Helping to get your home and family life into a happier state with cleaning, tidying and organising tips.
Vinegar is great for a salad dressing or sprinkling on your chips, but it can also be a really handy product to use around the house. This non-toxic and relatively eco friendly acid is a great option for cleaning a whole variety of items when used in the right way.
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| Did you know you can use vinegar to clean around the home? |
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| Keep your paddling pool cleaner with these tips |
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| It's easy to descale your kettle without scrubbing |
Family life can be messy, especially if there are young children or pets involved. You may feel like your days of having lovely things in your home are over, at least until the children are older, but this doesn’t always have to be the case. Several common stains can be removed from furniture with a few tips, tricks and home remedies.
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| Rescue your stained furniture with these useful cleaning tips |
Carpets are a great way to make your home feel cozy, but they accumulate dirt, dust and bacteria over time. Regular cleaning of carpets is crucial to maintain a healthy home environment, and this blog post will help your decide how often you should clean yours.
It's not just about looking clean and removing unsightly stains. Regular carpet cleaning helps extend the life of your carpet by removing abrasive dirt particles that wear down the carpet fibres, causing them to fray and unravel. Through proper cleaning you can delay replacement costs and maintain the appearance and value of your carpets.
The best way to keep your house tidy and clean is to do a little bit each day. Makes absolute sense right? But what if that doesn’t work for you? Methods like The Organised Mum are brilliant if you are able to find the time and motivation for daily cleaning, but it’s never caught on in this house for two reasons: my children tend to cause absolute chaos everyday so just to tidy up that days mess uses most of my energy and when it comes to the deep cleaning? The windows? Skirting? Or even cleaning the oven? Well my ADHD brain just doesn’t want to tackle a little bit of those each days. It’s more likely that I will spend an afternoon doing a major focused clean because I’m in rage at the mess. Or maybe I'll have an urgent piece of work that needs to be done so my brain suddenly decides that the shutters need dusting. I recognise the need to try and have a bit more balance and so I'm sharing the best way I've found to motivate me to get the basics done. This habit tracker gets results and sometimes it even works to magically get housework done without me lifting a finger!
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| Keeping on top of the housework can feel impossible when you have children |
We have a big problem with damp and mould in our house. It’s not just in the bathrooms, but patches on the walls and ceiling. I absolutely hate it and from October onwards I go on high alert to try and catch it as soon as it starts to appear or within a few days it spread big time. This year I think it has been particularly bad because we have delayed turning the heating on for as long as possible. We use dehumidifiers to help with drying clothing, but we still get patches appearing. I have tried various products to help in the past, but after a recent TikTok recommendation I tried something new and I'm really impressed. Find out what we have used in the past and my new favourite product.
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| Through trial and error I have found the best products for removing mould from my home |
Are you feeling the pinch and trying to save money where ever you can? While we might be able to cut down how much money we spend on food or 'treats' the amount we will have to spend on gas and electric in the coming months is a big concern. Luckily there are adjustments we can make to save money without noticing any difference and one of these changes is how we wash clothes. Following the tips in this post can reduce how much energy you use washing clothes by over 70%!
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| You can spend less money washing clothes with these tips |
If your radiators aren’t heating up properly, have cold spots, or are completely cold despite your heating being on one of the things you might want to try is to bleed them. Bleeding your radiator is the act of removing trapped air that has built up inside your radiators.This trapped air can affect the efficiency of your central heating. It is very simple and easy to bleed your radiator yourself, all you will need is a radiator key and a cloth/tea towel to catch any water.
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| If your radiators aren't heating properly you might need to bleed them |
We love our pets in the UK. As a nation, we definitely consider dogs to be “man’s best friend” and a cat is wonderful company. Despite this unconditional love, however, there are a few annoyances that can come from having a furry pet, and one of those is finding dog or cat hair all over your sofa and clothing. If this sounds like something you experience, don’t worry, here are some great solutions that will help you to remove fur from your sofa, your clothes, as well as other soft furnishings around your home.
