Saturday, July 28, 2007

Sunday for Rest

Tomorrow is Sunday. Me being the sort of Christian who attends church on Sundays, it is my day of rest. Now I don't have a problem with people who chose Saturday as a day of rest, or even Tuesday or Friday. I do feel that it is important to the health of a person, especially a homemaker, to have one day each week of rest.

I do not start or perpetuate huge projects on Sunday. Of course I'll cook and clean, I'll do dishes, even hang laundry, pick up around the house. But I do not engage in heavy projecting. I'll fabric-paint a shirt, or sew, or draw, because I enjoy doing these things. I enjoy my housework, too, but I won't move furniture about, change curtains, or alphabetize the DVD's on a Sunday. Instead, I take some time to contemplate.

I attend the church service in the morning and take notes on the sermon. Sometimes I'll look up the text on eSword just to see what other commentaries have said on it over the years. I'll also plan my week out, make lists of things I might make for supper and make sure my tasks are all entered into their various programs to remind me throughout the week.

Sometimes, well, maybe monthly or so, I'll have a time of introspection when I review my life goals, modify them as desired, and ask myself how I'm proceeding towards completing them. Tomorrow will be a day like that. I've been going through a lot of changes in my life with coming home and being a full-time housewife/mother just for the past three weeks. Time to evaluate what I've accomplished, what I have left to do, and how I can regain my motivation.

Thursday, July 5, 2007

A less known part of homemaking

As much as people who actually stay at home can tell you that this is a definite part of the process, it usually isn't listed on the various tellings of what a homemaker does! Keeping the furniture in working order is definitely important, especially in this family where most of our stuff is hand-me-down. In fact, I'd have to say that every single bit of furniture we own was given to us.

There's a rip in the arm cloth of a lovely comfortable plush chair in the living room. A simple rip I could sew back, but this material is stretched tight and it's opened up over the foam-padded chair arm. My solution was to wait for an opportune sale, which opened up at Ocean State Job Lot (surplus store) this week, and buy a slipcover. Slipcovers are a good way to freshen up a piece of furniture. Unfortunately, they tend to be expensive. Even the one I found in that great sale was all of $20.

Little Bernie, my son aged 4, spilled milk some time ago into the loveseat cushion in the living room. As much as my husband rinsed out the block foam cushion, it just didn't ever get properly clean again. So I took all the covers off the cushions to wash, only to find a little dark dry spot on the other bottom cushion. I sniffed at it. It appears that our son has graced the loveseat in another way as well.

There is a way to fix this, but it isn't cheap! I put one of the cushions in the back of the station wagon and took it down to a place that sells foam. There are places like these. Look under "foam" in the Yellow Pages. I tried already looking under "furniture" and "refurbish" and such. It's under "foam", trust me! It costs $55 to replace a single bottom cushion, about 6 inches thick and I don't quite remember how wide. Anyways, he measured it, said he had to order it, and it will be in tomorrow morning to pick up. So I will be making another trip out tomorrow.

A kitchen how-to site says that you can freshen up your kitchen cabinets with some furniture polish. I do know that furniture polish works wonders on a tired-looking bit of wood furniture. I'm going to try it with the cabinets and see how it does.

Our downstairs couch was hand-me-down, and it has had a musty scent clinging to it even after a few weeks in it's new home. I bought some carpet-and-furniture spray from the carpet-cleaning part of the supermarket and I'm going to try that. We'll see how it goes.

Someday I'm going to learn how to build some simple furniture pieces. The stuff is expensive, and it can't be all that hard to do, as long as you don't mind Shaker-style, which I love.

Monday, July 2, 2007

Kitchen Upkeep!

How things change! Since my last update, my husband has landed a job and I have quit mine. I am now a full-time mother and homemaker proper! It didn't take long for me to launch headlong into long-neglected housework and today is no exception.

How often you need to do this really depends on how you run your kitchen. Since I've been quite lackadaisical, this badly needed to be done. I basically took all of my non-refrigerated goods out this morning and put back only what was still good. Come to think of it, everyone probably could stand to do this maybe yearly. Even the best housekeeper may end up with a three-year-old box of brownie mix in the depths of her cupboard.

My house is a bi-level, and the kitchen is pretty small as kitchens go. I don't have a lot of cupboard space. There are two shelved closets in the hallway, and one of them is my pantry. There I keep dry goods, cans, etc. In my kitchen, I keep baking goods (from rice to vinegar to baking soda to cane sugar) and the simplest common things I have more often, like my trusty jar of Ovaltine. Down in the cellar, I have a shelf on which I keep things like extra boxes of cereal that I bought on sale and the cases of ramen that my husband persists in buying periodically for himself. I cleaned up the kitchen this morning, getting everything off the floor for once and giving it a good scrub, so I had plenty of room in which to pull everything out of the cupboards and pantry and go through it all. Wow. I ended up dumping easily half my inventory.

I hate putting so much stuff into the garbage. I live on a four acre lot, and I have designated a small area for compost. You don't even need to have four acres to maintain a compost bin. You can do it on two, even one acre, depending on what you compost. Meat is not recommended as it attracts carnivores. Most dry cereals, pastas, and vegetable leftovers can be composted. I filled a container with old potato flakes, ancient bread crumbs, aged pastas and similar, and my young son carried it out to the compost and emptied it out for me.

Hopefully this will help me keep from buying things that we already have, that I just plain couldn't find!