The Do’s & Don’ts for Cleaning Stainless Steel

Stainless steel adds an image of elegance and sophistication to any kitchen, and the beauty of that is how easy it is to keep clean. Here is what to do and what not to do when cleaning your stainless steel appliances so that they will keep their luster and shine for years to come.

What to do:

1. Always start by cleaning with warm water and a cloth, or a microfiber cloth first.
2. Spray with glass cleaner to clean off fingerprints.
3. Use dish washing liquid and warm water to clean tougher stains and dirt.
4. Use a stainless steel cleaner to remove stains if needed, but always read the directions and test a small spot on the appliance first.
5. Wipe in the direction of the grain to avoid leaving streaks.
6. Always towel dry after cleaning to prevent water spotting.

What not to do:

1. Never use steel wool or steel brushes. They will scratch the surface of your stainless steel and make it more susceptible to rusting and staining.
2. Abrasive cleaners will scratch the surface and should always be avoided.
3. Bleach will stain and damage stainless steel, do not use cleaning sprays or solutions that contain bleach.
4. Dirty water and cleaning solutions can leave a residue that can stain and damage the surface, so don’t forget to rinse and dry.

The keys to helping your stainless steel appliances avoid stains and corrosion is proper care and maintenance. With just a little effort, your appliances will stay looking shiny and new.

Get Your Home Clean and Organized This Weekend

No one likes a cluttered house. But, unfortunately, no one likes cleaning a cluttered house either, especially when it's so hard to keep clean. Take some time this weekend to declutter once and for all, and figure out an organizational scheme that works for you.

Step One: Get Rid of Your Crap

Before you can have a truly organized house, you need to purge all the stuff you don't need. Before you do anything, form an attack plan. One of the best ways to declutter your home is to create a detailed inventory, and we've shared lots of solutions for doing so in the past. Once you've highlighted all the things you can downsize, it's time to get to work. Check out our guides on kicking your clutter habit for good and de-crapifying your home to get started. Your home office is probably its own beast, so be sure to dedicate specific time to that with our guide to getting out from under your office crap, and organizing those piles of paper into something manageable. Once you've gotten rid of the clutter you don't need, you'll be much better off when it comes to organizing everything else. Photo by Sandra Cohen-Rose and Colin Rose.

Find Better Ways to Organize Your Stuff

Now that you've gotten rid of the crap, it's time to organize the stuff you have left to make it more useful to you during your day. Once again, form a good plan of attack before you do anything else. Go through all your leftover stuff and make sure each item has a home. If you aren't sure where to put something, don't waste time on it. Put it in a clutter bucket that you can decide on after you're done with everything else. If you need help keeping everything clean, there are a lot of gadgets that can help, as well as stuff you probably already have lying around. Go through each room and see where the weak points are. Too much clutter spreading itself through your house? Get a landing strip for the front door. Can't find anything in your desk drawers? Organize them by a hierarchy of importance. Fill dresser drawers front to back so you can see everything inside, and find a place for your kitchen stuff that keeps floating around your cupboards (like pot lids).
Remember though, the object isn't to get everything picture-perfect. That's a waste of time. The goal is to get everything just organized enough so that you can find and access everything you need in a timely fashion. Sometimes, that means de-organizing: your silverware or sock drawers don't always need to be separated and organized perfectly, for example. You'll spend more time organizing them than you ever would searching for the right thing when you need it.

Make Sure You Keep It Clean

Once you've gone through all that work, you probably won't ever want to do it again, so now comes the (seemingly) hardest part: keeping everything clean and organized. It's much easier than it seems, though: in fact, by putting all those chores on autopilot, you can keep everything clean with what feels like minimal amounts of work. For example, instead of striving for perfection and going through big cleaning sessions every once in a while, just clean up 15 minutes a day. After 15 minutes, stop. You'd be surprised how quickly you get to perfection with such little effort. Every time you leave a room, take one item that doesn't belong there with you. And, every night, reboot your office to make sure you come back to a clean workspace in the morning. A few minutes a day is all it takes to keep everything clean and organized for the long haul, and once you've worked it into your daily routine, it'll be so easy to keep up you won't even notice you're doing it. Good luck!

Quickly De-Stink Your House by Cooking Vanilla Extract or Any Essential Oil

 

Perhaps your house doesn't smell particularly nice and you've got company on the way. While you might not clear the smell up forever, you can improve your home's scent by burning some vanilla extract or any other essential oil.

Put two caps full of vanilla extract (you can use other oils, such as lemon and lavender) in a coffee cup (or oven proof dish), then place it in the oven at 300 degrees for one hour. The smell will start to spread after around twenty minutes and encompass the whole house after the hour duration.
Should last for at least a day.

Although not a permanent solution, if you need to remove a bad smell or just want a nice one in your home, this sounds like a pretty simple solution.

Every once in a while I will take a damp cloth and wipe down my mini blinds to catch some of the dust, and then remember oh yeah...that doesn't work.  The cloth just pushes the dust around so that it clumps and looks even worse than it did before!

Here is how to clean you mini blinds so that they are actually clean!

1.  Take them down and place them in your bathtub.
2.  Run warm water and add a couple big squeezes of dish soap and about a cup of vinegar.
3.  Fill just until the water level comes up over the mini blinds.
4. Give blinds a swish around the sudsy tub and then let soak for one hour.
5. Come back, swish some more, and drain tub.  Rinse with clean water to remove soap residue.
6. Give the blinds a gentle shake to remove some water, hang them back up and let them dry.
7. Wasn't that easy?

Happy Cleaning!