Cleaning Tea Pots and Cups

I don't have a fancy tea set but I do have nice ceramic mugs that I like to use for hot tea. I have the problem that they get stained with the tea (like a brown rim) and the dishwasher doesn't seem to know how to clean that. I've tried rinsing them out right after I finish my tea and washing them by hand but it always takes a lot of elbow grease and even then, they're not always clean.

Well, I have finally found the solution for cleaning them! You put a generous amount (I used about a tablespoon for each cup) of baking soda in the cup and put in just enough water to form a paste (I had a little extra water, which was fine but you don't want it to be too watery). Then you use a sponge, cloth, whatever you use to wash dishes by hand with to spread the paste along the stain. This will take minimal scrubbing and it comes out just perfectly clean!

You can use this method with tea pots too. If your pot's spout has build up, you can use a pipe cleaner or the sort to get it clean. I wash my cups every time I use them but I am told for tea pots, depending on what kind of tea was in it to begin with, you only need to wash them every 3-4 times you have tea. With how simple this method of cleaning is, you won't mind cleaning them more than that (if need be)!

I'm going to choose to wash the cups like I normally would, even with the stains gone because my sponge wasn't the cleanest but as long as you rinse well, I don't believe it's actually necessary. I would also like to note that these stains were in a white mug that had been run through the dishwasher at least once, if not twice and the stains still came out perfectly fine! (Some stains seem really set in, similar to putting a stain through the wash and the dryer.)

How to Get Rid of Ants

You're probably going to think we have a really messy kitchen but I assure you, we don't. Part of the problem is we don't have trim on the kitchen windows, which make them not sealed to the outside. But we have ants in our house. They come in through the crack by the window and then they travel all around the counter tops in search of food. They drive me crazy and get everywhere but I can't spray chemicals since I'm pregnant.

However, there are some things you can do. We choose the method of using cinnamon (all along the window sill to prevent more ants from coming in and then the other ants just die off because they can't go back home) because we happen to have a ton of it from David's mom but you can choose whatever method works best for you.

• Any form of talc keeps them away. This includes baby powder, some chalks, and of course plain talc. 
• Certain scents like cinnamon, vinegar, black or cayenne pepper, and bay leaves can also keep the ants away. 
• If you can find it, plug the hole. It could be as easy as a little caulk, plaster, or in our case, putting trim on. (We're getting to it but we just haven't made it there yet.) 
• Petroleum jelly. This could be used in a line (such as along the bottom of a door) to stop them or it could be used to plug up their entrance point.
• If you see the line of ants, you can spray them with household cleaners or bleach. This isn't exactly chemical friendly but they won't be around anymore! You can also use a damp sponge or cloth to sweep them up and into the sink or garbage. 
• When there's only one ant around, it's usually the scout ant that is going to report back to the colony where they can find food. If you kill this ant (I'd suggest by squishing it), it can't report back. This could prevent more ants from entering your home.
• Put down cornmeal. This won't stop the ants from moving around but they do eat it. Then their digestive tract swells due to the cornmeal and they die. 
• It's also suggested to keep a clean kitchen, have a lid on food and your garbage can, and stay on top of it. Of course this is easier said than done but it still seems inevitable that at some point, you will have ants in your house. I hope these tips will help.

1st Year Wedding Anniversary Gift Ideas

This Sunday is David and I's first wedding anniversary. We couldn't be more excited. We are planning to stay at a local hotel for a few nights and just enjoy our staycation. It will also double as our babymoon. Our weekends are usually filled with errands and working on the house so this little getaway will be just what we need. It got me thinking about gifts, though.

The first year traditional material for a gift is paper (you might be more familiar with the higher years that include things like gold, diamonds, and other jewels). This makes for kind of a weird gift unless you get creative about it. So here are some ideas:

• artwork (as long as it's done on paper, like a print) 
• maps. This could be especially cute if you get a map of where you first met or where you each came from. It could also be of your wedding spot, honeymooon destination, a place you want to go to in the future, anything special to you.
• books. This could include things like notebooks or journals but it could also be reading books. 
• Stationary. This one seems kind of boring to me but if your spouse is in a place in their lives or a job where stationary or business cards would make sense, go for it. You could get it monogrammed or make it more professional with their work information.
• Calendar. In the middle of July (when our anniversary is), I don't see this being very practical but you could make one yourself and have all the pictures be things important to you and your relationship. It could end up being very sentimental.
• Tickets. This could be for a concert, a trip, a museum pass, etc. 

I don't think David and I are doing gifts, we never really have for things like this but we do always find a special way to celebrate, like with our mini-vacation. So of course you don't have to give a gift of paper. It's just the traditional material. You could even make up your own things as you go along! 

