Tag: cleaning | Apartment Therapy

How To: Take Care of Velvet Upholstery

Many of you love velvet, especially the blue kind, but either have a hard time keeping it clean or just haven't given in (to avoid such velvety dilemmas). You want it to retain its luster for years, y...

One Man's Collections

Tony's largest collection, cartoon character figurines Displayed throughout his home, Tony's collections are at once overwhelming and inspiring. Overwhelming, because of their size (that's the most ...

Apartment Aromatherapy: 4 Household Uses for Lavender

This week we were delighted to receive a thick, fragrant bunch of lavender among the veggies and fruit in our CSA box. And while it will be exciting to experiment with the lavender for baking, we're a...

Sarah Hartill's Laundry and Craft Room

A spare room is a thing of dreams for many small space dwellers, so if you've got a home that has one we are admittedly a tad envious. However, figuring out what to do with that extra space can be tri...

Preparing the Home for Puppy: 5 Essential Items

Friends of ours recently adopted a 12-week-old puppy, and having raised a pup ourselves (see above, little Wilbur in his crate on his first day home), we thought we'd help them out with a list of the ...

Your Nightmare "House Swap"?

You know that television show about swapping wives? The most contrary of families are always paired and the wife in the family is switched for some given period of time. The perfectionist is always ...

Desk Cleanup: Befores and Afters

They say there is genius behind a messy workplace. If that's so, we're far from genius, because we find great satisfaction in cleaning up a work area. Before, you're cluttered, crowded, and work suf...

Outdoor Inspiration: Clothes on the Line

Nothing beats drying the laundry on the line. The fresh clean scent, warmth, thrift, and eco-friendliness add up to make clothesline drying a win-win practice. Plus, we just like the way it looks......

Homemade Carpet Freshener
RecipeZaar

We have a cat, whose adorable gray fur comes off of her body with not-so-adorable dander and allergens on a very regular basis. We sweep and vacuum, which usually does the trick, but since June is t...

Outdoors In: Open Window Tips

One of our favorite ways to bring the outdoors in at this time of year is to throw open the sashes. Opening the windows is a favorite fair-weather practice because it instantly enlivens a space with...

Are You a List-Maker?

We write lists for just about everything. And as it turns out, many of those things have one thing or another to do with the home. The list goes on. And on......

Spring Cleaning: Decluttering Your Life

We were awoken this morning to a "second notice that the factory warranty on our vehicle has expired," for the seventh or so time. We've simply hung up the phone in the past and gone back to sleep, bu...

Inspiration: A Beautiful Mess

Something unexpected happened after we'd been through the Cure a couple of times: we became a lot less uptight about the little messes and piles that accumulate periodically around our home....

Aroma-Apartment Therapy

While relocating into my new loft/attic space (I have decided to call it a loftic) I did what I usually do when I move into a new home---put up a fresh coat of paint and clean the dickens out of it! T...

How To: Clean Your Windows
The Oregonian: 04.27.09

Our windows are totally filthy, and we need to clean them. We don't even want to think about how many cycles of condensation and dust have caked a thin brown film over them, but the important thing ...

Two Battle-Tested Household Uses for Cinnamon

This week my husband wrote "20 lbs of cinnamon" on our grocery list, and no, he is not planning to bake breakfast pastries for the whole neighborhood (although that would certainly make us popular!). ...

Etsy Find: Crocheted Dish Cloths

We can never have too many dishcloths — without a dishwasher, they get used and abused every single day. If we could crochet we'd be making our own, but Etsy comes to the rescue with this set of ...

How Did You Lose Your Bed?

My brother, who is in the Peace Corps, recently told me that his bed was missing. Turns out he was airing out his mattress on the roof of his building and it blew away. It was eventually discovered ...

Spring Cleaning Tip: Give Your Houseplants a Shower

Keeping houseplants brings a lot of energy and life into a home, and with relatively little effort. Like most household items, however, plants need a deep cleaning every once in a while. Even though y...

Look! Glass Jars for Laundry Supplies

Sad as it may seem, it is our dream to have a laundry room in our home. Right now we count ourselves among the denizens of the laundromat, but if one day we do have a dedicated room for laundry, it ...

Five Pet Products for a People-Friendly Home

click thumbnails for larger picsAs much as we adore the skinny fellow in the photo, it took us a while to get used to living with an animal. Not having grown up with pets, and being—well, ahem—a ...

How To: Clean Your Oven with Ammonia

This may be a well-known trick to some, but it was new to us so we thought we'd share. In the past we've avoided ammonia in our cleaning routine because the smell seemed too strong. But with that po...

A Compendium of All-Natural Cleaning Tips
Real Simple

There are many well-known and well-blogged about natural cleaning tips out there. Olive oil to shine and buff stainless steel, lemons in the disposal to clean and freshen, and sprinkling baking soda o...

Five Things We Never Think to Clean in the Kitchen

Even if you’re not taking part in the spring cure, chances are you might be getting around to some spring cleaning. Well, we are, anyway—and it’s amazing how much more there is to do than we tho...

10 Tips for Making Your Home Sexy from Lynda Reeves

With Valentine's Day coming up this weekend, are you trying to think of some ways you can add sex appeal to your home? We'd start with asking that guy in the gorgeous living room above to take his...

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Posts tagged “cleaning”