I just found the coolest thing ever. You have got to check out this website if you are into shrinking your footprint upon this earth.

http://www.tumbleweedhouses.com/houses/

I’d love to live in one of these – the larger ones of course. I don’t think I could fit my ample rear into the 65 sq ft one. However, the 700-800ish sq ft ones with a basement would be big enough even for me and my 4 kids. It would be perfect on a small (5-10 acre) parcel of land. I could grow much of our food, live simply and cheaply and reduce my carbon footprint. Someday…

Anyhow, check it out!

I splurged and bought an H2O mop on sale.  I was very wary, but the only other steam mops at the stores in town were beyond my price range. I figured I’d keep the receipt and if it sucked, I’d return it. However, I’ve been very pleasantly surprised!

When we were picking out lino/vinyl flooring for the kitchen when we were building this house, I wanted to make sure we didn’t pick anything with lots of grooves for the dirt to accumulate in. I hate ‘groovy’ vinyl flooring. And while I still like the stuff we did pick out – there was a problem I could never have known before we had used it for awhile. There are ‘fake’ grout lines that are a bit rougher than the rest of the area, and they are beige colored. Well, it wasn’t long before they were more brown than beige. Even with mopping constantly with my swiffer and homemade cloths, every few months I’d have to get down on my hands and knees with a Mr. Clean magic eraser and clean the grout lines.  It was a total PITA!

Well, I’ve only used the H2O mop 3 times in the kitchen and already the grout lines seem to be brightening up. I hope it’s not just my imagination or some sort of wishful thinking. I also love the way the floor feels after – so clean! And no vinegar smell, lmbo, I hate that smell. My swiffer wet jet recipe that I put in my reusable bottle always had some sort of strong essential oil to cancel out the vinegar smell, but I could still smell it at times.

And it works wonders on sticky messes. You know, when the kids spill something in an obscure space and don’t tell you and a week later you find a gummy sticky mess that no mop will get off, you need to get out the heavy duty stuff. This mop just melts it away. Love it.

I am worried about longevity, but for now I’m very happy. I’m just hopeful it lasts long enough to pay for itself (in vinegar, EO’s and magic erasers!)

I’ve been drooling after those floor steamers that seem to work like magic on tv. The first one I saw was the H2O mop and I thought, wow, how cool! But after I read the reviews, I was less enthousiastic. I’ve seen a few others since, some on infomercials, and our local trade show had one being demonstrated (Though for the life of me I can’t remember the name of it). To me it seems the ultimate in non-toxic cleaning. Does anyone know how well they work???

I was also looking at hand held steam cleaners. I really wish I had money for those 2 things at the moment, especially for our hard water build up that nothing natural, not even vinegar, seems to help. Then there’s the sterilizing aspect of it, which I must admit is EXTREMELY appealing to someone who has a toddler who likes to stick her hand in her poopy pants, among other disgusting things. LMBO, it’s a good thing she’s so cute .

So I was reading in our local recycling flyer, about a certain non-toxic stain remover. It’s shockingly simple.

Boiling water.

Why I didn’t think of this before is beyond me. In our laundry sink, we have a tap that can do a strong spray and sometimes I can spray most of a stain out. Well, apparently the same mechanism works well with boiling water. Before laundering, boil some water, put your stained item in the sink, and hold the kettle way up high, and pour the boiling water onto the stain. The force of the water, as well as the heat will get most if not all of the stain out and the rest should come out in the wash. I find this works MUCH better than simply putting a stain spray or stick on a stain. SO much cheaper and environmentally friendly too. I got a chocolate syrup stain on white out this way. I never get chocolate syrup on white stains out. Not even after soaking in oxy and boiling water overnight. The trick is the FORCE of the water. It’s just too simple.

Much like my life at the moment.

I haven’t done much ‘natural’ cleaning, lately. Although I’m still using my own recipes for wet jetting my floors. For my wood floor, I’ve been using water, lemon oil, and a small squirt of Dawn. For my kitchen, I usually have a mix of vinegar, water, squirt of Dawn, and a few drops of Patchouli EO. Love the smell of patchouli – it is also the best at covering up the smell of the vinegar (I still can’t get used to it!!).

My next project, should I ever get around to it, is to knit some reusable swiffer duster covers. Oh, and I now have a swiffer vacuum, so I need to make some dry cloths for the back part. I’m not sure what to use though. I think polyester microfleece would be best.

Hopefully soon I’ll feel more like cleaning naturally. Right now there are just too many other things going on in my life. I suppose that’s the story with a lot of people. Trying to live naturally always seems to take a backseat to our busy/crazy/messed up lives.

I’ve been super busy lately – too busy to update or test new recipes or anything. One thing I can tell you is that don’t use the scrubbing powder recipe with grated lemon zest in it. It plugs the drains. Ask me how I know. I thought I had grated it into a fine almost-powder. Guess not.

I’m talking about the homemade scrubbing bubbles. I tried a recipe that included vinegar, ammonia, rubbing alcohol and dish soap. It didn’t work at all for me. Almost the next day I started seeing soap scum and build-up. Yuck! So at the moment I’m nearing the end of a bottle that contained bleach, vinegar, & dish soap. So far so good, I’m going to try another bottle of it and see if it keeps up. If it does I’ll post the recipe. I sure can tell you though, stay away from anything that contains a combo of ammonia, vinegar, rubbing alcohol and dish soap. Just because it has more ingredients doesn’t mean it works better.