DIY Curtain Rods

I mentioned in my previous post that our curtain rods were not store bought, expensive ones. Rather, David made them himself. I'm not sure where he got the idea from but this is his method (to the best of my own knowledge. I don't always know what he's up to.) First, you measure your window and decide the appropriate length for the rod (in our dining room, we extended six inches on either side of the window but it's really personal preference). Then you go to the stove and buy conduit. Ours was galvanized and 10 feet long. We also bought a bronze metallic spray paint to match the hardware and ends we picked out. (You do want to buy these things, for sure the hardware for hanging the pipe. It's not that expensive. The ends can be expensive but we're looking into how to do those ourselves too). Then you go home and using a pipe cutter (it kind of looks like a clamp with a blade in the middle of it), you cut your pipe at your desired length.

If you so choose, this is when you paint it. To get it even, we used a foot hold on a tree (like the kind you use for deer stands when you go hunting). You do have to turn it while spraying it to get it even. Also, bugs are attracted to it (we couldn't figure out why but it was kind of annoying to keep them off. Maybe do yours inside?) Then you wait for it to dry and put up the hardware (according to the directions). You put up your pipe with your curtains on it and voila! You're done. I think the total price of the pipe plus the paint was 5 dollars or less. If you buy an actual curtain rod, you will pay from 25-50 dollars (if not even more). This looks just as nice, doesn't take that much time or work, and I think is totally worth it. We got all the supplies at Menard's but I would assume you could buy it from any home improvement store.

(I'm sorry I don't have a picture to show you. Uploading pictures from my phone isn't working lately and who knows where my real camera is.)

Updates from the Weekend

David's parents didn't work on Saturday because they were at a wedding so we decided to make a list of things to do that we haven't gotten to yet because of trying to get the house farther. Boy oh boy was this a long list! It was hot and humid on Saturday, which partially prevented us from not finishing it but really, we spent at least 8 hours working on it and we got a lot done. Here's the finished tasks.

• trim out the tree that was pointlessly growing right next to our porch. I have no idea how got the bright idea to plant it here (this was before we decided to buy the house) but it was just a menace. It would blow in the wind and slap me if I was reading on the porch, it obstructed the view of our neighbor's house, and we just didn't want it there. Since we were trimming this out, we also trimmed two of the other trees in our front yard so they wouldn't droop over the sidewalk (nothing is more annoying to pedestrians than trees in the way, although ours wasn't that bad). Then we hauled all this to the city compost pile place. 
• clean the car. We needed to clean out the car even before we put a bunch of trees in it but now we definitely did. I don't know how it happens but we always seem to get a big trash build up. In order to fit the trees in the car, we had to take out a bunch of the stuff that had accumulated in there. Then after the trees, we vacuumed it all out and threw away more garbage. We even went to a car wash! David claims this changed the color of a car from a "is that tan or silver?" to a "this is definitely silver". I'm not so sure but our car was muddy so I'm glad it's clean now (at least until the next time it rains. We don't have concrete at the bottom of our driveway yet, which can give us some pretty big mud puddles.)
• put our living room back together. I'd have to look back when exactly we bought the couch but I believe it was March. Since then, we've barely been able to use it because of the construction dust and everything (so we cover it up with plastic). Then our living room floors needed to be restained so our couch got taken apart (it's an L) and moved and covered in the dining room. It's been there, I want to say, several weeks at least. Definitely unusable. So we were finally able to move that back, set up our rug again, etc. We still need to bring the TV down from the loft and do some wall decorating (including curtains) but our living room is the only room in the entire house that is 100% finished from a construction standpoint.
• repainted the dining room ceiling. Okay I didn't help in this one due to pregnancy so I took a nap while David did it. We had originally used this really bad cheapo paint that needed like 4 coats to cover right but then David's mom edged (she does all our edging) with a different paint, unknowingly and they weren't even the same white! So we had to repaint with the right white (try saying that ten times fast!) and we've been meaning to get to it for months. In our defense, it makes it a whole lot harder to paint the ceiling in there when our living room couch is taking up most of the room.
• sprayed our DIY curtain rods and hang curtains for the dining room. This was probably the most exciting. We have venetian blinds some other places to help with light and privacy but we don't have curtains anywhere. It really brought the room together. We also set up our make-shift dining room table but I doubt we'll ever eat at it.

I don't have the list in front of me to consult but I feel like we did more than this. I suppose these are just the big things and that maybe we did some more little things. The dining room is ALMOST done too, it just needs a little piece of trim that nobody has found yet. So basically we have two rooms completely done! We even hung up a picture in the bathroom! I finally feel like we are started to LIVE in our house!

