Sattua, I love my Revere Ware, too. I bought it with my second paycheck when I was a teenager, so I would have it when I was ready to move out. My mother-in-law, however, is firmly in the Calphalon camp, but she has a fully stocked kitchen and I can’t unload it on her. Since it is “good” cookware, and we aren’t exactly wealthy, she kind of guilted me into keeping it when we bought this place. The former owner of this house was a nice old lady who had lived here for more than fifty years. Her two daughters fled the midwest, and both married into big money. They bought her all kinds of cookware stuff and sent it to her, but it appears she hardly used any of it. She did have some Revere Ware, which looked like she had been using it her entire adult life, so she apparently did not care for the Calphalon either. Setting aside the Calphalon for my son is a good solution, and I won’t hear about it (much) from MIL, because it is staying in the family.
On that note----I cleared out two big tubs of craft krap! More than half of it was trash, and went to the dumpster. Paints that had probably congealed back in the eighties, old sewing projects where I realized (too late) that I cut one piece with the nap facing the wrong way. Stuff I kept out of guilt, hoping that “someday” I could figure out how to fix it. After determining that there was no reason to think that someone else would want to take apart and fix my fabric faux-pas, and the fabric itself was not all that wonderful, I decided that they were not thrift-shop items. I also found a bunch of froofy-froofy gathered lace that I could donate. I have all boys, and my interior decor style (which I am still trying to figure out) is niether lacy of excessively feminine. I like clean lines and lots of plants. And my cat like to eat froofy things. So… time to let that stuff go. Ye gods, I have soooo much more craft stuff to go through, but I’m proud of the little dent I made.
So far today I took a trash bag around the living/dining room and spent fifteen minutes tossing old envelopes, magazines, and other worthless crap. Looks a whole lot better in here now.
Today’s big mission is to get the Calphalon into the newly-emptied tubs, label them and take them down to the dungeon till my kid needs them.
Wah. I want **old **Revere Ware. The new stuff is just dreadful - thin walls, bumpy bottoms. It dents with a single drop (and who has never dropped a pan while putting it away?) and then the lids don’t fit.
I moved out of my mother’s house in 1998, and I’m on my third set of cookware. I know I should simply “invest” in some $500 set and be done with it, but I just don’t have that kind of money all at once. The ones I buy aren’t the *really *cheap stuff - they’re decent, $200 7-9 piece sets (which I get on sale for $150 or so), but they just don’t last like Mom’s old Farberware.
I too need to get rid of some pots and pans; we were given a set of that amber-colored Pyrex stuff (Visionware?) when we got married, and I’ve never really used it. It just sits back there, getting dusty and crowding the stuff I use.
We are home-improvement people this week. We fixed the shower door, and my dad has just been here ripping the siding off a small piece of our house. We have to replace it.
I cleaned the Room of Doom this week. I disassembled the desk and removed it, since I never use it and it had turned into a clutter-catcher. I assembled two cheap 3-shelf book-cases from Wal*Mart and put them in there so I’d have some actual storage space besides the bookshelves that are already full of books. I also did some cleaning out, but honestly, until I get the energy to work on the craft-supplies the room just will not be totally organized.
Ooh, I hated those amber-colored pans! My S-I-L hated her red ones, too. Once upon a time, it must have been a popular, but evil, wedding present.
I wrote the thank-you note before I ever used it, fortunately, because I wasn’t feeling very thankful, or even polite, afterwards. Water scorched & stuck, never mind actual food!
I do love my Revereware more than I hated That Pyrex Crap, and live in fear of it suddenly wearing out. No signs of impending doom so far, but it’s only 20 years old.
The delusions of neatness probably had more to do with the combination of fever & codiene cough syrup than the antibiotics, unfortunately, since I again realize what a disaster moving will be, and am still taking the pills.
Wow. Congratulations, WhyNot! And just think of all the calories you burned going up and down so many times!
