Creation within a newlywed’s apartment – Step 1 AGAIN

Sunday! A time for rest and reflection. Right?

I hope I’m not the only one like this but rest and reflection absolutely cannot come until I’ve done something productive. Unfortunately today’s productivity comes as a repeat {sort of} of a previous post. As you can imagine, I am not pleased with that.

When my family and friends were in town for our reunion, we dragged the smoker out of the closet we had previously stuffed it into and grilled up a brisket and wings and jalapeno poppers. It’s been two weeks and the smoker has been shoved in my office with all the boxes that were packed in with it laying all over the floor making the room completely unusable for me. Do you see my poor, lonely little sewing machine in the background there behind all those boxes? Yep, I haven’t sewed a stitch in over 3 weeks! But my office was not unusable for Hubby who took advantage of my refusal to enter that room by eating in there while working online. I chose to take the picture before cleaning up his wrappers and boxes so that while I’m working at making our home its best, you can see it at its worst.

There is still some cleaning up to do but I wanted to share with you our closet before and after.

If you compare the final product of the closet in the last post to the final product of the closet in this one, I think you’ll notice a huge improvement!

I hope everyone’s having a wonderful Sunday and we’ll see you tomorrow for Museum Monday!

Aw crap!

Before I get into the meat of this post, I’d like to give a quick shout-out to all the lovely folks at Blogelina.com for hooking me up with an awesome blogging buddy group! They’ve been awesome and supportive for the whole 24 or so hours I’ve been part of it! You may notice some changes in the upcoming days and weeks as per their great suggestions {Do you see the buttons on the right? Recommended by my group and graciously created by Craftiments} and I expect this will eventually start looking beautiful and professional in no time! Anyway, onto the crap… literally.

I’ve been absent from the blog for the last two weeks as I was preparing for “The Wedding Reunion: First Anniversary.” Apparently my family and friends liked each other so much and enjoyed hanging out with each other both in pre-wedding preparations and the reception that they couldn’t bear the thought of not seeing each other again! So sweet! But that left hubby and me to clean for the whole week up to the weekend of the 22nd, prepare, cook, bake, etc for the whole weekend while entertaining a huge number of people, and then clean up the aftermath!

But it was SOOOOO worth it! El Señor {my dad} paid for the food, my brother and his girlfriend bought the booze, hubby prepared everything {with a little help from the little wifey}, Melissa brought delicious homemade peach cobbler, Blake and Natalie brought margarita mix and cutlery, and El Señor made his FAMOUS Apple Krinkle! Only family can have this recipe, except he gave it to an extended-family member once and has been in the doghouse ever since. At our most occupied, our apartment living room had 15 people crammed into it, plus two dogs, and everyone was teasing each other and loving on each other and it was great!

But you better believe that there was some serious cleaning up to do afterward! Having that many people in our home may have made Erda nervous, maybe someone gave her something she shouldn’t have eaten, maybe she wanted to cover the smell of strangers with her own smell. I don’t know. All I know is that little miss Erda crapped all over the living room rug! UGH!

You know I’m all about frugal, being one half of a poor-college-student-newlywedded couple, but I do have two tools that I felt were worth it to buy. We got a Bissell Carpet Shampooer a while back to help with Charlie’s messes, and we recently purchased a Bissell Vacuum Cleaner to help mitigate Erda’s destruction. We didn’t necessarily mean to purchase two Bissell products, they were just both available around 11 pm at our local Walmart for a reasonable price.

Let’s talk about what to put in the carpet shampooer. The manual says to never put any liquid other than Bissell approved shampoos in it. POPPYCOCK! While you probably shouldn’t load it up with straight bleach or anything like that, you absolutely can put other cleaning fluids into the water chamber that work better than their expensive carpet shampoo formulas.

My main concoction is 1/2 cup white vinegar and fill the rest of the tank with HOT water from the tap. BOOM! You will be amazed! My carpet has never been cleaner! And it will save you so much money! A gallon of vinegar is $2.88, while a quart of cleaning fluid is anywhere from $8-20. I’ll just let that sink in…

I began by vacuuming up all the bigger bits. This included dog hair, craps of paper, and any chunks of crap {gag} that the vacuum could pull up. A little better, right?

Gross. Just so very gross. I swear we don’t live like this.

I went a little bit further with my cleaning supplies this time, since I was so grossed out. I combined in a plastic tub {A plastic drawer! Ha! Told you I’m cheap!} a quarter cup of Gain {almost any laundry detergent should be fine}, a whole cup of Extra Strength White Vinegar, and hot water. Mix that up and you are ready to go!

The Diet Coke was just for me. Don’t put in on your carpet.

Onto the first spot…

 

Dip your scrub brush in the water, place it over the offending spot, and scrub!

CLEAN! Well… cleaner.

And one you are done with one spot, look up in despair at how much is left! JUST KIDDING! It went a lot quicker than I anticipated. This concoction took the stains and crusties {gag} right out of the carpet with almost no effort! There will be the occasional bigger chunks {so much GAG!} where you may have to pull it up with your fingers so as to not risk grinding it into the carpet. But the hot water mix helps it release its hold on the carpet.

Are we having fun yet? Nope? Didn’t think so.

Once I got a goodly amount of area wet, I used my carpet shampooer filled with the mixture I mentioned above {1/2 cup white vinegar and fill the rest of the tank with HOT water} and sucked that soapy mess right out of the carpet! See?

I failed to get a good picture of the carpet post-trouble spots or a picture of the dirty shampooer water {gag}, but I did get a bad shot of the pile of crap that I pulled out of the carpet. NICE!

Because I know you wanted to see it. There are also a couple strands of carpet yarn segments that I pulled out on accident. But all of it is safely in the dumpster.

Total price: $0.40

1/4 c. of Gain – $0.221 c. of Vinegar – $0.18
Hot water – Free (sorta)

Final product: CLEAN, CRAP-FREE CARPET