!