We are finishing up the siding job, and I am thrilled. It looks so nice! It wasn’t a huge disaster! The house didn’t fall apart or anything. Now we’re re-hooking up the dryer vent, since that was the part of wall that was bad–so no laundry for me today, but I did get the area behind the dryer all nice and clean, and cleaned all the lint out of the back vent and all that. Now, I have to start facing the fact that the house needs repainting.
I am proud to report that my kitchen is now move-in clean!
After sorting through and winnowing the contents of the cabinets, I wiped down the countertop and the various appliances. I also washed the walls, scrubbed the sink (yo, Flylady: bleach ain’t enough) and scrubbed all the cabinet doors and drawer fronts. Finally, I washed the floor, every inch of it, on hands and knees, getting in all the corners, and even used a sponge pushed by a broom handle to get in the crevices on either side of the fridge. Furthermore, I cleaned the spice rack and the tops of all the spice jars (not like I’ve never done that before…how DO they get so dusty and sticky so fast?) AND cleaned the nuke: all outsides, inside, and underneath. (I was dreading a lot of dead food bits when I moved it, but there was nothing except dust!)
Mr. Rilch says it hasn’t looked like this since we moved in. I said, “Not even then, because bringing our stuff in dirtied up the floor.” It’s all gleaming and spotless now, and I believe I have earned a day off!
WhyNot, all my pots and pans were bought separately, for $40-150 a pan (except for the cheap non-stick frying pans). They’re all good quality and hoilding up well. I find it less painful to buy a good, pricey-ish pan every few months than a $150 not very good set all at once and have to get rid of them.
It may not be as cheap as a set, but if your money doesn’t all come in every-six-month-chunks or something, it’s less painful.
I woke up this morning with every intention of not doing all that much. Fate has intervened, and I have cleaned up the entire laundry room, which really needed it. I was planning on getting to it but was putting it off because it was a bit intimidating; layers of stuff had piled up on the sink and so on.
Now, it is all lovely and beautiful. I threw away a bunch of junk, scrubbed the sink (and put 3 batches of boiling vinegar/baking soda down to clean out the pipe, which is slow), vacuumed everything in sight, and I am running some laundry. I have already gone outside to admire the new dryer vent in action. I have also realized that if I buy a little gunk-catching basket to go in the sink drain, it won’t clog up any more. Yes, I really am a bit slow in figuring out some things!
Fellow Slob Reformers, I have made a Major Advance on the cleaning front!
A couple of months ago, a friend of ours moved back across the state, but that’s a rant for another day. He left a lot of food back at his old house and said that SpazGnome and I could take it to fill our own empty larder. Little did we know that his box of Honey Bunches of Oats came with a prize inside. A mouse prize.
The mouse got loose in our house. It decided to set up shop in the pantry. It set off a snap trap, licked off the peanut butter, and chewed on the trap to show its disregard. I got a cage trap. It never went near it.
I found out why today: it got in the 10-lb bag of cat food and died.
:eek: :eek: :eek:
The pantry is now cleaned and mouse-free. And now I have to buy a new bag of cat food. D’oh.
On top of that, the pets are now on Advantage and the fleas have gone to the Land of Wind and Ghosts. Heck, we’re VERMIN free now! Go cleanliness!
In my neck of the woods, I am thrilled to say that I just managed to clear off the buffet in the bedroom. Back when we moved into this house I found a table and buffet set that I loved, but the only space we had for the buffet was the bedroom. I was using the interior of the buffet for storing Christmas presents and stuff that doesn’t fit in the kitchen (a good use of space), but the top had become covered in clean, unfolded laundry (a bad use of space). It was piled very high.
The other day I was washing towels, and decided it’d be easier to just fold them one at a time out of the dryer than take them to the buffet. From there, my husband and I have chipped away at the large pile of clean clothing a little at a time. But today I decided to just tackle it and get it done. I am also doing laundry at the moment, and will probably use the buffet as the laundry folding table, but now that it’s clear, I want to keep it that way, so the laundry will actually get folded.
