I told you a few days ago about the baby shower I went to last weekend. But I DIDN’T tell you about the little top secret device I learned about…

Many of you know that I’m a bit of a cleaning freak, but apparently I have never been let in on the the amazing powers of…the steam mop. Have any of you known about this and not told me?!?  How DARE you!!!  This thing is AWESOME–it’s like a swiffer on steroids!

Luckily, my friend Tess, who hosted the baby shower had one…and she was kind enough to tell me about it, and then even broke it out for me. She’s a regular steam mop saleswoman (seriously…I think she could make millions selling them door to door.)

After you do an initial sweep or dry swiffer,  you fill the mop with water and plug it in to let it heat up:

Then you put a pad on the bottom (these are washable), and when it’s warm you just run it across the floor:

It’s that easy! And it works sooooo well! There was sticky punch all over Tess’s floor and it was cleaned up just like that (picture me snapping here). No chemicals. No fuss. Just steam! (Wouldn’t that be an AWESOME tagline?!? Tess, feel free to use that in your sales pitch.)

It gets Tess’s seal of approval:

Here are a few of the top steam mops on the market: the Haan FS-20, the Bissell 1867-7, and the Shark Steam Mop 53101. Happy cleaning!

And if any steam mop companies out there would like to hire Tess to model YOUR steam mop, you just let me know and I’ll pass the message along to her.

My little sister Caroline pointed out to me that my blog post “cliffhanger”  last night was about how I reorganized my pantry. I’m such a dork.

But, I do legitimately get excited about reorganizing my pantry…so really, I think it goes to show how AUTHENTIC I am. Right? Authentic. Pantries. Uh huh…. I digress.  But really, without further ado…here’s what I purchased, four of these little babies:

Yup just four.  Because I’m really not in a position to be dropping cash on pantry organization supplies right now. Luckily, with my $30 gift card I only spent $7 or so! Not bad considering I was lusting after about $400 worth of pantry organization supplies a few months ago at The Container Store.

Once again, the before shot:

Very Messy.

And the after shot:

Not bad for $7, right? Okay…$37 if you want want to be exact. But I was pretty darn happy with the outcome either way! I used the tubs I bought to hold all the boxed meal stuff (mac & cheese, rice pilaf, and the like), Nuts and Berries, Pasta and Rices, and Spreads (Peanut Butter, Nutella, etc.). I had a galvanized steel tub that we use to hold white wine at parties (in the lower right above the trash cans) that usually sits with my party supplies; now it does double duty and holds are snacks, too.

I used some metal mixing bowls I already have that I rarely use to hold root veggies and breads. And I used cake pans (1 square and 2 round) to hold other spices and sauces I rarely use on the highest and lowest shelves.  Now they’re actually serving a purpose when they’re not in use…not just collecting dust!

I also really wanted to make two levels of cans on that shelf. So I scrounged around our house and settled on leftover tiles we had sitting on a shelf in the garage.  I just stacked them until they were high enough for me to see both levels!

And then I moved my cookbooks from the top shelf of my pantry, which was always an awkward place for them to live, to another place in my kitchen, and moved some appliances right on in. Lastly, I made some labels on my handy dandy label maker!

I’m so happy with how it all turned out!

But perhaps the funniest thing I found, was this can of soup:

For the most part, everything that was I took out of the pantry went back in…but I did call into question a few things. Like this soup. To my knowledge, we have never eaten this flavor of soup in our house. So I questioned whether or not to toss it. I decided to check for an expiration date to help me with my decision making.  I found one: June 17, 2006. Yup. It’s been expired for four years. The best part? That’s right around the time I moved in with my hubby. And we’ve moved twice since that date! This soup has been living with my hubby longer than I have. How romantic! Needless to say, it’s now in the garbage. Sorry, Chunky.

And there you have it. Just another day for This American Wife.

It may or may not be 12:53am. I may or may not have just finished cleaning my house. Yes that’s right….it’s another Late Night Cleaning Session here in This American Home. I seriously don’t know what’s wrong with me sometimes!!!  Since our last guests left Saturday morning, the hubby and I have been LAAAAAZY. And tonight I’d had it. So I started cleaning and kept cleaning and kept cleaning. But now, my house is beautiful once again. And I can wake up tomorrow morning knowing that I don’t have to put away any more clothes or clean out any  more fridges for awhile. I LOVE that feeling.

