How Do You Do It?How To Accomplish Just About Anything

Breakfast bars seem to be all the rage. One of the best ways to build a breakfast bar can be to use older cabinets that have been removed from other areas or were purchased at a yard sale. Building a breakfast bar can be easy, cheap, and fun if you tackle it from a common sense point of view.

A breakfast bar is a very convenient thing to have in your kitchen or dining area. Building a breakfast bar from cabinets is handier still since you have some storage area beneath it. Read the rest of this entry »

Can be achieved quite easily without expensive brushes or specific and costly equipment.

Here’s what we did.

Paint the wall your first color and using a plastic grocery bag, of the kind that is rather crackly and easily crumpled up, we dipped it in paint, and then blotted it onto a paper towel several times, so that the paint was barely damp and the bag was not well loaded.

Starting in three foot by three foot sections, we used a bouncing motion to apply the second coat of paint, in a contrasting color, over the top of the first coat.

You will need to overlap your sections and watch the thickness of the paint when you overlap, so that you don’t have noticeable squares on the wall.

To get rid of the soft fluffy hair that your cat leaves on the upholstery, wipe it down with a VERY slightly dampened fabric softener sheet. Removing pet hair from upholstery is a great deal easier when its been treated this way.
This will get rid of the static and allow the hair to be removed when you use your vacuum or a lint brush.  In many cases the fabric softener sheet itself will take off a good bit of the pet hair.

To clean your garbage disposal, just dump in a couple cups of ice and run the disposal. The icey grit will remove particles in the garbage disposal. No it won’t “dull” the blades, since they are largely blunt to begin with. To sweeten it up and get rid of any residual odor, cut a lemon or an orange in quarters and run the garbage disposal for a few minutes. It will leave the lemon or orange oil behind it and sweeten up the garbage disposal instantly.

When I have small spiders, ants or other bugs that are “bugging” me, rather than using a messy or toxic means to rid the kitchen or bathroom of them, whats proven to work and be non toxic is to take one of the small sticky mouse traps place it in a corner of the room, or in the back corner of the counter and leave it. The bugs will visit and be stuck to the trap. Whatever draws in the mice seems to also work for bugs, particularly the sweet eating variety.

As soon as something bubbles over in your oven, sprinkle a layer of salt over the oven spill. The salt will rapidly absorb the spilled grease or pie filling while preventing the horrid scent of burned on grease from filling your home.
When the oven has cooled down, simply take out the salt with a spatula and wipe over the whole mess with a clean damp sponge.

If you have hard water and it develops scaly deposits around the tap, try taking a tea towel and soaking it in vinegar. Wrap it around the faucet for about two hours. The vinegar will break down the scaly lime and make your faucet shine like..well.. like chrome.

We’ve all been there. Crayons on the walls and a guilty little face looking up at us. First try the Magic Eraser. I love those things don’t you?
If (TM) Magic Eraser doesn’t work for you, try to the blow dryer. Normally this works well for me. The heat will cause the wax to soften and it will wipe right away. If a touch of stubborn color stays, dampen your sponge and sprinkle it with baking soda. Using a round motion scrub it gently so that you don’t damage the wall paper.(if you have wallpaper)

The next time you wash your windows, try using newspaper to wash windows instead of paper towels. They are very absorbent, they don’t contain vast amounts of lint. Newspaper washes windows very well and they leave your windows sparkling clean. Additionally you are recycling so its less expensive for you and  good for the environment too!!