I fell asleep almost immediately upon laying down in bed last night.

And every one of us slept in at least an hour later than usual.

We were exhausted, aching, and satisfied with all we'd gotten done over the past two days.

We spent Monday in the garden trying to rescue our plants after days of heavy rain and hail that battered their leaves and washed away much of our soil.

There was soil to move, seeds to re-cover, thistles to pull, and so much mulching to be done.

And the day was was hot like summer.

So when Lupine asked if we could drive to town to swim in the public pool I realized that we all needed a break. No matter how many starts were left to go in the soil.

And then I reminded her that we had a creek and a swimming hole just beyond the pasture and her mouth dropped open in amazement as she remembered.

Oh yes! That!

There was still much work to be done, but before I knew it we had dropped our tools and were running down to the stream for a cooling dip (and a little knitting and banjo playing, of course).

Oh, my. Just what we needed at the end of a long and busy weekend.

Yes. It was time to put down our tools.

Sometimes it's hard to stop once you've gotten started, isn't it?

The
to-do list is always long and always growing. As soon as you cross an item off another
one – or two, or three – appear on the list. There is so much to do we could start at sunup and not quit until long after bedtime and barely make a dent.

I began the weekend full-steam, gutting my sewing room and starting over. (Sorry about that "during" photograph above. Scray stuff!)

Cobbled out of a tiny bedroom, the space is way too small for everything I had going in there, so I needed to call a radical do-over.

And for me anyway, I always expect projects like this to take two hours and they usually end up taking two weeks, no matter how many hours I throw at it. 

I could have kept at it.

Unending until the work was done, but at what cost? This project can wait, but this day can not. So I seek out balance where I can, pausing for a walk or to read a book to my kids or to churn a batch of ice cream.

Because we have stuff to get done and a life to live – all at once.

So I'm always seeking balance. In my own wonky way.

Because we need to pause. To rest. To play.

We need to say "I've done enough" sometimes, and set down our tools, where ever we stand.

Cleaning your house shouldn't expose your family to a host of chemicals.

After all, your goal is clean – not toxic. But since companies are not required to list the ingredients of house cleaning products (not in the US anyway), it's hard to know exactly what you are inviting into your home.

So why not make your own?

It's easier than you might think. And ridiculously cheap.

Here's how we keep things clean around here. 

Most of the ingredients are in your kitchen or laundry room already. Now you just need to learn some new tricks to use them!

DIY Laundry Soap

Ingredients

• Natural bar soap
• Borax
• Baking Soda
• Washing Soda

I shared this recipe with you two years ago and you went gaga for it! Because, who knew it was so darn easy to make laundry soap?!

Every few weeks the kids and I grate a couple of bars of our soap, mix in baking soda, washing soda, and borax, and we're set for the month! It's ridiculously easy. And yeah, cheap. Even if you do use the most amazing soap on Earth, like I do.

Oh, yeah.

And you can even make your own washing soda if you can't find any at your local stores.

My laundry soap recipe is here.

DIY Laundry Pretreater

Ingredients

• Light-colored bar of soap (no dark or bright colored bars or soaps with exfoliants) 

For machine washable clothing only.

Moisten stained area on fabric. Rub with bar soap to coat stained area. Wash as usual with the warmest water for your fabric.

Check stain before drying, and repeat if needed.

DIY Citrus All Purpose Cleaner

Ingredients:

• White vinegar
• Fresh citrus peels from 1-3 oranges, tangerines, lemons, etc.

This one is even easier than the laundry soap!

Fill a mason jar with citrus peels and add enough vinegar to cover. (Weigh down the peels with a smaller jar if they are floating out of the liquid.) In one to two weeks, pour off the vinegar into a clean jar and compost the peels.

Transfer to a spray bottle if you have one, and use to clean floors, tubs, tile, showers, counters, and more.

I use this all. the. time.

 

The Best Window Cleaner is No Window Cleaner

Ingredients:

• Water
• Microfiber cloth

I've tried ever DIY window cleaner recipe I could find. Dozens, I tell you. Dozens.

And I didn't love a one.

Nor do I love the store-bought natural incarnations of the horrid blue stuff my mom uses. (Man that blue stuff works. But it is loaded with ammonia, fragrance oils, and dyes. Nothing I want to breathe nor rub over every glassy surface in my house.)

So after giving up on washing windows forever more, I hit the jackpot at our local hardware store. It is the humble microfiber cloth. Oh. My. Goodness.

For the first time in my live I'm loving washing windows. Though the kids are a bit crazy over this cloth too, and usually beat me to it.

And now I wash windows with… water. And my cloth. And I squeal with delight. For real. Ditch the blue spray and buy a microfiber cloth. It's all you need.