Also, last month I tried my carpet freshener on an old mattress we had that had recently received some abuse from a very nice, but a tad dirty, long term house-guest. I sprinkled it on the mattress, rubbed it in and let it sit for 15 minutes. Then I vacuumed it up and now the mattress is super-fresh! I am amazed at how well that recipe works.

Speaking of fresh smells – I’ve been line drying a lot of our clothes lately. Not all, but mainly anything polyester or acrylic to avoid the static, or anything that might need ironing if I let it go in the dryer. That’s in addition to the usual ‘delicate’ clothes the kids have that I’m trying to save for resale later. Our laundry room is on the west side of the house and as luck would have it, the wind nearly always blows from that direction. I just crank open the window and let the breeze dry my clothes on the line I have hung in the laundry room (and I avoid bugs that way too!). That, with the homemade laundry soap, makes for some yummy smelling laundry! mmmm! It ALMOST makes me like doing laundry. lol.

I haven’t been able to write about much lately. I’m still testing a few things – like a scrubbing bubbles substitute and swiffer wet jet refill recipes.

Yesterday I decided to make some more homemade laundry soap/detergent, but instead of gelling it I’m going to leave it as a powder. When I grate the soap, it comes out powder-y so I thought I’ll try a powder, since the gel takes up so much room in my itty bitty laundry room. So far though I really like how the gel is working. It just doesn’t dispense from my dispenser very well, so I have been putting it in with the clothes. I’m hoping the powder will work in the dispenser.

I’ve also discovered for sure that we have insanely hard water – I read somewhere 10 is hard, 15 is REALLY hard. We’re 19.5. ack! I knew we had hard water but didn’t know it was that bad. So I’m going to have to check out some water softener additive of some kind. The only kind I know of here is Calgon and I’m sure it has a lot of chemicals in it so I’m not sure if that will work, ‘green’-wise. There’s no way we can afford a whole home water softener at the moment either. I’ll have to do more research on it.

Hopefully I’ll be able to post more recipes that have worked for me, in the near future.

So, since the last post, I decided to go out to Home Hardware and purchase the “Natura” cloth dryer sheets that are supposed to eliminate static to see if they would be a good alternative to regular dryer sheets. As I said in my last post, I tried the ‘natural’ type with not very good results, I still had a lot of static. So far, after about 5 loads with the Natura cloths, there is very little static, even on the 100% polyester fleece stuff. I’m happy. I just wish they had a nice smell. Don’t get me wrong, everything smells clean and fresh when it comes out, I’m just used to the pretty perfume-y smells.

My homemade laundry detergent is working great as well, except it’s leaving a small amount of residue on the seals (it’s a front loader) so I’m now adding vinegar hoping that helps clear that out. As an aside, I HATE my washing machine. Don’t EVER get an LG! We’ve been having problems with grease stains, and now brownish stains showing up AFTER our clothes have been washed. I had a repair guy out (incidentally, to fix our LG dishwasher but got him to check out the washer too) and he’s pretty sure is the bearings and the seals, or something, and that it’s a super costly repair.

 I’m NOT happy and sure won’t be buying LG ever again, we’ve had problems with ALL of our 6 LG appliances (we bought them all to match) that are only 2 years old. So next month we’re budgeting for a cheaper washer, not as big, but it will have to do for now – I won’t repair the LG for the cost it’s not worth it, especially for the other problems we’ve been having, like the error codes that always show up. I did some searching online and I’m not the only one. Talk about frustrating!

We bought that washer because it was rated good at the time, only now do I see all the negative reviews. It’s all such a crapshoot, you can even do the research (which I did before we bought) and not know. We’ve had several new sets of appliances over the years (as well as some older ones the sellers left behind), nearly every time we’ve moved and we’ve never had to call a repair person, ever.

 So as you can see, LG has definitely NOT made our life good.

But those Natura sheets – quality product!

I was at the end of my big pail of Kirkland laundry detergent and decided to use that pail to make some of the gel-style laundry detergent. It seems to be a pretty popular recipe:

• 1 bar soap (grated)
• 1 cup washing soda
• 1/2 cup borax (I used 1 cup because we have HARD water)
• hot water

Place grated soap in a pot with water to cover. Simmer on MED heat, stirring occasionally, till it’s all melted. Put melted soap in 5 gal bucket, add washing soda and borax. (I mixed at this point and added some boiling water to get everything dissolved better). Add enough hot water to fill bucket, and stir. Let sit overnight to gel. Use 1 cup per load.

Mine gelled fine. I’ve been using it on the odd heavily soiled load and it seems to work really good. I’m going to wait long-term though to make sure, since I liked Kirkland at first too, but after awhile all my lights got super dingy. We’ll see if things get dingy with this mix.

Oh, I also added a few ‘things’ to the mix when I added the borax and washing soda. I added a bit of orange EO, since I used a lemon-scented Sunlight laundry bar as the bar soap, and a squeeze of environmentally friendly mandarin dish soap liquid, so now it’s a gorgeous citrus scent. yum! It makes everything smell SO clean.

I did have a bit of a laundry bummer though, as I bought some environmentally friendly, petroleum product free, dryer sheets and they don’t work at ALL. They smell great, but the static with them is exactly the same as without them. What a disappointment! I think I’m going to pop into Home Hardware one of these days and get a couple of those reusable dryer ‘rags’. I’m already missing the nice smell of the regular commercial kind though. I’ve been looking up how to make my own though, and there seems to be all kinds of recipes that have nice smelling EO’s, so I’ll have to try that. Hopefully I have it all down to a science by the time next winter hits – super static season.