Eureka! (Vacuums that is)

I love my Eureka vacuum cleaner with a bag. I have never bet a bag less vacuum that I liked at all. Who came up with that idea any way? Without a bag, when you go to empty the silly thing up comes a big cloud of dust all over. Not healthy to breathe at all. So I will never buy a bag less vacuum cleaner. I have an older model Eureka that does a great job on everything I put it to.

To the left is a newer version of my Eureka and when mine gives up the ghost I will probably buy one like this. It has some newer features mine doesn't have. Like a special attachment for vertical cleaning without getting dust and dirt in your eyes; I like that idea!

Well today's 15 minute session was in the kitchen. First I swept up all the loose chunky stuff that I could get to and then put my old Eureka to the test. It got up quite a bit of the stuck on mud and things are looking a little better in there. Just don't look on the back porch.

So here is my old work horse going at it in the kitchen. There was enough dirt that I had to change the bag soon after starting (it wasn't all from the kitchen tho, it was just time to change the bag).

And here's when I left off after 15 minutes. Some more sweeping, vacuuming and mopping are in order, but not today.

Early this morning while it was still fairly cool I worked on the ditch on the hill. Spent most of the day in front of the computer. I had intended to go back and work some more on the ditch this evening when it cooled off, but my son showed up and he helped me finish clearing the culvert in creek. We realized that the water was high enough that it was actually coming over the top of the crossing and some water had been running right down my driveway. That is  a bit scary because that is a huge amount of water backed up. I'll have to be really keeping an eye on things and get the culverts cemented in ASAP, with a little overflow channel in case this happens again.

"Blessed are the Flexible for they shall not be bent out of shape" Lyddy

In light of the grand mud slide (Oh I know it's nothing compared to what you have in California and other places, but a pain in the butt for me) all decluttering and most housework will come to a halt so that I can deal with this mess.

Before I can even clean up the back porch though I have to dig out the ditch on the hill above my house. That is so that when it rains again I will not have more water running into the house. Once that is done I'll get the house taken care of.

This is going to take a bit though because it's pretty bad up there.

Here is where part of the water came down and ran down by the pallet, then down the side of the hill into the yard.

Here's a slightly different angle of the same spot.

Here's the area higher up. What you can't quite see in the photo is that on the right a gully is forming and all the dirt washed down and blocked up the ditch, so water that was coming down the ditch went down the side of the hill instead; this is probably where most of the water came from that ended up in my house.

This is the same area as the last photo after about an hour of hot, sweaty work with the shovel. Just glad I didn't hit any really big rocks cuz I didn't take the pick axe up there with me. You can see where I dug through the pile of dirt that washed down, clearing the channel so it can go on down the way it is supposed to.

As soon as I get a chance I will bring some seeds up here to plant and try to get some more cover so there is less chance of erosion. In the meantime I have about another 75 feet of ditch to clear out.


Remember if you click on the picture you can see it bigger.

When Disaster Strikes

Well now, after I did that nice declutter in the cupboards yesterday I went on and washed dishes and tidied up the counters, and swept and mopped before I left home to go to work. Only to be greeted with disaster when I came home after 10:00pm.

mud & water in my kitchen (my floor is blue)

mud & water in the kitchen

worst on the back porch

I haven't even begun on cleaning up any of it. It was too late last night and I had to work this morning. In fact I'm only home a couple of hours and then I'm on my way back to work and it's raining again now.







On another note, I did get a bit of decluttering done this afternoon when it was way too hot to have worked on the mud slide and besides, I had to go back to work, didn't want to get all dirty. So I decluttered some of my inbox and my Windows desk top. 

Yes I still use Outlook Express for my email. Don't even start. I like it. I hate using web based mail, it's annoying with all the clicking back and forth to see what something is and decide I want to read it then  you gotta click back a page to see the next thing. Forget it. Any way, if some of you are still using Outlook, I discovered a long time ago that if you click on the headings that say "From -Subject - Received" it will organize your mail in different ways. Clicking "From" will list everything in alphabetical order by name of sender. Clicking "Subject" will list it in alpha order according to what's in the subject line. Clicking Received will put it all back into the order that it was received in. Click again and it will put it in reverse order by the date.

I get a lot of email reminders from FlyLady and her friends, along with messages from different blogs and forums I follow,  so when they are piling up I just hit From and scroll down and they will all be grouped together for easy deleting.

On Windows I went through the control panel and deleted a number of games and other things that I don't need anymore.

Declutter the Pantry, part 2

pantry cupboard before

Well today I decided that the first part of the cupboard looked so good I should finish up the whole thing. I'm glad I did because I found some yummy treats hiding in the no man's land in the far right side. My kitchen is small without a lot of storage space. My stove is just about 2 1/2 feet to the right of this cupboard. I keep my little kitchen cart/butcher block in the space. Since that makes it a pain to get to that far right hand cabinet, I rarely open and look in there. Guess I should do that more often.



I discovered quite a bit of food hiding back there that I canned when the garden was going great guns in 2009. (See my garden blog here). I actually did about 20-25 minutes on this project, first emptying the shelves and wiping them down to get the chunky stuff out (including a dehydrated baby mouse.....mmmmm could that be a new snack treat for cats?) Then scrubbing the shelves with hot soapy water. Then of course wiping off each jar and can and checking the seals and expiration dates. Then deciding how to rearrange things. I pulled everything over towards the left so that I will see and use it. I  found several jars of various pickles, the really, truly, last jar of pickled eggs, several jars each of hot pickled peppers, applesauce and pear butter. Along with a couple of jars of bean soup and potato soup.

When my timer went off the first time I set it again, because I wanted to finish this project and be done with it. When I was done in the cabinet there was still time left so I used it to wash down the side of the stove and then scrub up some groddy stuff off the floor.

