Cleaning Archives - The Message in the Mess

Cleaning May 22, 2012

How to Get Smoke Out of Clothing

Hi guys! I just wanted to share a quick laundry tip with you today. A few years ago, just before we moved in together, The Hubs had a house fire and lost pretty much everything. What clothes he could salvage smelled…well, not so nice. At the time, it wasn’t in the budget to replace everything so I had to salvage what I could. I wanted to save his clothing so he’d at least have more than one set (that he was washing nightly – I felt so bad for him!) until we could get out and get him some new things. So, I did what any nerdy girlfriend would do. I did a little research online and discovered an awesome way to get rid of the nasty, sooty smoke and ick. Check it out: You’ll need some Arm & Hammer powder laundry detergent in “Free” and a giant jug of distilled white…

Cleaning May 8, 2012

Going Paperless in the Kitchen

A few days ago, Katie from Gadanke.com posted a link to how she and her hubby Martin went paperless in their kitchen and it hit me that we’ve made some changes in our kitchen too – but we’ve yet to go paper towel-less. What a great way to cut back further on our budget! Here’s what we’ve done so far:For general cleaning, dusting and shining up glass I use these – Evercare Microfiber Cleaning Cloths. I use the thick, green ones for dusting, the yellow one for glass, the pink one for furniture polishing and I use the blue one for bathrooms. I love that they’re color coded and that they clean so thoroughly. Because of them, I no longer use paper towels to clean.Click Here for SourceNext up we have the Tekla towel from Ikea. It’s basically just a flour sack type towel but they are amazingly well made and…

Cleaning August 30, 2011

Quick Tip

I don’t know about you, but I haven’t been blessed by the Dyson Fairy just yet. 😉 My vacuum is bagless, but it still has an accordion cone filter that attaches to the dirt bin. Try as I might I could not keep that thing clean, until I discovered that a hair pick works great to fit in between the accordion folds. Now, when I clean out the vacuum bin, I just scrape excess dust off of the filter with the hair pick. Works like a charm.Now, if the Dyson Fairy could only hear me…Happy Tuesday!