We have been plagued with a curious mold in our basement this summer. It’s pink…and spreading. Our basement is an unfinished, rough place that we venture only when we need something out of the refrigerator or freezer we keep downstairs. So, the mold has not been a huge priority…that is, until we discovered it marching across the room.
I’m lobbying hard for a basement dehumidifier to take care of the moisture down there. When I googled “pink mold” I learned that this kind of mold needs a very moist environment to thrive. I think we need to dry out our basement pronto! Thankfully, we do not have a forced air system in our home so the mold spores are not readily spreading throughout the home…but it still needs to be taken care of.
OK – so we’ve discussed some of the warning signs of being too busy and the problems this creates in one’s life. Ready to leave this lifestyle behind?
The first step is to admit that things have gotten out of control. You likely did this when you read the last post…right? Good!
You do have choices; however, and choosing to slow down and create a balance in your life is a reasonable choice and wise choice.
Spend a short time visualizing a time in your life when you were not overwhelmed with busyness. Think back to what it felt like. It felt good…right?
Now it’s time to plan how you are going to achieve this calm and serene feeling in your life. Redesign your life so it encompasses only the things you choose for it to include. Remove every single thing you don’t love or want. You can do this!
With happiness as your goal, you have the motivation to make these changes.
Begin to conquer the physical clutter around your spaces. Remove things that are unnecessary because these things lead to stress…whether you realize it or not. Once you make a dent in the physical clutter, start getting rid of the obligations that clutter your time. Delegate where you can and where you cannot delegate, you must ruthlessly eliminate the things you no longer wish to include in your life. Make sure your priorities are in order. Don’t forget about yourself as your whittle down your obligations. For example, if you have always wanted to take a crafting class, prioritize this in place of something you want to remove from your list of obligations. When you reassess your priorities, you suddenly have time for things like this.
OK – chew on those things for a bit…next time: making your home a sanctuary from the crazy world.
How do you freshen their air when you cannot open windows in the dead of the winter? As for me…even though I do not have any toxic fumes like cigars in my home, as the winter progresses, it still becomes rather stale and I feel like I need to freshen the air.
I sprinkle baking soda on the carpet before I vacuum several times per month. I also use our air purifier to freshen the air and remove odors as they become apparent.
Do you have any tricks you use to keep the winter air in your home fresh?
My husband and teenage son both enjoy lifting weights. Due to space limitations inside, we have decided to make them a gym area outside in the garage. Believe it or not, they have managed to make themselves a decent work-out area…even though it is a garage.
The one thing we are still lacking out there, though is proper garage flooring for their purposes. I would like to place something with a little give in it over the cement floor…but I don’t know if this is possible.
For the time being, however, everyone is happy though. They have a great place to huff and puff and we don’t have to trip over barbells and dumbbells!
We live in a very old home in the Midwest. Our home is full of the funkiness and quirkiness that just goes with old homes. Doors and windows that are not level and even, floors that slope, counter tops that slope, plaster walls with layers and layers of old coverings from many owners over many years. It is all a part of the house that I could not imagine not having.
I have never lived in a brand new home in my life. The prospect of living in something like a prefab or a manufactured home seems quite foreign to me. I don’t know if I could do without the character. I could probably do without the sloping counter tops…but other than that…LOL
We learned an important lesson this week…and it’s a vital one if you own a freezer stocked with expensive food. Allow me to share…
One of my kids left our upright freezer door ajar on Monday afternoon. I did not discover this unfortunate event until approximately 36 hours later on Wednesday. By this time, there was a puddle in front of the freezer, a mess on the bottom of the freezer (thawing meat…blood…ick!). I placed a thermometer into the freezer and found that the temperature was still about 40 degrees. Cold enough that the food was still safe…yet rapidly thawing.
I closed the freezer and said to myself…”WHEW! I’m sure glad I found that near disaster…now we’ll just let it refreeze and all will be fine.” Sound good? I thought so…
Unfortunately…every time I went downstairs to check the freezer, the food was not refreezing as I expected it to. I told myself that the freezer simply needed to catch back up and it might take up to 24 hours. The temp in the freezer by this point was about 30 degrees F.
By the next day, the situation had not changed. Temp still 30 and food still not refreezing. I googled and googled and found nothing about what to expect when a freezer is recovering from being left open. Finally, I called the manufacturer and spoke with a service tech.
What I was told was that we needed to manually switch the freezer into a defrost mode by turning a screw in the back of the freezer. Doing this would turn the freezer off for 30 minutes and during that time any ice that had accumulated would melt and the freezer would then be able to recover from being left open and would be ready to freeze again.
