Yesterday as I was strolling through Target to pick up some decorative tags for my planner, I noticed that Target has its yellow Dyson vacuums on clearance for only $300. At $100 less than its normal price, Peter and I decided to throw together some of our Target gift cards and buy one. It isn’t the animal hair model that we originally registered for, but we decided that the animal hair version was never going to be about $250 better than the yellow one. After taking it home and trying it out on various surfaces, we really love it! Weighing in at almost 20 pounds, it is a bit heavy, but only when you’re carrying it up and down stairs. Despite its weight, the vacuum glides easily across floors.
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About a week ago we had some friends over for bimuelos. We were all standing around the stove dipping the deliciousness into the honey sauce when I looked down at our floor and realized how unbelievably filthy it was. Now, these were really good friends. The kind of friends that you don’t clean for before they come over, yet our floor was that disgusting. It was the kind of dirty where you try to stand in the way of the gross spots, hoping that they won’t see them. Yeah, that bad.
As soon as they left, I knew Peter and I had to find a solution. He promised he would clean the floor, but his method of cleaning the floor is getting down on his hands and knees and scrubbing it Cinderella style. Don’t get me wrong, whenever he does it, the floor looks fabulous, but I knew we needed a simpler way. A way that would allow us to clean the floor at least once a week.
I went to Target and wandered between the Wet Jet Swiffer (which I’ve read uses chemicals that are really bad for your animals. Apparently they absorb them through their paws, and of course, whenever they lick the floors.), the Rubbermaid version of the swiffer (which lets you add water or whatever chemicals you want), and the Shark. I knew we needed more cleaning power than just plain water, but I also didn’t want to use anything on the floor that would make our sweet little dogs sick, so I settled on the Shark. I figured I could bring the thing home and if Peter thought it was too expensive, I could take it back. Luckily, Peter loves it. We’ve used to twice and our floors look amazing. Plus, you can even use it on your carpets!! It steams them, making the room smell so much fresher.
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I’m still in the lazy Thanksgiving mode but I’m loving our clean house!! We’ve been trying to keep it clean all weekend but I feel like all we’ve been doing is cleaning non-stop!
How was your Thanksgiving?
Before I got started planning out the bathroom closet, Peter had a much less pleasant job to face. While I was at work he created various pastes of bleach that we left sitting on the tiles for long periods of time. Is this the safest thing for you to do? Probably not, but we were desperate and as I mentioned before we didn’t have much money to throw at our bathroom makeover. He managed to gently chip away some of the freestanding grout that was dried to some of the individual tiles. Unfortunately, for fear of chipping the tiles themselves, he did leave some of the more stubborn grout. After just the bleach the bathroom was looking a million times better.
As you can tell from the photo above, the caulk and grout was way too disgusting to leave in tact. Even after bleaching it repeatedly, it still looked like a gross gray color.
Peter went in and removed the strange caulk/grout combination that lined each of the walls and connected the walls to the shower. After vacuuming up the debris, we were ready for a fresh new start.
Written on January 29th, 2010 by Peter6 comments
The majority of home improvement blogs tend to present the viewer with a very carefully constructed representation of continuity. In short, most blogs show a visitor something that the blogger has found which has been overwhelmingly positive; a force in their life has been discovered and utilized in way that makes not only home improvement, but life in general a more noble and harmonious pursuit.
We, however, prefer a more honest approach and are more than willing to familiarize you, dear reader, with our cock ups, as John Cleese might call them. We want to tell you when we screw up, because we think mistakes in homemaking are productive. Mistakes help us learn and by sharing our failures with you all, we can help you learn in a more honest fashion.
So here is an epic fail:
It began so innocently, with a beautiful, sunny Sunday afternoon of thrift store shopping. My betrothed and I found what might be the best antique store in Austin, a little place called Out of the Past, after the masterpiece of a film noir with your favorite bad boy and mine, Robert Mitchum. We paid this place a visit, met the store’s wonderful proprietress, and purchased two beautiful silver pieces for use in our upcoming wedding. As with most vintage silver one may find, these pieces were tarnished. As we were leaving the store the owner called after us, “Now don’t go buying any of that silver polish! It smells! Use toothpaste instead.”
Well, I attacked this project full bore, thinking it would give me an opportunity to share a thrifty tip with our readers. Unfortunately, I was wrong. Yes, a man was wrong. Somehow the planets aligned and the forces of nature turned against the human race: a man was wrong. The toothpaste did not yield any results. I then tried soaking the silver in warm water and baking soda. Again, nothing.
The picture above serves as both a before and an after. I did manage to remove one microscopic spot, but I would assume that scrubbing furiously for an extended period of time using oatmeal could have produced the same result. (No, I haven’t read any evidence that oatmeal can polish silver.)
The moral of this story, unfortunately, is that some home remedies are sheer quackery, like the nineteenth century elixirs of life sold at medicine shows across the U.S. This did not work, so by all means, use your toothpaste and baking soda for, respectively, personal hygiene and troublesome stomach ailments, not for imperfections of silver.
