In most dishwashers, the silverware holder will lift right out. So lift it out when you unload the dishes, instead of stooping for each handful. When loading the dishwasher, put the holder in the sink to load the silverware into. Again, it saves the back. Mix up the silverware in the compartments. While it might seem to be more efficient to put all the spoons in one or two slots, they WILL nest together if you do so.
I keep a whiteboard on the fridge, and when I notice that we’re running low or are out of something, I write it down. That list is the basis of my shopping list.
We have several laundry hampers. One lives in the bathroom, for towels and undies. One lives in Bill’s room, for his jeans. And the third is for everything else. The fourth is for the clean laundry that needs to be folded and put away, and of course doubles as a cat lounge.
Speaking of towels, try to buy towels, sheets, and washcloths in white, unless you have a compelling reason to do otherwise. A compelling reason is that your daughter is a Pink (or Purple) Princess, and refuses to accept white sheets. Or if one set of sheets is for the waterbed and the other set is for the regular bed. It’s fairly easy to tell a kingsized sheet from a fullsized.
I think plastic shopping bags end up being cut back on because most people don’t reuse them like this, but instead they end up balled up inside another trash bag in a landfill, or blowing around someone’s neighborhood (especially if one item is put in a bag, and then the buyer takes the item out once they’re outside and tosses the bag aside).
I suspect many trash bags in the near future will be biodegradable - there are currently such bags out there but they’re a little more expensive - and thus of less concern.
Anyway, I know Glad makes 4 gallon “small container” trash bags that ought to do the trick if you do run out of plastic shopping bags. I use them as liners for my rabbits’ litter boxes; I tuck the handles under the box, then just untuck when it’s time to change, lift it up, and use the handles as ties to contain litter and waste.
I did this - I went to Costco and got a huge bag of microfiber towels, probably intended for garage/other heavy use. They were a lot cheaper than buying microfiber towels from a kitchen section of an average store.
Plastic shopping bags - store them in a paper towel tube! I use them for rubbish too, but there’s a danger of storing too many and ending up with a huge cloud of them - you can only fit so many in the paper towel tube so you have to bin the rest.
I do something similar to Bam Boo Gut with plastic shopping bags (although I have much fewer than I used to and I treat them like treasured items now). I use two cardboard wine sleeves to store mine. The sleeves are meant for gift/presentation of a bottle of wine. I have one downstairs to store the bags and use for lining waste baskets; the other one is upstairs for the same purpose. The wine sleeves are decorative, have a top and a bottom, and a string that allows me to hang them on a hook in the closet. It is quite remarkable how many bags can be squeezed into a sleeve.
A tip for hammering small finishing nails is to use a piece of packing popcorn (any small piece of styrofoam would work probably). Push the nail through the centre of the foam - then hold the piece of foam by its edge while you hammer. Once the nail is in sufficiently to stay in place, you can pull the foam out and finish nailing. No banged fingers!
I live in a lovely 150 year old home. The stair cases (one in the front and one in the back) are wooden, original and uncarpeted. They seem to collect a lot of debris (little dust bunnies, strands of hair, the odd bit of dirt). As my laundry is on the second floor - when I’m taking one of my beloved kitchen towels or dish cloths up to wash, I dampen it and give each stair a wipe on my way up.
I love the tips for keeping bed linens together, storing a bit of paint in the appropriate room, and the “11 things”. 27 might be a bit too ambitious for me!
The point about keeping things only if they’re useful or beautiful is a great one. I have inherited many things over the years – some are not very useful and so-so on the beautiful scale but are unique, unusual, and very old. I can’t display everything of course - but I feel a responsibility to provide stewardship until I can inflict them on, um, I mean gift them to my children. I plan on spending a lot of time paring down what I’ve been keeping - any great thoughts on what criteria something should meet in order to be kept? Useful and/or beautiful isn’t enough for me, I don’t think.
I also keep a list as we run low on things during the week.
On Friday nights, I plan meals for the entire next week. First step, go to the grocery store’s website and see what’s on sale.
Second step, look at my recipe notebook. In the front is a list which has all our usual meals. (Meatloaf, stir fry, spaghetti, etc.) The rest of the notebook is recipes which are mostly printed from allrecipes.com or similar sites. These are in plastic page protectors so they don’t get too wet or stained laying on the counter as I cook.
I choose six meals (seventh night is leftovers), and list all the needed ingredients.
Finally, I add staples to the list and then rewrite the whole thing, putting the items in the order in which I encounter them in the store. On a fresh sheet of paper, I write down the six meals and post it on the refrigerator. Now we have the whole week’s menu there, and it’s pretty easy to decide what to cook and take something out of the freezer in the morning! If you’re especially anal, like me, you can cross off meals after you’ve cooked them. If there’s anything more fun than crossing stuff off a list I don’t know what it is.
With the shopping list, my husband and I can shop once weekly for a family of five and get in and out of the store in less than half an hour. Saves money too, no doubt.
Every time I shower, when I’m done I take the towel I dried off with and give the tub/sink/toilet a quick wipe down. If you start with the tub, the towel gets damp enough to work well wiping down the sink and the outside of the toilet. Then I drop the towel on the floor and push it around with my feet to give the floor a quick mop.
