clean up clean up everybody everywhere

Stainless steel or copper scrubs are awesome. Passionate Homemaking first tipped me off to this little secret, perfect for plastic, glass, and metal; not recommended for ceramics, which will scratch. :) With a sprinkle of baking soda and some elbow grease, faucets sparkle and bathtubs emerge from grimy rings. Nice for cast iron skillets too.

Tidy tip from Thomas Keller's Ad Hoc at Home: before you start cooking, grab a big old bowl and put it on the counter. As you cook, dump any trash (stems, gristle, tinfoil) into this handy catchall. Presto! You have just 1) eliminated clutter in your workspace, 2) streamlined the process with zero trips to the trashcan, and 3) made cleanup a lot easier after dinner prep's done. It's brilliant. Can't believe I never heard of or thought of this before.

After hemming and hawing for a a year, I finally tried soap nuts . . . wow. Now I feel uber-crunchy. I'll leave you to Katie and Lindsay's detailed reviews, but let it be known that they work, by golly by gosh. They're also quite frugal and decidedly natural. I'm sticking with this!

We already have reusable dishrags in place of throwaway (and germ-hiding) sponges in the kitchen, but in an effort to further reduce the number of disposable items in our house, I tossed my last cellulose sponges and cut up a bunch of clean but past-their-prime cotton shirts. These large, soft rags work just fine for cleaning the bathroom, the linoleum floor, and anything else. As with the trash bowl, I am not sure why I didn't do this a long time ago. (I also hear that microfiber cloths are excellent and would love to try some in the future.)

This post shared at Simple Lives Thursday.

{image from Hyperbole and a Half}