Cleaning for Spring

While I'm working on the emergency pantry, my day job, my regular housework, etc. I'm also spring cleaning as I go along. Part of reorganizing the emergency pantry was cleaning off the shelves in my laundry room directly opposite it, which I did to get rid of some old cleaners we don't use anymore and clear the top shelf for our non-food emergency supplies. You can see I had enough room leftover to store some empty gallon jugs for emergency water storage.

Today I'm planning to spring clean the downstairs guest room; I keep that ready for hurricane season, in case our nephew and grandniece need to come and stay with us. I keep it tidy year-round and we never use it, so it won't take long. I just change the sheets on the bed, dust and vaccuum. If I have enough time I might finish tidying up my office after that. Then there are all the closets, which have gotten messy and overpacked again.

Experience in years past has taught me to tackle little jobs first during spring one at a time to work up to the bigger, more complicated jobs. I've been working on an entire room filled with piles of stuff, one pile at a time. I'll show you before and after pics of that one when I finish.

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Gifts

This is a story that starts out very sadly, so if you're depressed by the holidays you might want to skip the first part. As far back as I can remember I've dreaded the holidays. Being poor, having constant family troubles and belonging to a strict religion made that time of year always pretty unhappy. I just hunkered down and hoped to get through without being yelled at or punished because I didn't do something I was expected to do, like sit in church for hours without moving or making a sound while a priest spoke mass in Latin. Gifts were uniformly disappointing, too. My mother usually gave me dolls or socks or underwear for Christmas. I understand now as an adult that she was doing the best she could, and trying to save money at the same time, but as a kid I'd been told good children got what they wanted for Christmas. I was a pretty good kid, but while my friends received new bikes and cool toys and lots of treats from Santa, I didn't. I thought San

We Have Backsplash!

Yesterday my guy and I decided to chose this natural stone as the backsplash tiles for our new kitchen counters (which will be in the same quartz I'm holding at the bottom of the photo.) Since all the bids for installing the backsplash came in very high my guy is going to put it in himself; he's done a bit of tile work in the past, too. I swear there is nothing this guy can't do. :)

Detoxing Results

For twenty-four hours I left these five vintage cigar boxes sit with detoxing agents (baking soda, coffee grinds, dryer sheets, vinegar and Febreze) inside them to see which worked best to remove the tobacco/storage odors that came with them. I then removed the agents and did a sniff test. Before we get into the results, a reminder: none of what I do is ever meant to be expert advice, as I am certainly not an expert at anything. Follow my methods at your own risk, and please first consult an actual antique expert conservator or restorer to detox items that have value for you. Okay, let's see how my experiment worked. Baking soda (left) did nothing to remove the odors. I think if I let it sit for a longer period of time it might have done something, but for a 24-hour test it was a complete fail. Coffee grinds (right) removed 100% of the odors, and left behind definite coffee scent. I like that and think it goes very well with wood, but if you don't like the smel

Rayen

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