(One disclaimer for you tactile people: it feels really freaky in your hand. Sort of like it's snagging on every microscopic skin cell you've ever had. I got over it. If you can't, just wear gloves.)

Homemade Disinfectant

Ingredients

• White vinegar

Really! That's all you need. Can you believe it? Yup. The acidity of vinegar it is one of the best disinfectants around.

Here's how: Just wipe down contaminated area with undiluted vinegar and allow to dry. Make you wonder why you had that other stuff around, doesn't it?

And by avoiding antibacterial agents, you won't be contributing to the development of antibacterial-resistant super bugs. And that's good for everyone.

Feel free to substitute All Purpose Citrus Cleanser for white vinegar.

No more nasty bleach!

DIY Floor Cleaner

Ingredients:

• Vinegar or Citrus All Purpose Cleaner (above)
• Water
• Essential Oils (optional)
• Squirt of unscented dish soap (optional)

When I clean my floors I have a pretty basic routine. I fill a bucket with warm water, add a carefully measured glug of vinegar (glug!) and a few drops of my favorite essential oil blend – Cranky Pants. It's all I need! If the floor is horrifying (okay, mine often is) add a wee squirt of natural dish soap, too.

Smells great and it works even better. What more do you need?

Use your favorite essential oil blend or try a few drops of sweet orange eo.

 DIY Sink & Tub Scrub

Ingredients:

• Baking Soda
• Vinegar
• Liquid unscented dish soap (optional)

Sprinkle your sink or tub with baking soda. A couple of TB is enough for the sink, maybe 1/4 cup for the tub. Moisten with a splash of vinegar or spray it from your handy spritz bottle, all around the surface you are cleaning. The baking soda and vinegar will react and fizz up. Fun! Now scrub the fizzing/fizzled paste around the tub and rinse. Clean!

If your surface is stupid nasty dirty you can add a squirt of dish soap to your rag before you begin.

If your sink handles have horrible gunk around them, soak a clean rag in vinegar, encircle the nasty fixture, and let it sit. By the time you clean the rest of the bathroom it should be easily wiped away.

Look how much less gross your house is. And it cost you like eight cents! Cha-ching!

 DIY Toilet Bowl Cleaner

Ingredients:

• Baking Soda
• Vinegar
• Liquid unscented dish soap (optional)

Toss 1/4 Cup of baking soda into your toilet. Scrub around with your brush, then add a healthy glug of vinegar. (1/2 Cup or more). Scrub with your brush. It will fizz. Let it sit until your other cleaning is done, then flush.

 

In truth, these recipes do not mean my house is always spotless. Quite the opposite. But when we clean, we mean business. And no toxins are left behind when we're done.

So there you have it! Cleaning, cheap and green. What's not to love? (Okay, maybe toilet cleaning…)

 

Edited in 2015 to add: For whatever reason I get dozens of spam comments on this post ever week. It's a pain. So I'm closing comments to save myself time deleting bunk comments. Sorry for those of you who have something authentic to say! Feel free to email me. 

I have a little one in my arms with a belly ache today. So we're taking today off to cuddle, read book, sip broth, and heal.

A slow and nourishing day.

A quiet day.

I'll be back here tomorrow I expect, after everyone feels well, rested, and shiny once more.

Be well, friends.

Love,
Rachel

Formula for a Lovely Weekend

Begin at home, wearing pajamas almost until lunch time.

Explore science, nature, and art with wild abandon. Add copious amounts of imaginative play. Knit. Plan gardens. Prune orchard. Read about sheep. Visit with friends.

Add fresh air and sunshine in large quantities along with early bedtimes and lots of laughter.

Repeat process throughout Saturday and Sunday. Then pause to make popcorn for dinner. Continue to play during dinner. And laugh. A lot.

After dinner, notice the horrifying amount of mud on the kitchen floor and end the weekend with mopping.

(And more laughing.)

What was the sweet spot in your weekend?

It was a busy weekend and a couple of us are feeling a little (or more honestly – a lot) under the weather.

We're taking today off to let fevers cool and bellies and heads feeling well once more. Here's to the healing power of a long sleep, a mountain of library books, a cup of homemade chicken stock and plenty of elderberry tincture.

Be well, friends.

Love,

Rachel

P.S. I'm going to leave the comments open on yesterday's magical giveaway so a few more of you can enter. I'll close them bright and early on Wednesday!

Hello, dirty, old, worn out cupboard! I love you – even if you do look terrible these days.

This old cabinet and I go way back. When Pete and I got married we put every
penny of our wedding gift money (around $1000) toward the down payment on our first house. (The house that was a few blocks from the circus.)

We
lived there for only three years, but those three years were huge.

We

had just gotten married, we had moved away from the only community we
had really ever known, and a
couple of years later Sage was born within those walls.

