House Warming Gifts with Boxed

My sweet friend and right hand helper, Kate, just moved into a new house with her husband. They've been tackling some really cool DIY projects the past couple weeks. Look how cute their house is now after a coat of paint and some grass seed!

One of our sponsors, Boxed, reached out about trying their service as a housewarming gift for Kate!

Boxed is like an easy-to-shop online wholesale club store, without any membership fees, and most importantly, none of the headache. (Going to Costco is truly like torture for me!) Boxed has a great website, but their phone app is a breeze to use, too. 

They sell non-perishables in bulk sizes for really great prices, and they ship right to your door in two days or less. I especially love popping over to the sale page every few days to see what specials they are running on my favorite cleaning products, like Mrs Meyers. Boxed also has great prices on baby items, like diapers and wipes, baby food and shampoo from companies I trust like Annie's and Honest Co.

Kate has this great little pantry space off of her new kitchen that we decided to give a little makeover before stocking it with items from Boxed. Here's the space before:

We took out the old thin shelves and painted the inside of the pantry a really pretty color called Templeton Gray from Benjamin Moore.

Using the same technique I talked about yesterday, we added wooden shelves to dress things up a bit. I think the wood looks so pretty against the gray/blue/green wall color!

We also painted her pantry door with chalkboard paint so Kate could make a note of supplies she's getting low on. Remember that it's important to "prime" a freshly painted chalkboard surface with a good layer of chalk before writing.

The black of the door looks so pretty with the art we hung in the kitchen. It's a print of a photo taken by our friend Angela Hardison we printed out ourselves and framed in an IKEA Ribba. I LOVE it.

We're both so happy with how Kate's pantry turned out! I'm a big fan of putting extra effort into cleaning and storage closets. It helps me feel more organized and inspired to keep my house cleaned.

A big thanks to Boxed for sponsoring this post and for the housewarming gift! :) All first orders on Boxed ship for free, so be sure to check out their app here!

Natural Cleaning Products That Actually Work (and Don't Stink!)

Happy Earth Day tomorrow! I'm packing my bags for a quick New York trip this week. On Thursday I'll be hosting a fundraiser event that I'm really excited about. I have partnered up with the eco and budget-friendly appliance company, Amana, this year to share home ideas and tips that are also green and not expensive. Amana works a lot with a great organization called Trees for the Future. I hope you can join us for the fundraiser if you're in the NYC area. You can learn more about the organization and can RSVP for the event by visiting trees.org/nyc. If you use the discount code AmanaFan, you'll get $25 off. :) 

Several months ago my wonderful friend Mara held a really cool natural beauty night, where we learned all about the best natural, non-toxic products to use on our skin and hair. It was totally eye-opening for me. Since then I've been putting in an effort to use less toxic cleaners in our house too.

For a while, it felt like every recipe for a homemade cleaner was pretty much just white vinegar, which... gag. Not my favorite smell for a bathroom. So I've been testing the waters of homemade natural cleaning products and I've found a few that 1) work really well, 2) don't require crazy amounts of time or weird ingredients, and 3) don't stink like vinegar.

First up is the most simple. I love the clean scent of tea tree (I don't ever like cleaners to smell too floral or sweet). I bought a starter set of essential oils on Amazon for about $20 and I've been happy with the quality. The set comes with eucalyptus, lavender, orange, lemon, tea tree and peppermint essential oils. Not a bad deal!

To mix the cleaner spray, reuse an old spray bottle (what I did) or pick up a new one at the dollar store and add one cup of water to every two tablespoons of Castile soap (I used the Tea Tree scent again). You can buy Castile soaps at Whole Foods and Sprouts and even at CVS and Walgreens sometimes. The Lavender scent is perfect for washing bedding! Some of my friends use Castile soap as shampoo and body wash - it's very gentle, but also cleans fantastically.

Then you add a few drops of the tea tree oil to the spray bottle and shake it up well. You'll have an amazing cleaner on your hands that works as well as the other store-bought stuff but has none of the scary ingredients or horrible vinegar smell.

This next one might feel a little more intense, but it's actually really easy and kind of fun to make. I heard about the idea here first and it's a great one. A single batch will last forever too, so your efforts go far.

To make your own scrub that will clean all your sinks and tubs like they've never been cleaned before, just start setting aside your eggshells. I put them in a gallon size ziploc, tucked away. Over the course of a couple weeks I'll have three or four dozen eggshells to rinse out, boil for about 10 minutes, and then spread out on cookie sheets. A day or two later, the shells will be completely dried out and very brittle.

The shells will break down very easily in a food processor (I've heard a coffee grinder works very well). They're so brittle at this point, there's no way any damage would be done to your machine.

The only "weird" ingredient you'll have to go out of your way to pick up is calcium powder, but it's easy to find at health food stores or online. It's cheap too, just a couple dollars.

In a bowl, combine 1/2 cup of baking soda, 3/4 cup of calcium powder and about 20 drops of essential oils. I did half a batch of lemon and half of orange.

