Tackling Spaces: Kitchen & Utility Clean Up

It’s 9:30 in the morning on a Saturday.  Grizzly is out hunting down dinner.  The monkeys are still tucked snug in their beds.  I’m on my third cup of coffee, a load of laundry is drying, I’ve already made a batch of laundry soap, and I have projects on the kitchen table (clearing out space to continue to re-purpose the hall closet project).  I look around myself and think, “What a hot mess!”

Because in my projecting and tackling Mt. Washmore this week, things are out of place.  Christmas still hasn’t made it to the attic.  There is laundry to put up.  There are dirty dishes in the sink.

Who lives like that?  Ugh!

I go back to work on Monday (didn’t win the Lottery over the break, darn it) and I hate going back to school with a dirty house.  The monkeys did a nice job in their bathroom the other day so it’s down to maintenance in there.  The spaces bugging me most now are the kitchen and utility room.

My utility room is a small, tight, cramped space.  Over Thanksgiving Break, I organized the pantries, which are part of the utility room.  All I need to do to them is some re-stocking.  There is a cabinet over my functioning dryer that needs organizing, especially since I’ve repurposed a new container for my laundry detergent (yay me!) and the top of the dryer is a wreck.  My functioning washing machine is part of a stackable unit (the dryer doesn’t work) and on top of the non-operational dryer, I need to go through the Laundry Fairy’s collection and put things away from up there.

My kitchen is pretty well organized the way that works for me.  So it’s just a matter of cleaning at this point.  The only organizing I need to do is in the “junk” drawers, which I’ll tackle one drawer at a time.

It sounds like a lot, but I bet I can get everything done in just a few hours.  And then I can go back to my projects.

What will you tackle today?

~ Katie

*Side Note*

Yesterday, someone accused me of hoarding (the same person who taught me Cool-Whip bowls make good cereal bowls.) I do NOT hoard.  I REPURPOSE.  My projects today have been a cute pencil holder from a Ball Jar Craft Kit using an old can and I repurposed a snack mix container to hold my laundry soap.  They’ve turned out really cute and USEFUL.  I’ll post pics later.

I’m sticking my tongue out right now, by the way.

Related articles

• Family Buy-In: Laundry with the Monkeys (sobomama.wordpress.com)
• Organization: Orphaned Socks (sobomama.wordpress.com)
• Never-Ending Love and Laundry (sobomama.wordpress.com)

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Family Buy-In: Laundry with the Monkeys

The other night, cruising the web, I found a really neat blog (of course, I cannot for the life of me recall what it was!) that dealt with running a home more smoothly.  This lady has several children and she home schools them.  It sounds, from her blog, as though all of the kids help around the house.  The thing that caught my attention was LAUNDRY.

Mt. Washmore can be overwhelming for anyone.  I just went foundation shopping with Perkilicious and she was saying that she really needed to wash laundry before we go back to work next week.  So laundry even qualifies as “single girl problems.”  With my family of four active individuals, laundry can quickly get out of hand and for sure takes a big chunk of my few free minutes.  Grizzly works in construction and changes clothes at least twice a day.  Summertime, 100+ degrees?  Forget about it.  The monkeys wear uniforms to school and often change when they get home.  Monkey 2 rolls around in the dirt with her four-legged bff, Jasmine. Laundry is never-ending at my house.

The blog I found had some neat strategies.  This lady’s kids process their own laundry!  They each have their own basket.  Each family member is assigned a laundry day.  They wash, dry, fold/hang and put their clothes away!  I think she helps the littlest monkeys.  How cool is that, though?

So yesterday I snatched Monkey 1 up by his ear and took him to the bathroom hamper.

“What are we doing in here?”

“I’m going to show you how to sort laundry,” I told him.

“Why do I need to know how to sort clothes?”

So much for buy-in.

I stood my ground, though.  He sorted his clothes from his sister’s and then separated lights from darks.  We moved on to the utility room and I showed him where I keep the laundry soap, how to measure it, and how to start the washer.  I explained to him that since we use powdered soap, we let the water run a little and start dissolving the soap before we add the clothes.  He needed a little help distributing things evenly, but he actually had a look of accomplishment on his face when we closed the lid!

Not so much when I told him it was time to dry his load of laundry.

“This is taking a long time,” he complained in that whiny twelve-year old voice I’ve come to know and love.  I told him that by shaking out the clothes and putting them neatly in the dryer, things would dry more quickly and not be quite so wrinkled.  He was less than impressed but continued to shake the clothes out.

By the time it was time to actually fold clothes and put them up, the monkeys were on their way out the door for their New Year’s date with Nana and the ladies and I was a little frustrated with the process myself.

Is my adventure in Monkey participation over?  Not by a long shot.  Monkey 1 knows his way around the washer now, with some guidance, and tomorrow is another day.  Even the little bit he knows now is a time-saver for me.  Next, we will work on folding, hanging, and putting away.  He won’t like it, but I imagine he’ll get it figured out.

Never-Ending Love and Laundry

If you’re addicted to the smell of Gain, this post is not for you.

If you don’t mind spending $10+ on a bottle of laundry detergent, this post is not for you.

I’ve never been one to spend much money on laundry soap – except when the monkeys were babies and I spent a small fortune on Dreft and All Clear for their itsy bitsy baby gear.  None of us have particularly sensitive skin, so it’s not been a problem to spend $1.59 on off-brand, dollar store soap for our dirty drawers.

Over the past few years, however, my $1.59 soap has risen to over $4 per bottle.  I allow myself to spend $50/week at the store, and doing 2 loads of clothes each day, laundry soap was taking a bite out of my budget.  My Rhonda Belle encourages my endeavors in cheaptitude (she calls it frugality) and told me she’d begun making her own laundry soap for her HE machine.  And she gladly shared some.

And it worked ok.

Until I checked the pits of my DH’s t-shirts.

And I went back to my now high-dollar off-brand soap.

But I loved the idea of each load only costing a few cents in detergent.

And I opened the trusty old laptop and visited my friend Google.

There are probably as many recipes for laundry soap as there are users of laundry soap.  I decided early on that liquid soap would not work for me, not only because of storage concerns (huge batches – 5 gallon buckets!) but also the gross-out factor (I kept reading “consistency of snot”).  I found that most recipes called for about 3 ingredients, 2 of which I had no problem finding at my local grocery.  The third item I found at my local Kroger (not my favorite store) and cleared their shelf.  Following is the recipe I use for my family:

Katie’s Laundry Soap (1-2 tablespoons per load)

• 1 bar Fels Naptha – grated, the finer the better (I use a cheese grater)
• 1 cup Borax
• 1 cup Arm & Hammer Washing Soda – must be WASHING, not baking

Because the Fels Naptha has been difficult to locate, I have changed to Ivory, which is easier to grate, easier on the skin, much cheaper, and doesn’t have the strong smell.  During the summer, because DH works outside, I also add some of the faux OxiClean from Dollar Tree.  There are no added perfumes, so if you like your clothes to smell a certain way, maybe add some essential oils to your wash.  It’s also easier to grate the soap if you unwrap it and let it dry out for a few days.  I keep lavender scented in my dresser drawers, so that may be an option for you.  The boxes of Borax and Washing Soda will make several batches before you need to buy more.

This powdered detergent could be stored in Tupperware or whatever container you have that seals.  Mine fits well in an old ice cream bucket.

This recipe is not the only one, or even the best one.  It works for me. I encourage you to snoop around the web and see what you find.  Explore, experiment – and let me know if you find something cool!