This house was
where we spent that first hard year of parenting as we struggled to find
our groove as a family of three.

Just after closing on the house in 2000, we found the original kitchen cabinets in our garage.

I fell
hopelessly in love with them, so Pete converted one larger base cabinet
in to an island, adding a salvaged butcher block top. We hauled that heavy cupboard back into the kitchen
where it was built, and I painted it my then favorite green – a perfect
fit for our cheerful yellow kitchen.

When
we moved I couldn't bear to part with it, so we've hauled this cupboard
from home to home for the past ten years, parking it in back corners of various garages as it awaited a reason to be once more. (I can't think of anything else we've done that with. I'm pretty quick to let things go that seem to have no purpose.)

But when we moved to the farm this fall it was time to put it back into action as the centerpiece of our kitchen – worn out paint and all. (Or as we call our tattered belongings, "more shabby than chic".)

Yesterday
while the kids were playing with friends I set to work to wake up that
sleepy cabinet. An hour (and a half-quart of paint) later, it was a
whole new piece of furniture. I kept squealing every time I saw it for the rest of the day. Hello aqua cabinet!

Interestingly, as I cleaned up the cabinet
for painting I noticed that several layers of pant were chipped in a few
places. And the base coat from 100 years ago – hidden beneath my Martha Stewart green and lots and lots of white – is nearly identical to the color I chose.

I love that.

The hardware was already painted, so for now I've just repainted it. My intention is to pull off and strip all of the hardware some soon day.

And now this kitchen is starting to feel just right. Oh yes. Home.

My color palette for this tiny kitchen is above. Light gray walls, dark gray cabinets, light aqua ceiling, and yellow accents.

Oh what a difference a little paint can make.

And now, what to do with that other 1/2 quart of paint…

Well. That wasn't the plan I had for Sunday.

Oh. My.

It started like this. I cleaned and set up my new craft room. I was jazzed and ready to dig in on my first big sewing project in my new space. But I still couldn't find the quilt that I was working on for Sage before the move.

We still have some boxes in the barn as well as the basement, so I headed to the barn and dug through what I've stored there.

Nothing.

I headed to the basement to check those boxes and was greeted by almost ankle-deep water throughout most of our space.

And the boxes? Yeah. They were on the floor.

Ack.

I called for Pete and along with Sage and Lupine we did what we could to bail out for the rest of the day.

I lifted and drained boxes while we used snow shovels and push brooms to clear the water. Pete headed outside with pick axe in hand and cut a trough across the driveway to divert the snow melt away from the house and down into the pasture.

I sent the kids up to the house with some treasures to try to salvage (our wool and wood puppets were bobbing in the water having tumbled out of their basket, and the frames and pictures from our family photo wall was just dry enough to save if we acted fast). 

And then I started going through wet boxes.

One by one with fingers crossed.

The truth is I wasn't sure what was down there. We moved into a very small house and just didn't have the space for all that we kept. We've been going through boxes but it's been slow. Because it's a little overwhelming.

After yesterday I sure wish we'd gotten to it sooner.

In one box I found my favorite photo of Sage – ever – dripping wet. (That's the one above, taken at our last country home when he was three.) I cried a little, wondering what other treasures might be at the bottom of the next box.

There were some sad discoveries. Like Lupine's Flower Book, my favorite artistic/homeschooly creation of hers ever. It was an entire homemade book of lovely drawings of flowers she wished to grow, carefully labeled in her five-year old hand. Poppy. Rose. Tulip. Foxglove. Lupine.

So I cried again and tossed it into the box-of-wet-things-that-can't-be-saved.

And then I opened the next box. And the next. And the next.

It was dark out before we went back into the house. The kids cooked a simple dinner that we ate around a table heaped with wet half-salvaged possessions.

In truth, we really were blessed. We lost random things like telephone books – not baby books. There is still more to be gone through today, but I think overall we got off easy.

I can't imagine weathering a true home-wrecking disaster and seeing the treasures that you hold so close destroyed in their entirety. 

And again, it comes to simplicity, doesn't it? If I had just a few things. If the basement was empty. If.

But it is what it is. Today we're sore. Tired. And our house is suddenly full of boxes to be unpacked once more.

So we'll get to it. It's the only choice we've got.

Oh. And one more thing. Remember that last
post I wrote? About seeing beauty in winter? (Heh.)

No really. I did. I
saw it. Even in the midst of hauling our belongings from the water, I
looked up and saw this. And had to stop and breathe it in.

Such beauty. Yes, even in the chaos.

Love,
Rachel

 

We've been on the farm for nearly two months now.

And I'm starting to feel like we're settling in.

We haven't painted yet (something I'm really looking forward to), but we're making it our own just the same.