But believe it or not, cleaning until past midnight was not the most exciting thing going on here tonight!!!  ”What was?” you ask. Well…I had a Target gift card burning a whole in my wallet. And I happened to be there tonight.  So what did I do with my $30 gift card? Well…I’ll give you a hint:

And if you want to see the big reveal, you’ll just have to come back tomorrow!!! See you then!

After I finished cleaning out the Man Cave, I just couldn’t stop, and I went right on organizing and uncluttering in the garage! I cleaned out our garage a few months ago, but somehow garages seem to require more maintenance to stay clean than other rooms of the house.  So while it didn’t need a full on purge like the Man Cave did, requiring me to pull everything out, sort it, and then put it back, I did consolidate some tubs and organized everything so that it looks neater.  I didn’t take any before pics, but here’s what it looked like after:

It’s still pretty garage-y looking, and all my tubs don’t match, but at least it’s nice and organized!  I also got a refill for my label-maker.  I forgot how much I loved that little gizmo!  And now all my tubs have nice little labels:

After all this cleaning, I took a load of stuff to the Salvation Army.  Now I just need to sell a few things on Craig’s List and persuade my hubby to take a load of electronics to the electronics waste place, and my spring organizing will be done (Spring Cleaning is a whole different matter…)!

It’s time.  Gather round blog readers, it’s time for me to tell you about my worst night home alone.  Somehow, when you sign the paperwork making you a 100% bone-fide military spouse, you agree to deal with all sorts of things on your own: plumbing problems, exotic childhood illnesses, and well, my little problem….

My hubby was going to be gone for about a week…leaving on Monday, coming home on Friday.  My aunt was also coming into town on Friday, staying until Sunday, and then on Sunday, my in-laws were coming for a week!  Exhausting, right?  Well…in that week I had to myself, I decided I would take on two projects.  Number 1: I would paint our upstairs guest bathroom.  We had been living in our house about six months, and it was still sponge-painted yellow (ICK!).  Number 2: I would paint the built in bookshelves in our downstairs guest bedroom.  They were a stark white, and I decided to paint them a chocolate brown!  Lovely! I would have three days to paint, and then a last day to clean the house before all our guests!  So I bought the paint and the  painting supplies, and I spent evening one prepping the areas and priming.

Evening two was the big painting night. I started pretty early and painting was going okay…of course, taking a little longer than I wish it was.  I was in the upstairs bathroom with the door closed as I painted the wall behind the door, and I smelled something funky.  I thought it was all the paint fumes in the small bathroom, but after I opened the door, I quickly realized the smell was coming from downstairs.  As I walked downstairs, I quickly realized it was the smell of something burning!  I hadn’t cooked all evening, I had just eaten a sandwich for dinner, so it wasn’t the stove or the oven.  I hadn’t used the fireplace, the heat wasn’t on.  I quickly realized the smell was coming from on side of the house, the side closest to where the water heater was.  Yikes!  I called my hubby, and was a little panicky, and he told me to go turn off the water heater.  So I walked outside to where the access to water heater was and turned off the heater.  As I was walking back inside I looked at our golden retriever, Paul, and saw that his face was all wet.  As I started to walk a little closer, I realized that the smell was coming from HIM!  I locked him outside, and googled “dog” “burning smell”.  And learned that oftentimes a skunk spray, yup, skunk spray, starts off as a burning smell.

I had left our sliding glass door open that evening so that Paul could walk in and outside without me opening the door so I could concentrate on painting.  He had been sprayed, and then come in and rolled around on the carpet to try to get rid of the smell (the area where I had been smelling the strong burning smell).  At this point, it was pretty late in the evening, so I made Paul sleep outside (for the first and only time ever), and I went upstairs to finish painting for the evening and go to bed. I had to stay on the paint schedule so I would finish before our guests came that weekend!

As I was finishing up, I started to feel a little sick.  I realized then that the deli meat had been a little old, and yes, I was facing some stomach issues.  Sooo…one really rough night, one sick day, three dog washings, three bottles of peroxide, one giant bottle of baking soda, and two coats of paint later, I had a painted bathroom, a painted bookshelf, a healthy tummy, a not AS stinky dog, and a fresh smelling carpet.  Seriously folks, you can’t make this stuff up. And what did my husband say when he came home?  ”This place smells like skunk! ” Arrrrg…but I love him anyway

Note to self:

+

= BAD NEWS!!!!