This makes enough scrub to fill two pint-size mason jars, which should last you at least a couple months. I saw online that people were reusing parmesan cheese or economy sized spice jars that have that sprinkle spout top, but the mason jars work great too.

The powder fizzes when it touches water and it really brightens up that porcelain! And the eggshells really scrub well, but it doesn't feel like you're scratching your tub up or anything.

I use it on my bathtubs and showers, our sinks and even our toilets get a good scrub down once a month (I turn off the water valve at the base of the toilet first, flush the toilet so it's dry and that makes it easy to really clean things well).

I think next time I might try one of the peppermint oils to mix things up a little.

My third tip is so, so simple, it's kind of a 'duh' thing, but I feel like not a lot of people do it. We all spend a ton of money on expensive candles and sprays to make our homes smell nice, but homemade potpourri is SO cheap and the scent lingers way longer!

I love the clean scent combination of lavender and vanilla. You can buy a bag of lavender flowers at a health food store and vanilla beans can be found in the spice aisle at most grocery stores.

To make the potpourri, bring a big pot of water to a gentle simmer and then add a 1/2 cup or so of lavender flowers, two vanilla beans and several drops of lavender oil (and maybe a drop of vanilla extract if you want it to be extra vanilla-y, or in lieu of the beans if you don't have any). After about 30 minutes, your whole house will smell amazing. I let the potpourri simmer for at least a couple hours on low heat and the scent will last for two or three days. I wish I could say my $30 candle's scent lingered that long!

The last tried-and-true natural cleaning recipe actually uses vinegar! There is a way to harness the wonderful cleaning power of vinegar while masking most of the intense scent. (I almost wrote pungent there, but eww, no. Not an okay word to use.)

We're lucky to have an over-abundance of citrus here in sunny Arizona, and lots of friends and neighbors with wonderful trees and more than enough fruit to eat/use for making counter spray. But next time you have a craving for fresh-squeezed orange juice or lemonade, save all the peels in a big mason jar that's filled to the very tip-top with white distilled vinegar. You can add more peels over time, but it's important that all the peels be submersed in vinegar, or you might get mold.

I like to add some essential oils too, for good measure. After at least two full weeks, the vinegar scent will start to go away, but the cleaning power will remain! Your counter tops will smell citrusy and look brand new! I use a gravy sieve to strain out the cleaner into a spray bottle. 

Aren't those chalkboard labels cute? I picked them up at Staples I think and I love that I can use my Chalkboard pen on them (which only wipes off with a wet rag), so I don't have to replace the label each time I make a new batch of cleaners.

So those are my best recipes for natural cleaning products! Not too crazy, but guilt-free, effective and nice-smelling. I also added some other tricks here in this chart below. I was surprised at how well the lemon-juice-instead-of-bleach tip works! I feel like between switching to a front-loading washing machine (Amana really has a great/affordable/eco-friendly one, btw) and taking bleach out of my cleaning routine, I'm really cleaning up my laundry room act! 

Also, if my iron on a damp cloth trick doesn't work for you when trying to remove heat marks on furniture, try the mayonnaise idea here below. I must have a sensitive nose or something because this is another one I don't love the smell of, but it doesn't really linger. And it really does get those heat marks out!

So what works for you? I'd love to hear what your favorite eco-friendly tips are!

This post was brought to you in collaboration with Amana Appliances, an earth-friendly and environmentally conscious company. Learn more here.

How to Easily Remove Rust

I've had this Plycraft chair in storage for a while now, with plans to reupholster it in a caramel leather remnant I found in Brooklyn. Well the day has finally arrived! My upholsterer came and picked up the chair and hide this week (should be done on Saturday!), but I wanted to clean up the wood shell and the super-rusty chrome base first.

Barkeepers Friend has always been known as DIYer's Bestie to me - I love the stuff. But, oh man, when you combine that magical powder with the newest addition to my cleaning arsenal, the Scouring Stick, even the rustiest vintage chair base around stands no chance!

I bought a Scouring Stick, which is a heavy duty pumice stone, as sort of a splurge purchase a while back. I think I found it just at the grocery store. I'm pretty sure they have them most places.

It didn't really do a lot on it's own, so we mixed up a bowl of Barkeepers Friend with water,

And gave the chair a light rub down with the mixture just to loosen things up.

And then we found it worked best to dip the stick in the solution before using it to scour.

The stick starts to sort of whittle down after a while, but it really really works well at removing the rust!

Check out how clean the legs are now after just a little scrubbing! I was shocked at how well these two products worked together. 

Now I'm looking all around my house for anything to use my scouring stick on! Heather saw me working on this post and took a stick outside to clean up her vintage bike that was starting to get rusty and now it looks practically brand new. The box says it can be used on a ton of surfaces like stone and even concrete! I'm going to give our grill a really good scrubbing now that BBQ season is kicking off.

Also, in case you're not already using Restor-A-Finish, check out how a once-over wipe down really freshened up the old wood finish:

So much better, right? I can't wait to get this cleaned-up chair back with its new upholstery!