I thought today that I'd show you around and share some of my favorite corners. Not the big picture (because there is nothing big about this little house!) but just a few favorite little touches.

Aside from a second-hand shelf or two we haven't added anything new. I am working on a few small pieces of art that the house is calling for, simply using what we have on hand – old maps, driftwood, calendars, and stones.

Otherwise we're just finding new uses for what we already had. And it feels good to see our old things in a new context.

This little collection lives in our upstairs hallway. It is a favorite corner for me.

The barn papercut was picked up at a rummage sale for 50 cents. The barn line drawing was also from a garage sale ($4). I bought them when I was focusing my energy on manifesting our own farm, so it's delightful to see them on the wall here.

The rose is a painting Sage made for me when he was small, painted on a decaying board we took off of our garage in Viroqua.

The woodblock of the snowdrift is from a marvelous local artist, also part of my country-manifestation-experiment.

And my favorite, the thrifted vintage shelf arrangement I put together one quiet morning here on the farm. I used an old vocabulary card, some Lake Superior stones and driftwood, and chicken feathers.

See? Pretty can be cheap or free!

Our bathroom is home to the art that once hung in our playroom. (Remember this?) I wasn't sure where it would fit in this little house and wondered if they would have a place here at all.

But they do brighten up an otherwise dull, windowless space perfectly.

Fabric hoops are the easiest art ever. Quick, cheap, and satisfying. (Second hand hoops run about 50 cents each.)

And the family room now hosts our nesting doll collection.

After putting most of Lupine's and my matryoshka dolls in the bye-bye box during the pre-move purge I had a change of heart.

Because I love them.

So I scored a sold wooden shelf at Goodwill (My big decorative spend at $6) and the dolls became art as well.

(You might recognize the kids' bed sheet curtains from the old house too. Use what you have is clearly a theme.)

The children have also set to work, carving out their own space in their bedroom. I often hear the tap-tap-tap of Lupine's hammer as she hangs another piece of art in her room.

Resisting the urge to be in charge of how their room looks is important work for me. It is their room, so I've relinquished the cute vision in my head of all that I could do to make it lovely to my eyes. Because it isn't mine.

And besides, they're doing great.

(The spool necklace rack was Pete's gift for Lupine on Solstice a year ago. It matches the music box I made for her. I know. It's completely rad. He's one crafty papa.)

I also framed a couple of vintage maps of Wisconsin – of both the Driftless (where we live) and the North Woods (which we love).

The maps came from a 1960's atlas of Wisconsin at the local church thrift store for 50 cents. I almost hated to cut it, but now we enjoy it every day. The rest will be used for decoupage.

If you thirft even occasionally you can find nice quality frames for a couple of dollars each. I had the frames on hand for another project but the map project trumped!

So there you have it. The artsy tour of our house. Sure, we still need paint (and curtains, and to rip out that old linoleum floor, and…) but progress is being made.

Adding these simple touches was truly the moment when our farm started to feel like home. What a difference a little art can make.

I'd love to know: what is your favorite way to beautify your space without buying new?

Love,

Rachel

Let's just pretend these are current photos, shall we? Because really, a tinsel tree, an unmade bed, and citrus are timeless. Right? No matter that I just borrowed them from myself from December's past.

We still have no internet and no phone at the farm. It makes me so… present when I'm there. No distractions, no "need" to find that new recipe, no staying up late tinkering about on-line. I love it. Except that I'm terribly ineffective at keeping up on emails and blogging. And when I do blog I no longer have access to my photos, which are on the hard drive at the farm. I'll figure it out. Thanks for being patient while I do.

This week we've been…

~ Unpacking, organizing and purging. What goes where? What goes away for good? It's a long process but we're digging in. Thanks for your warm response to my last post. I'm so glad you're inspired.

~ Obsessing over bees and sheep and gardens and fences. All things that will be popping up around here in the spring.

~ Appreciating friends and family so very much. Help with meals, help with our kids, and help moving are the finest gifts we've received in a long time.

~ Crafting. Lupine is obsessed with painting noodles with thick layers of watercolor paint, then stringing them into garlands. It's been her hobby for days and while we've done much of it together, she is content to string noodles while I unpack.

~ Knitting. And knitting. And knitting. (Yes, even Pete. As I tucked into bed last night I called, "Are you coming upstairs, baby?" And the reply was music to my ears: "Yep. Just as soon as I finish this row!" Gush.) As for me, since the move began I have cast on – and cast off – two pairs of fingerless gloves, two pairs of mittens, and one pair of felted slippers. And yesterday I cast on Sage's solstice gift.

Knitting is my sanity right now.

Blessings to you all. I'll be back in a day or two with some fresh photos and fresh stories. (Or I hope so!)

xo
Rachel