But if you ever need a recipe for deskunking a dog, you just let me know!!!

I saw this Martha Stewart show segment a few years ago where she teaches Marcia Cross how to fold a t-shirt in about 2 seconds, and I instantly became obsessed with folding t-shirts this way.  I know, that sounds crazy, you may ask, “Why do I need fold my t-shirts any differently than I do right now?” If you ask this, you clearly haven’t  watched the video yet! After I saw this, I refolded all the t-shirts in my dresser.  Seriously.  Maybe that says more about me than it does about the video though…

Click the photo to watch the video!

1. I make sure that each and every item (from my toothbrush to my telephone bill) has a home. If I’m not sure where something goes, I find a place where it should “live” (or evaluate if I really need it).  This keeps me from making piles of random stuff on our counter/kitchen table/dresser/etc.

2. Every day, before I head to bed,  I put every item in it’s home. If I don’t do this before I go to bed, the next day our house seems to get our of control much more quickly, and then takes much longer to clean up!

3.  I make our bed (nearly) every morning. This keeps our room looking tidy, keeps dust, dirt, and Paul hair from accumulating on our sheets all day, and it feels so much nicer when I slide into bed at night!

4. I immediately put dishes in the dishwasher. It takes about .02 more seconds to put dishes in the dishwasher rather than just in the sink. It keeps gunk from transferring from one dirty dish to another, and saves me from having to spend 5 or 10 minutes “doing the dishes” later.  When I head to work in the morning, I just turn on the dishwasher, and I’m done!

5. We invested in the nonstick pans from Costco. Seriously, go buy them now.  We were planning on purchasing a set of Calphalon pots and pans a few years ago, and we set aside a large chunk o’ change in our budget to do so.  Before heading out to buy them, my hubby looked on Consumer Reports to see exactly which Calphalon pans were rated best, and the $180.00 14-piece set were rated as the best buy of all non-stick pans!  They supposedly are very similar as the Calphalon pans to cook in; they last longer; and they are MUCH cheaper!  What are you waiting for? Go buy them right now! (No, I do not work for Costco).  Why is this on this list? Because I HATE washing pots and pans…they are the one thing I will pile in the sink, which would violate rule number 4.  Because the pans take approximately 3 seconds to wash, I don’t mind washing them right away!

6. When I take off my clothes, I hang them up,  put them way, or toss  them in the hamper . Okay…my hubby will tell you, I don’t always do this.  Put I always try!  Clothes have a way of multiplying in my closet if I don’t do this, so in order to keep my closet neat and tidy, I try to not put my clothes in piles.

7.  I keep an ongoing box in the garage of things to take to Goodwill. I try to constantly purge my house–clothes, dishes, knick knacks…you name it, I purge it.  I’m much more likely to do this if I know I already have a Goodwill box going.

8. If I haven’t used it in a year, I get rid of it. With the exception of my wedding dress, and one “Memory Box” in the garage of stuff that has sentimental value to me (papers from high school, my pom poms, etc.). I’ve used almost everything in my house or my garage in the past year.  If there is anything that I see that I haven’t used in a year, I toss it or give it away (see Number 7).  This includes home decor, christmas decorations, dog toys, EVERYTHING!

9. I try to do at least one extra chore every day. If I spend 5 minutes a day vacuuming, sweeping the floor, cleaning the toilets, dusting, etc.  I rarely have spend a whole house cleaning session.  I’m would so much rather spend 15 minutes a day picking up rather than sacrifice one whole afternoon or evening every week or two.

10.  I let myself have a day off every now and then. Every few weeks you can walk into our house and it will look like a tornado hit it.  Cups sitting on the side tables in the living room, dishes in the sink, clothes all over our bedroom.  And I’m okay with that.  I think that it’s healthy to take a bit of time to let loose (and yes, I consider that letting loose) every now and then.  And after I let it go for a day (or sometimes two), I spend an hour or so getting everything ship shape and then I’m back in business! It also helps me appreciate our home so much more when it IS nice and clean and organized!