Also, my kitchen is quite clean. But I have to find a good home for my new mandoline (a Christmas from my husband).
“How Clean Is Your House” has put a spoke in my wheel like FlyLady never could have. I watched a couple more episodes yesterday, and it struck me how they clean every surface, even the ceilings, everything. Then I realized something.
The floors in our kitchen and downstairs bathroom are scarred. The bathroom floor was scarred when we moved in. Some of the kitchen floor scars were pre-existing as well, although I know that a series of them are the work of a drunken guest wearing stilettos. Anyway, it dawned on me that I don’t have to write them off as permanent black marks on the floor. They’re not going away, certainly, but they don’t have to be dark from embedded dirt.
So I got down and scrubbed them with Ajax and steel wool, and now you can barely see them! I think, in fact, that I am going to go back to my old method of cleaning floors by hand. Mr. Rilch balks at that, because he says he doesn’t like to see me on my knees outside of the bedroom but to that I say, pah! No one is going to see me scrubbing the floor, but everyone will see the results. He also doesn’t have to know that I’m going back to using a feather duster, but I am. I despise dusting, but I think a lot of that has to do with using paper towels and making a huge production of it. I found the feather duster, I tried the feather duster, and the feather duster works. So feather duster it shall be. If it makes him feel better, I can wear a French maid’s outfit while I’m doing it.
There appears to be hours’ worth of How clean is your house? airing tomorrow on the BBC. Set up your equipment to tape, and you’ll have weeks of inspiration!
Oh, I don’t know, there’s a scene in Chocolat… :halo:
I have to wipe my floor, I’ve been bad this weekend. Friday my guild in WoW got around to doing some stuff that many of us needed done months ago and I went to bed at 2:30 am (my regular hour is 9-10), I woke up at 5am as usual and then at 3pm I took a nap which, oops, lasted until 1am. So I did do “light” laundry (not enough darks for a load) and went to the supermarket, but the floor needs to be mopped.
I’d initially brought “two of each” from my silverware back home and bought “two of each” for dishes; seeing that apparently and if I don’t decide to tell the boss to stick it where the sun don’t shine the contract is going waaaaay beyond its theoretical 6 months, Saturday I bought a set of cutlery. The knifes I’d brought from home are steak knives: this set’s are regular, so better for things that don’t really need an edge. They had transparent plastic handles in bright colors and non-transparent ones in black or white; I bought the transparent green because the dishes (of which I have to buy more, since now guests are in the horizon) have green centers and yellow-and-orange rings. Somehow the orange manages to be dominant, even though it’s the color that takes the smallest surface. They’re very sunny dishes. Oh, and the cutlery comes with its own organizer, so now my silverware isn’t just strewn about a drawer any more.
I haven’t been doing very well with this lately. My kitchen has been consistently marginally cleaner than it has been, so that’s a step.
Today I cleaned off the hall table and sorted out all of the mail. The stuff on the bottom was from November. Yeah.
The hard part for me is getting my brain around the fact that this stuff is not optional - that it’s as important as showering and doing homework. It’s a slow process.
Since it is “good” cookware, and we aren’t exactly wealthy, she kind of guilted me into keeping it when we bought this place. The former owner of this house was a nice old lady who had lived here for more than fifty years. Her two daughters fled the midwest, and both married into big money. They bought her all kinds of cookware stuff and sent it to her, but it appears she hardly used any of it. She did have some Revere Ware, which looked like she had been using it her entire adult life, so she apparently did not care for the Calphalon either. Setting aside the Calphalon for my son is a good solution, and I won’t hear about it (much) from MIL, because it is staying in the family.
:eek: 
but to that I say, pah! No one is going to see me scrubbing the floor, but everyone will see the results. He also doesn’t have to know that I’m going back to using a feather duster, but I am. I despise dusting, but I think a lot of that has to do with using paper towels and making a huge production of it. I found the feather duster, I tried the feather duster, and the feather duster works. So feather duster it shall be. If it makes him feel better, I can wear a French maid’s outfit while I’m doing it.