Got kids or pets? Then you "got" scratches on your wood furniture- I don't care who you are. The wood crayons have never really worked for me; I don't know if I had the wrong color or what. But here's what to do. Take an oily nut (filbert, Brazil nut, macadamia) and bit it in half. Eat the half that is in your mouth. Take the other half and rub with the grain of the wood across the scratch(es) on the furniture. The natural oils in the nut will fill in the cracks. No kidding! Want more great ideas? Then go see what works for everyone else!

Labels: works for me

Remember our Roachityville Horror? My guess is that y'all are dying to know the continuing saga...and so I shall indulge you. To be honest, we haven't seen the first big live cockroach in our home since that dreaded Monday night two weeks ago. Did you catch the big and the live part? Carrying on...See, turns out that roach poison doesn't kill roach eggs (apparently), so now we have little cockroach spawn. The good news is they can't fly- yet. The bad news is WE STILL SEE ROACHES. My friend Susan called them, let's see if I can get this just right, "sad little orphans." Excuse me?!

Moving along.

The mouse problem I mentioned? As luck would have it, there was not a mouse. There was a rat. Two of them. The good news is they are both dead (and were before I ever laid eyes on them). The bad news is that when I did lay eyes on them they were a maggot-infested stench. Ahem.

We still love our house. Really, we do. It's quaint and quirky, complete with some crooked inside windows. And not a wall or doorway is square, level, plumb- whatever. It's ours, and it's affordable (less than affordable, actually). It just happens to carry extra tenants- temporarily.

Labels: home ownership

Labels: Rob

This is GOOD, girls, so listen up! You must go buy this incredibly wonderful product as soon as possible. I cannot stress enough how this will revolutionize your bathroom cleaning. Really, you just press the tool against the inside of your toilet bowl until it clicks; it releases a "stamp" of gel cleaner that lasts (approximately) a week. Y'all, I have three boys, and my toilets smell nice now. 'Nuff said.

Check out all the other great ideas this week.

Labels: works for me

Remember we bought a new house and moved to another city? Well, technically the house is only "new" in the sense that it is "new to us." In every other aspect this home is 45+ years old. Uh huh, go ahead and let all those stereotypes filter on through, because they're probably pretty accurate.

So the house had been unoccupied for over a year. Apparently other people enjoyed having such a nice, empty backyard in which to hang. I can only surmise this from the silent testimony of broken beer bottles and ground out cigarette butts (can I say butts on a family-friendly blog?), er, cigarette hineys that littered our backyard. But there were also non-people thingies that enjoyed the uninhabited state of our home/yard. Thingies like mice and roaches (Rob says I'm only fooling myself to call them Palmetto bugs). And since our "new" house was built by "old" standards, we can't seem to find a pest control company that will service our 16" crawl space (now it has to be 18").

Anyway.

We found a company to come service the exterior of our home and the whole of our yard. I'm not really into the whole spray-bug-poison-inside-my-house treatment. The gentleman explained we should see a dramatic decrease within two weeks (not sooner, since I wouldn't let him spray inside). Fine. We've dealt with it for a month, so what's two more weeks, right?

That was a week ago Monday. On that same night, at precisely 9:00 PM, all cockroach h*ll broke loose in our home. These things were literally crawling out of the woodwork in a staggering, poisoned-to-death sort of way. It never occured to me that they would try to come inside the house to escape the chemicals outside. What followed can only be described as a comedy of errors as all six of us scurried around with a flip-flop on each hand, or a flyswatter- sometimes both. Basically Rob and I were on stun/kill duty, and Harrison and Eli were on the pick-it-up-with-toilet-paper-and-flush-down-the-toilet patrol. Sophia and Kirk just ran around screaming, "Here's another one!" When the count got to 35, Eli started declaring, "That's it! We're going to the Ramanda (Ramada)." I told him, "Don't be ridicul- HOLY SMOKES! Is that one FLYING?!?! Get your clothes together, we're going to the Ramada!!"

As it turned out, the death toll only rose to 48. Yeah, I know. We didn't go to the Ramanda, or anywhere else, but sleep was a looooong time coming that night. I think in (many) years to come this will be hilarious. For now, I'm just thankful it wasn't the mice (however many there are) that came pouring into the house. Although, I have noticed a rather unsavory odor when I step out the front door...

Labels: home ownership

Oh dear...excuse me while I go buy some Geritol...

So this week is a "Backward" edition, and it works like this: instead of giving a tip, I want (hope) to get tips from y'all.

In a nutshell- we have a mouse. Let me interject here and say I fervently hope it is a mouse (singular) and not a RAT. At any rate, this guy is good- a little too good, if you know what I mean. He eats my tomatoes sunning on my windowsill; he eats my bananas hanging on the banana tree; he eats the mozzarella cheese RIGHT OUT OF THE TRAPS (3 of them).

Can someone pleeeeeease help? Leave a comment here with your suggestions, and then go see who else you can help today!

Labels: works for me