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| Love your pets, but not everything being covered in hair? These tips will help |
Now I don’t want to be dramatic, but I’m pretty sure the pots and pans cupboard is the most chaotic in my kitchen, with fierce competition from the Tupperware drawer. Hands up if you’ve ever opened your pan cupboard and found yourself at the bottom of a cooking pot avalanche. Or maybe you’ve been looking for a specific pan, but you can’t find it amidst the chaos. Yes, it sound’s extreme, but when I say using organisation hacks for organising my pots and pans transformed meal times, I absolutely mean it.
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| There is no need for your pan cupboard to be a mess with these clever tips |
I am a big fan of TikTok. The combination of the huge amount of content and the great algorithm means you get to see videos you didn’t even know would interest you and there is a good chance your content will get see too, even if you have no followers. Whatever your interests you should check it out, but if you have an interest in cleaning and tidying you will love CleanTok.
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| CleanTok is full of great tips and cleaning motivation |
*Gifted product* I was sent the Multi Surface Cleaner (Counter Clean) Starter Kit to try out from Purdy & Figg which is an Eco-Concentrate product. You get little bottles of concentrated cleaner in glass bottles that you mix up with water in the large glass bottle. It costs a bit more than I would normally spend on cleaning products, but there are a lot of things I like about this kit and the company.
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| Review of the Purdy & Figg Counter Clean Starter Set |
I am a huge advocate of period pants. I think they have revolutionised periods offering comfort and reliability to menstruating people while also being eco friendly. This is a really useful post if you want to learn about period pants, but I’m assuming you are here because you have period pants already and you want to know how to wash them.
Most brands suggest that their period pants will last at least 2 to 4 years, or roughly 40 to 50 uses each. The real life span of period pants will depend on the quality of pants and the care you take of them. Cheeky Pants for instance are relatively low cost, but I have found the quality isn’t so good and it feels like the waterproof layer isn’t going to last 2 years, my Modibodi pants are really reliable, but have gone bobbly in the wash and my WUKA pants in contrast still feel reliable after many wears (but I don't like the styles as much).
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| The Best Ways To Store, Wash and Dry Period Pants |
They might not be the most energy efficient way to dry clothes, but when you have a family a tumble dryer is a huge help for keeping on top of the clothes washing. If you don't have a big kitchen or utility room you might be considering a combined washer dryer to save on space, but are they any good?
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| Washer dryers are a good space saver but are they any good? |
I love a good kitchen gadget which makes cooking easier and more fun. I could happily have twice as many cupboards and fill them with a gadget for every possible cooking need, but in reality space is limited so it's only the really useful ones that I have. I have versions of the items below in my house or plan to soon thanks to trying them out. If you don't remark to yourself "oh that's clever" at least once while reading through I will be disappointed.
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| Clever kitchen gadgets make cooking more fun |
Traditionally Spring Cleaning is the term given to a full house clean taking place at the beginning of spring. As the days get longer and the sun gets brighter the dust and cobwebs around the home become more obvious so it’s a good opportunity to do a deep clean and get rid of anything no longer needed. The warmer days mean windows can be opened to let the air in and make everything feel a bit fresher.
Spring Cleaning originated long before the days of bright electric lighting and central heating so now the onset of Spring doesn’t really have the same impact of highlighting the dirt everywhere that it used to, but it’s still a good idea to give your house a good once over and thorough clean every so often. Rather than waiting until the start of spring though you could choose any time to get started, you might even be motivated to do a deep clean when you take down the Christmas decorations.
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| Where to start your Spring Clean |
Head to any shop or website and the huge choice of cleaning products is overwhelming. How do you choose? How do you know what works? It’s understandable to be a bit dubious about marketing which will focus on the positives and you don’t want to waste money on things that don’t work. I have asked a group of bloggers what their favourite cleaning products are that they have spent their own money on. Having been in a position to review lots of products and just generally working to keep their homes clean they have tested a lot of products out and so saving you the hard work these are their recommendations of the cleaning products, utensils and appliances they wouldn’t be without.
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| What are the best products for cleaning? |
With 5 of us living here we wear a lot of clothes each week. In the summer I can keep my washing basket under control thanks to the fast drying power of hanging my clothes outside, but in winter it is much harder to dry clothes quickly. I don’t want my house to look like a laundrette with airers in every room, but what is the best way to dry clothes inside?
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| If you have lots of washing what is the best way to get it dry quickly? |
