Tip of the Day

Vacuuming is one of the most basic household duties and yet most people never think to do this one very simple thing.

Clean Your Vacuum!

Admittedly this probably only applies to those of us with canister vacs, but it's so important. If you want to improve your vacuum's ability to get all the nasty stuff out of your carpet, take out the canisters and clean them thoroughly. Cut all the hair and carpet fibers out of the roller bar. If you have a vacuum with a removable filter like I do, clean the filter once per month. It will increase the lifespan of your vacuum and you'll be surprised at much extra dirt is getting sucked up once it's clean.

Grocery Update

I haven't posted about grocery costs in a while and one of the blogs I read regularly just had topic about doing a grocery audit, so it reminded me that I really needed to go over things again and see where we stood. To remind you, we have been attempting $300 per month on food and $100 on household items like tp, pet food, cleaning supplies, etc - $400 total. After a few months, we seem to be gravitating towards a natural spending amount of between $500-550 for food and household costs. This being said, some months, we are able to get around our goal amount.

I honestly don't know why we can make our goal amount some months and other months go $100+ over. Maybe it depends on how much I'm using coupons in a particular month (I'm not a big coupon user but will use one if I was going to buy that item anyway). Maybe some months we are able to cruise by on our pantry stockpile. I just have no idea.

This month, I'm attempting to do more freezer cooking, which I've been told will cut down on food costs big time once you get the hang of it. So far, I've spent half of our grocery budget for the month and have stocked up on bulk items at Costco. Once I get some more freezer cooking done and have outlined more meal plans for the month, I am hoping that it will enable me to successfully say that I was able to meet our food budget at the end of the month.

We have discussed raising our grocery budget by $50 to see if that gives us a little more wiggle room so we aren't stressing out about how much we've spent and aren't squeaking by on plain white rice and carrots for the last few meals of the month. But before we do that, I want to attempt a heavier freezer cooking rotation to see what difference, if any, it makes. I look forward to giving an update!

Before and Afters

Yes yes, I said I was going to post before and afters during spring break. Life tackled us again unexpectedly and then we went out of town. You think I would have learned by now that whenever I plan to catch up on things, we will all get sick.

Anyway, the first round of before and afters are not that amazing, I admit. But I chose to post them anyway to show that you can make little changes that will make things slightly easier and a little more attractive. Sometimes the very small things make all the difference.

A small area that had been bothering me was the top of the fridge. I had been setting all of my routinely used cleaning supplies on top of the fridge for easy accessibility, but it was making it look cluttered. And my minimalist mentality was losing it. So, I thought, I'll just move the cleaning supplies under the kitchen sink. The only issue? Under the kitchen sink looked like this:

I was unaware that I had become a plastic grocery bag hoarder, but there must have been 300-400 plastic bags under there. It would take me a LONG time to use up all of those in our little trashcans, so I took most of them out and recycled them at the grocery store. Something to look into if you're overrun with plastic bags: Check if your grocery store as a plastic bag recycling depository (ours is at the entrance of the store with the shopping carts). Of course, we're lucky enough to live in super recycling land (aka Portlandia), so I realize not all states have widespread recycling availability.

So, I was going to have to tackle under the sink if I wanted to fix this:

Yuck. I hate clutter. Lucky for me, it takes less than a minute to clear off the top of fridge, so I had immediate satisfaction when I saw my minimalist decor.

Ah, no more cleaning supplies up there! And yes, the front of my fridge is a tad OCD, but I like having pictures of family and friends up there and they needed to be organized by size. I also have my weekly menu and my housecleaning list separated by daily, weekly, monthly, and annual lists. A tip: clear tape instead of magnets makes things look a lot cleaner and keeps them from moving all around.

So then I tackled under the sink. I got rid of 75% of the plastic bags. I left the ones in the plastic bag holder and one reusable bag full. The other three bags full of bags were recycled. I also took out some bulk supplies so we could keep our bulk items in one spot in the house (the laundry room) instead of some here and some there.

Again, this doesn't look super amazing, but it's better than it was. My reusable bags are finally easy to get to (I was having to dig around for them before, which is probably how we ended up with so many plastic bags - I didn't want to bother attempting to find them!). All the supplies are within immediate reach and there is nothing that I have to reach far back into the cabinet to get.

While it is better than it was, this is one area that is going to need a few more attempts before I'm totally happy with it. There's some suggestions floating around Pinterest suggesting tension rods for hanging cleaning supplies or small wire shelving. I was planning on doing that, but I found that due to how our piping is set up under the sink, there's no way to get shelving or tension rods to fit properly. So I'm still working on an alternative storage plan. Plus, as I finish using up our individual store bought cleaners, I'll be switching to using vinegar and baking soda for all my cleaning, which will drastically reduce the amount of space the cleaning supplies take up.

I am looking forward to figuring out a final solution and sharing it with you. Next up for before and afters, the linen closet!