 Oh, what? Oh, yeah, the picture; here ya go!

As you can see that far right hand cabinet is now basically empty. I can now see what I have that should be eaten up pretty soon and better visibility means I won't be duplicating things on my grocery list, so I'll be saving money, always a good thing.


While I was down under there with my head in the cupboard I believe I found where the mice have been coming in. I thought they came in around the gas line but I put a blob of expando foam on that years ago. I couldn't figure out where they kept coming from. Well, looking at things it looks like the shelf boards have shrunk away from the walls of the cabinets in some spots and there is a crack that is probably big enough to let a mouse through.  So caulking those all up will have to go on my never ending to do list.

Those cracks are probably also where the spiders and scorpions are coming in also. Though I have many less scorpions now than I did when I moved into this house. In the beginning we were over run with them. Over the years I have been plugging up every hole and crack I can find with either expando foam or regular caulking. Now I only have one occasionally, maybe 3-5 in the house in a year, as opposed to that many every week. So if you have scorpions or other things in your house, seal up every crack you can find. Look around every place there is a break in the wall of your house, like water, drains and gas lines, around windows and doors. When I redid my spare room I sealed all the joints where the walls met in the corners as well as where they met at the ceiling and floor before I put up the new sheet rock. Has drastically reduced the number of critters coming in there!

Now, for all of my American readers and friends, Happy Independence Day!!! I'm Damn Proud to be American!

DAMN PROUD AMERICAN! by maryhysong

Declutter the Pantry!

pantry cupboard before

When was the last time you cleaned out your pantry? If you are like me you really don't have an honest to goodness pantry like our great grand mothers did (and more's the pity). No we have to cram our canned and packaged foods into whatever cupboard we can.

At least mine has stair step shelves so you can see most of what's in there. These were built by my granddad in the '40s or '50s when he and my granny lived in this house and remodeled the kitchen.

Poor things all of my cupboards have been badly abused over the years, with renters ripping off doors and bashing things up. And I haven't gotten around to fixing most of this stuff since I moved in. There's enough termite damage to know that I need a whole new kitchen.

Back to the point. You have to keep rotating your stock. You have to check the cupboards once in awhile and look at the expiration and 'sell by' dates on things. Otherwise you are going to lose money having to throw some of those things away.

There were several cans of food hiding in the dark recesses of this cabinet that I tossed; they were one and two years past their expiration dates. If they are only a couple of months past I'll put them to the front and use them right up, but too long over and they just don't have a good texture and taste. They won't kill you if you eat them, but they won't taste that good.

pantry cupboard after 15 minutes

So in just 15 minutes I got all of the left hand shelves emptied and wiped down and a bit done on the right hand side. Tossed a number of cans of food, one expired in November 2008.....

What I wouldn't give for an old fashioned honest to goodness pantry. And while I'm daydreaming I'll take a root cellar attached to it, so I can have cool damp vegetable storage as well as cool dry canned good storage.




If you just need a few more shelves in your kitchen you might want to look at these rolling pantries and see if they will work for you.
      Or maybe one of these organizers will help you get the most out of your space.

Antique Hoosier

Antique Hoosier in my kitchen, before

I have a wonderful antique Hoosier that I bought as a local shop, Hill Street Mall,  last year. I didn't even realize what it was when I bought it because the flour and sugar bins had been removed. I have high hopes of someday restoring it to it's former glory. For right now though I think I would just like to be able to get it out from under the pile of junk that has accumulated on and around it.

If you didn't know, Hoosier cabinets were the quintessential kitchen cabinet from the turn of the century until well into the 1930s. Kitchens of the time had no built in cabinets so everything was stored on wall shelves or in freestanding furniture like the Hoosier.

The Hoosier Cabinet Company of Castle, Indiana was perhaps the most well known of the time. They were perhaps one of the first companies to advertise credit terms for their cabinets, with only $1 down and a $1 a month, any husband could afford to give his wife this state of the art piece of furniture to ease the drudgery of kitchen work.


Here in one place were to be found the sugar, flour, coffee and spices, all in lovely matching jars. Most models of cabinets had some sort of built in spice rack; some had handy cards posted on the inside of the upper doors giving times to roast meat and a grocery list to help keep up with what you needed to order.

 The Hoosier company also made a unique stool. Upright the lady of the house could sit to work at the Hoosier and thus rest her feet. Turned upside down it became a stable step ladder for reaching high places.


I highly recommend Hoosier Cabinets by Philip D Kennedy. I learned a great deal about the different styles of cabinets and the different cabinet making companies from this book.

antique Hoosier after 15 min

And now I know you are waiting for this picture! What did I get accomplished in a paltry 15 minutes? Well, a fair amount. I made a pile of stuff to give away, which opened up space to move things back from the edge. I was able to shift some things around up top so I could put more up there and close the doors. And I moved a box of tools that was sitting there to the porch, where tools should live.


Happy 4th Everyone!

Decluttering Fun

As a decorative artist I often use paint to transform castoffs into something new. I have a lot of UFOs laying about at the moment though. (UnFinished  Objects) So as part of my decluttering I have decided I need to concentrate on some of them and get them finished and out of the house.

So today's project was to finish painting the coffee table that was in my living room. Now I didn't get all of this done today, I've been doing a few minutes here and there. Today I just did the decorative flower part. 

coffee table before

So this is what it looked like before I started. I sanded it a bit and gave it several coats of a very pale blue paint that I had leftover from painting the spare room.

coffee table after

Today I added the blue morning glories and now I just need to clear seal it so I can take it to the shop to sell. If you click on the pictures you can see them much larger.










This decorative painting style is simple One Stroke painting that I learned from Donna Dewberry.