Trail Mix

A lot of people have the misconception that trail mix is a healthy snack. It could be healthy snack, especially if you make it yourself, but it's not always. A handful (quarter cup) is usually a serving and that could put you close to 200 calories. Who eats just one handful of trail mix?? Not me! So I decided to make my own in an attempt to make it healthier than the store bought kind.

First, I looked at all the nuts. Now, I'm really picky when it comes to nuts and unlike most people, I don't like most of them, especially pecans, walnuts, and the other big (in size) ones. I pretty much only like cashews, peanuts, and almonds. These are probably the worst 3 three for you. David and I briefly did look at seeds to see if that would be any better but decided against them. We already had cashews at home so we knew we'd be using those. Then we compared the nutrition facts of the peanuts with the almonds. For the most part, the almonds were healthier (although not by much) but the peanuts had more protein. Since this snack was to help get more protein in our diets, we decided on the peanuts. If you're healthier than me (which guessing by the fact you're reading about this, you probably are, you might want to pick a healthier nut. Be sure to compare nutrition facts and keep in mind which nutrients are most important to you.)

Then we needed something naturally sweet. They typically put raisins (with hydrogenated oils and other preservatives) in store bought mix. We looked at the whole aisle of dried fruits. (These things are not cheap! But then again, neither are the nuts.) We did decide on raisins but ours are only raisins. No preservatives, fats, or other processed things. Just good old raisins (which is probably why when I went to make the mix, they're all stuck together in one big block). There are plenty of other dried fruits to try but to be honest, we don't really like dried fruit. Actually, we don't even really like raisins (makes you wonder why we're making trail mix when we don't like nuts or dried fruits but somehow everything tastes good together).

Lastly, we decided it needed chocolate or there was a good chance we were never going to eat this (again, why do we like trail mix?). We debated between Reese's Pieces and regular M&M's and decided on the latter. We didn't want a candy that didn't come in it's own shell or it might melt and get messy and the Pieces probably would've been too much peanut taste (since we were already using peanuts).

So that is our mix. It's actually the same ingredients as the one we had bought previously from the store but (minus the candy), we were able to make slightly healthier choices (obviously, we didn't go much healthier than the store bought kind but I do believe it also comes out cheaper this way. With a little help from nutrition labels and ingredient lists, you should be able to make yours better while still keeping the taste you love).

I would like to point out that I've made trail mix in the past and it was raisins, pretzels, M&M's, almonds, and peanuts. There are so many variations out there but I think the idea behind it is to have sweet blend with salty and to have a source of protein, especially if this is the kind of thing you're going to take hiking. Let me know in the comments what recipe you use!

Laundry Baskets

This weekend, David and I decided we needed more laundry baskets. We have a hamper that we put all our clothes in (we don't sort ahead of time like some people). We take that downstairs to our laundry room where I sort it. The problem is, besides the hamper, we only have 2 baskets. I can usually fit all our whites into one but our darks are usually 3-5 loads (depending on how long it's been since I've last done laundry. I aim to do laundry once a week, especially in summer because our dryer vent isn't hooked up to the outside yet so it all stays in the house and that can get really warm) and that doesn't fit in the one basket. So then some clothes have to stay in the hamper in order for me to fit everything. This means I sort at least twice. Then, my baskets are still full when my first load is ready to come out of the dryer. Therefore, I have to dump some of the dirty clothes on top of the chest  freezer so I have a clean basket for the clean clothes. It drives me crazy, plus I'm pretty sure I've lost a couple socks back there. So we finally invested in 2 more baskets.

I tried looking online to see how many baskets other people use and there doesn't seem to be a formula or anything. Some people even leave the hamper in the room, take a laundry basket and fill it up with the hamper, carry the laundry basket down, do the laundry, and come back up with the basket to be put away before they have to take the basket back down to the laundry room. Doesn't that sound like a lot of trips? I understand the people who do this when the bedrooms are on the same floor as the laundry facilities but ours are not. They're about as far away as they could be with stairs to contend with too.

I like the system as my parents' house because they have a laundry chute so you never have to carry the clothes down, just back up. We looked into doing that for this house but there just wasn't a good spot for it to all end up so I don't think that is a viable option for us. We also looked into moving our laundry room to the second floor where the bedrooms are, but again, the space we were looking at was just too small.

I suppose the solution could be to do laundry more often so I have less loads to do at a time but since we plan on using reusable diapers with Teeny and all those clothes changes that come with it, I feel like I'm going to have even more loads of laundry to do no matter how many days a week I do laundry.