Well…we did that and decided to use that defrosting time to clean it out. We actually ended up switching it back into the manual defrost mode two more times (the freezer was off and melting for 1.5 hours total) and by the time we turned it back on it was completely defrosted and spic and span inside.
We refilled it, turned it back on, crossed our fingers and said a prayer.
Within about two hours the temp was down to about 15 degrees F and it was cranking again. At this writing, everything is rock hard again and we averted disaster.
Lesson? Freezers need help to recover from being left open. You cannot just close the door and expect them to resume freezing without defrosting all of the partially defrosted ice that accumulates when this happens. Nowhere was this information readily available, either online or in the instruction manual. It took calling and speaking with a service tech to learn about this.
File this away in your little mental filing cabinet if this ever happens to you! May save you hundreds of dollars in valuable freezer items!
How are the outdoor safety conditions around your home and property? Do you have adequate lighting that will come on when you need it? Do you have lighting that will shine brightly to deter intruders? I ask because I was just reading something interesting about outdoor light fixtures and how important and instrumental they are in deterring residential crime and keeping people safe on their property. This is something that is easy to overlook…but having it there when you need it is so valuable.
We have one fixture out on the side of our garage that I think needs to be replaced. It has never shown directly and effectively to light up this area well.
Other than this, I feel reasonable confident that we are well-lit outside and deterring prowlers from sneaking around where we don’t want them. This means ‘coons in my compost bin, too!
I was on the hunt the other day. My three-year-old son has outgrown his church suit and I was sure that I had one packed away that his older brothers had worn when they were his size. So…I located the correct bin and sure enough, there was the great-looking suit all folded nicely and there waiting for my little guy. I pulled it out of the bin, shook it out, and…SIGHED. It had set in stains on the lapels and various other places on the front of the suit. I am not one to give up easily, but I did not think the suit was salvageable.
I tucked it under my arm and headed to my arsenal of stain lifters and stain fighters. As I scanned my options, my eyes set on a box of Mr. Clean Magic Erasers that I had just purchased the day before. I figured I had nothing to lose, and decided to try it. I cut a little square off and dampened it slightly. Deciding to just try it on one inconspicuous stain, I lightly rubbed the damped eraser over the stain. My pressure was enough to dampen the fabric of the suit slightly, but not much. I stopped after about 30 seconds of rubbing, set the suit coat down to dry, and went away for about 30 minutes.
Can you predict what I found when I came back? NOTHING. NO STAIN. It was completely and absolutely GONE! As if it never existed. I excitedly worked on the rest of the stains in the same fashion and the coat now looks like it has never been worn.
So…I’m excited. I knew these little eraser guys were good at getting out surface stains around the house, but this opens up a whole new area of stain-fighting opportunities.
Here are some other uses for Mr. Clean Magic Erasers that I have recently discovered:
- Remove food stains from the insides of plastic containers
- Remove stains on leather
- Remove mildew from fabrics
- Clean doll faces
- Remove hairspray build up from floors, walls and counters
- Clean oven doors
- Clean up old shoes
- Remove hard water build up from surfaces
Any more you know of?
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I seem to find myself on a continual quest for organization. I am always tweaking my systems and trying to make them better. Always going through things and trying to cull the clutter. Always looking at possessions with a keen eye for how they might be used or whether or not they should be gotten rid of. It seems like a well-ordered home can never be allowed to rest on its laurels. This is largely due to the fact that there always seems to be a continual stream of new items coming through the door that must be managed. Eventually, if older items don’t make way for newer items the place becomes overrun.
I am a particular fan of the sturdy high-quality discount moving boxes that can be purchased. These boxes are not the flimsy ones you can pick up from the grocery or liquor store. These boxes often have lids and are designed for safe and long term storage. If you have items that need longer term storage (like in a basement or attic) I would recommend using boxes like this.
Emails piling up? Yeah…me too. It can be scary how quickly inboxes can become clogged with junk. Here is what I do if I let down my guard for a day or two and my inbox becomes too full of spam.
1. Highlight all junk mail, chain emails, newsletters, offers for weightloss pills, shopping notifications, auto-replies, etc., and delete them unread. You’ll never miss them…I promise!
2. Highlight 50% of the other emails that you can tell are not important from the subject line and archive them. You probably won’t miss these either.
3. Skim through the rest and archive 98% of these. Choose a few that need replies or actions from you and save these.
4. Reply to these few emails as succinctly as possible immediately and file the email away in the appropriate folder as taken care of.
Email is a great barometer of life. Do you feel you need to reply and act on every single request that comes in? Wouldn’t you rather take control of your time and do what you feel is important instead of letting outside forces dictate this for you? You don’t need to respond to every email or even read everything that lands in your inbox. Choose what is important to you and focus on these. After you get good at doing this with your email inbox…try it out on the rest of your life!
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