It only takes a few minutes, and keeps the bathroom looking nice.
Learn to clean green: Soap, vinegar, baking soda, washing soda and borax is all you need. The only difference is you have to let the cleaners sit for a while before rinsing. But the reduction in cost and clutter is worth it.
Once a week fill a tea kettle with water, bring it to a boil, and then put some of the boiling water down every sink. Keeps the clogs away.
This is an excellent idea, but can I suggest an improvement? Put the receipt in one of those sticky transparent pouches and stick that to the item. This will protect the receipt from accidental damage.
What helped me do this was to time myself; I can empty the entire dishwasher in three minutes and take the trash out in about a minute. So even when I don’t feel like doing it, I can tell myself “it’ll only take a couple minutes,” and that helps to motivate.
I try to do the same thing. I think it’s because I work in a lab and need to label every reagent I open.
Old socks work wonderfully for dusting and furniture polishing.
I try to have pens and a pair of scissors in every room. I got tired of having to hunt those things down when I needed them, so now there’s some in my nightstand, the kitchen junk drawer, my desk, the coffee table drawer, etc. I bought a bunch of cheap kids’ scissors at back-to-school time a couple of years ago, since they don’t need to be fancy.
I race the microwave or the tea kettle: instead of “man, I need to get the dishes done”, I try “I wonder if I can get the dishwasher unloaded and loaded before the kettle boils”. Often, I can!
The deal, however, is that once the water boils or the microwave dings, I stop. I used to always push myself, saying “I might as well finish”, but once I started doing that, I didn’t want to start tasks because I knew I’d feel obliged to finish. It quit being a game.
If you’ve never learned or gotten the hang of a housekeeping routine, try flylady.net. This site saved me - I think I’d be in full-on squalor by now if it weren’t for her!
If you only have time for cleaning ont he weekends, designate two storage boxes in a convenient spot: Put Away, and Give Away. Also put a large trash can int he same vicinity. At the end of each day, take the clutter to these boxes, and set a time each weekend (Sunday morning works for me) to clear the Put Away box.
My friends and family go straight to the give away box whenever they enter my home!
Similar to boiling the tea kettle - do quick jobs while waiting. Waiting for the kids to get their backpacks and shoes on - wipe the counters. Waiting for that six minute griffin ride in WoW, empty the dishwasher. Waiting for the TV show to start, throw the clutter into the “put away” basket.
Keep a rag or two in the bathroom for wiping down sinks. It takes about ten seconds to squirt and sink and give it a quick wipe when you are in there anyway.
On one hand, I hope you wash the towel before using it the next day. On the other hand, that’s an awful lot of laundry- a new towel every day? Seems excessive.
Thanks to a food locker and freezer in my basement, I never run out of things. When I’m using, say, a bottle of dish detergent, a bag of rice, a box of freezer bags or a tube of toothpaste, I already have the “backup” bottle/bag/tube down in the food locker. When the one upstairs runs out, I get the one from the basement and immediately put that item on my shopping list. With items that get used up faster, like canned goods, I might have two cans up in the kitchen and two or three “backups” in the basement. Whenever anything gets low in the food locker it goes on the shopping list. I use the freezer the same way. I never, ever run out of anything.
Before going shopping, I copy my list, and put things in the same order they are in the store. Then I just go around the store once and I’m done.
Whenever anything gets put in the refrigerator or freezer, and I know I won’t be using it within a few days, I write the date on it with a Sharpie. When I’m freezing chicken parts, after the date I put a B, W, T or D, telling me what part it is. Sometimes you can’t tell by looking.
If I have used, say, half an onion or cucumber, etc. and want to bag the rest in the refrigerator . . . rather than putting it into a zip-lock bag, I just use one of those real thin transparent plastic bags that produce comes in. It doesn’t make sense to throw that out, then use a new zip-lock.
My cats’ favorite toys are catnip-filled unmatched socks. Just pour the catnip down into the toe and tie the sock in a knot.
I just remembered another from when my children were small and we were going on a trip. I’d write out a list of what I wanted to pack for them and then put the list in suitcase. When it was time to pack up again to come home - I’d check off the items that we’d brought. It cuts down a lot on crawling around a hotel room looking for anything that got missed.
I have a question about this: are there really people who circle the store over and over again because their shopping list isn’t “in order”? If I’m tooling through canned vegetables and then the next aisle over is, say, pasta and soup, I’m not going to skip that aisle just because the next item on my list doesn’t happen to be there. I’m going to scan down my list to make sure I don’t have something further down that I’ve forgotten about.
When I’m tidying up - I pile things at the bottom or top of the staircase. That way whenever I go up or down, I’m taking something with me.
I also went to the dollar store and bought little plastic baskets for my linen closet. I put all my prescriptions in one, all my pain/cold medicines in another, all my first aid stuff in one, all my mani/pedi stuff, soaps and body washes, shampoos/conditioners, hand creams and lotions, etc.
It really didn’t take long to do (maybe 20 minutes tops) but it looks so much neater and makes my life so much easier. Now when I want to refill my daily pill organizer, I can just grab the one basket and fill up and then put back. Or if I cut my hand and need to do some first aid, I just grab that basket. Easy to grab what you need - easy to put away when done.
The nice thing is that my bf uses these exact same tricks!
