Actually Cute Inexpensive Air Fresheners?

 

Okay, so I know this sounds suspect, but bear with me. I saw BzzAgent online, thought it looked like fun, signed up, and next thing I knew, these free Glade products were in my house. I know this sounds like the beginning of some kind of weird sales pitch, but it's totally not, I promise.

The white thing is a fragrance diffuser. It has no branding at all, which makes me so, so happy. I'm the kind of person who rips the labels off of everything. The plastic rips right off of those room sprays, so they look kind of like vases. The branding is very subtly embossed into the plastic on one side. I would actually be fine to leave one of those out in the bathroom, which is probably nice for any guest who might want it and would otherwise have to dig around in the cabinets for it.

I should also mention that these things smell like naturally-occurring smells, not chemicals. We have Pineapple and Mangosteen in the diffuser and our kitchen and living room smell like pineapple upside-down cake, despite the two baby dogs running around. The fragrance mist we're using is Cotton and Italian Mandarin. I don't really know how to explain this, but it just smells like a clean, nice-smelling house, but not like you sprayed anything, which, come to think of it, is somewhat creepy.

I know there's a hand in this picture. Let it go.

Both of these products are refillable, which is great. It's not surprising with the diffuser, and you can picture exactly what that entails, but with the mist, it does away with the waste created by that giant plastic contraption you usually find on the top of bottles. I wish something could be done about the canisters, but this is a step in the right direction, to be sure. When I picked them up, the starter kits were $2.99 for the spray, and $5.99 for the diffuser, so they're much cheaper than the options we usually choose, as well.

Anyway, I'm genuinely happy BzzAgent alerted me to the existence of these things. I would never have noticed them before, so I wanted to share. They're pretty inoffensive-looking, as far as air-fresheners go, right?

Purge of the Day: Decorative Dessert Paraphernalia

Off goes a huge bag of cake, candy, and cookie not-so-essentials. Jonathan and I took cake decorating classes way back when, and it was a fun creative outlet for a while, but it's not something either of us has much inclination to do anymore. I'm not sure why no one ever believes me, but Jonathan was actually better at it than I was. Friends have referred to (nay insisted upon) how he only took the class to be supportive of me, but that wasn't the case at all. For some reason, it's okay for a guy to be artistic, but not if he does something edible with it? Discuss gender politics in the space below.





Okay. Well, I kind of agree with some of your points. We kept most of our stuff, so we can still pimp the odd birthday cake, but we raided the kitchen and decided on a case-by-case basis how likely we were to do other projects. Wedding cake with 80s-syle columns? Not very, even though the cake itself would be very. VERY!! Remember Heathers? Never mind. We assembled a bag of donatables, and exported the tools we'll only use once a year to the art supplies section of our office closet, thus freeing up room in our cabinets for a few of our less-than-weekly appliances, THUS making room on our counter for the cookie jar I so desperately want to buy to organize our dog treats. Organization is kind of like Candy Crush Saga in that way. DO NOT LOOK IT UP. IT WILL RUIN YOUR LIFE. Byeee.

Best Apartment Ever?

I've already said that I've been a million times happier since Jonathan and I purged more than half of our personal belongings and moved into a smaller (but more private) home. Life is just simpler now, and a lot less stressful. It's easy to get organized for guests, and almost everything we own goes somewhere specific.

The expression, "A place for everything and everything in its place," used to irritate me, because I could never understand how one could possibly accomplish having a place for everything. Either you have enough space or you don't, and I never did. It took me until my mid-twenties to realize that the problem isn't the amount of space, but the amount of stuff taking up the space. Seems like a simple enough math problem, but there you go.

You can probably understand why the architect (Gary Chang) in this video is basically my new hero:



Wouldn't it be awesome to live somewhere like that? Everything he needs is right there, and clean-up must be incredibly easy.

Uh-Oh

We are in trouble, everyone! We are in trouble because I just found another website where we have to buy everything!!! It's organize.com.

Ironing blanket for ironing in small spaces

Jack ring holder

Polaroid-looking photo frames

Stacked sliding drawers for inside the cabinet

MacBook Cord Keeper

I would apologize in advance for how much I just made you blow this month's budget, but as it turns out, I also just found out about OrganizeIt.com. Our problems begin anew!

Sliding under-sink storage

The invisible bookshelf I've been wanting to buy forever

An ice cream spade that looks like a whale!

Okay, stopping... I don't want to make clutter with too many new organizational tools, as tempting as that is. The guy and I do need to come up with some storage solutions for our new place, though. It's a lot smaller than our last one, but has a huge yard. I feel like that trade-off is a no-brainer in L.A. I'll let you know if I come up with anything! 

Have a happy day!!

Purge of the Day: Kitchen Odds and Ends

Today, we cleaned out our utensil drawers and got rid of a lot of duplicates, along with this set of bowls. In giving them away, we opened up a spot on the shelf for this pretty set of rice bowls that we were given as a wedding gift, which heretofore had been sitting in the hall closet for lack of a better place to put them.

Now that they're within reach, I have a feeling we'll be using them in no time. 

It's weird how stuff accumulates in a kitchen and you somehow end up with five plastic ladles. I can't explain it. I let myself get so stuff-numb that I had no idea what was in my home or why. I'm determined to keep hacking away, piece by piece, making sense of it. I just finished organizing the bigger utensils into three compartments: cut, stir/flip, and serve. "Cut" includes everything from knives and sharpeners to peelers to a cake level, but it makes sense to me, so I think it's going to be easy to implement. I think I sometimes hit a roadblock in organizing when I pick a place for something but without a solid reason why. If the reason doesn't resound with me, I forget pretty quickly, and everything gets messy again. 

Man, I have to come up with a good way of ending posts.

New Mail Rule!

I always end up with tons of mail clutter and so I am enacting the following, effective immediately:

After retrieving the mail, I will not sit down until the entire stack of mail has been completely dealt with.

This includes bill paying, filing, recycling, decision making, scheduling, follow-up sending, and anything else that day's haul calls for.  I anticipate this will be effective, but a pain in the butt. But effective.

Baby Shampoo Time!

You can hand wash your delicates with it and it works really, really well. I learned this from the ladies at Jenette Bras. Follow these tips, but with baby shampoo.

I also discovered that it takes the makeup clean off of brushes with almost no scrubbing. Same with makeup bags. I had a couple that were trash-bound, so I figured it was worth a try. They were good as new in about two minutes.

That is all.