Detoxing My Home

****UPDATED****

Contest is now closed and we have a winner!!

Rachel Rhody, please email me at restorationoilers@gmail.com to claim your prize!!


I know you guys have all heard about detox diets, cleanses and so on.  But do you know what they are used for?  Mainly, detox diets and cleanses are designed to help you rid your body of anything toxic that may be hanging out (especially in your digestive system) so that your body is healthier.  While body detoxing is all the rage (we'll talk about that another day), have you ever thought about the fact that your home might need detoxing, too?  Go take a look under your kitchen sink (or wherever you keep all your household cleaners).  Go on, go look, take a mental inventory of the products and brands that are there.  GO.  This is important.  You need to know what's there.  It'll be important later.
If you're wanting to really make a healthy change for yourself and your family you can't stop with just your groceries or even your personal care products.  One of the most toxic products in American homes is air freshener!  Because the particles are airborne, we breath them in.  If the particles are toxic chemicals and we breath those in, we are doing damage to our health!  If anyone in your family has asthma or other respiratory issues, you understand, because often those products can irritate the airways and cause symptoms to appear or worsen.  But even if you don't have asthma, you are still inhaling toxic junk!  Anytime we come in contact with toxins in our environment, they affect our health in a variety of ways.  You can read here to find out more about some of the worst offenders.
This is all pretty scary, but making major changes can be hard and expensive!  Here's what I recommend:
Start with ONE product.  Just one.  Maybe it's the worst thing you have, maybe it's the one thing you use the most often.  Doesn't matter.  Just pick ONE product and make the switch.
Replace products as you use them up.  This is what I'm doing.  As I empty a container of a product I've been using, I replace it with something better.
You don't have to make all these changes all at once.  Start slowly, do what you can, as you can and eventually you'll be rid of all the toxic cleaning products.
***If you have or have been recently diagnosed with a respiratory disease, consider making some of these changes faster.***

Okay, remember that mental list of products from your stash of cleaning supplies?  Now is the time to dust it off.  Go to this link and find your products to see what toxicity grade they get.  You can search by product type over on the left.

EECK.

Did you look?  Was it bad?  Were you surprised?  For full disclosure purposes, while you were looking at yours, I was looking at mine.  I have STARTED the process of switching to better products.  Because I am aware of the terrible garbage in most of our cleaning products, I have been switching.  I mostly use Young Living Essential Oil's Thieves Cleaner.  (If you want to know more about why I use Young Living products, read here.)  Buuutttttttt, I still have some of the old products. Mostly because I'm a tightwad very frugal person and don't want to waste something I paid for.  So here's what's left under my kitchen sink (I have older kids who have been taught to clean so they avoid my stash of cleaning products like the plague for fear of having to do housework.  If you have littles, I suggest storing them somewhere else, even natural ones):

General bathroom cleaner with bleach:  F 

Toilet bowl cleaner:  D 

Carpet Stain remover: D

My Young Living Cleaner isn't listed on the EWG website, but you can look at a list of the chemicals found in the product and compare it to the list on the EWG website to get a good idea of how harmful the product is.  My guess is that my Young Living cleaner would rate a VERY good grade.  Take a good look at the list of products and the grades some of the "natural" cleaners get.  Not very good, especially when you pay two or three times the price of conventional products for those.  It's super important that we be educated consumers.  If you want what's best for your family you have to arm yourself with knowledge.

So, since you've spent time today arming yourself with knowledge, I think it's time for a little treat.  Comment below with your products' scores on the EWG website and you'll be automatically entered to win a Young Living Fruit and Vegetable Spray!  

The Great Closet Escapade

Hi, I'm Haley and I am a shoe horder.

Whew.  Glad I got that off my chest.  Now that you know my problem I can be honest with you about the state of my closet.  It was bad people.  BAD.

My family is relocating back to Texas in March and the house we are returning to is much smaller than the one we currently live in.  Why, on God's green earth, would we downsize with four kids you ask?  Well, my husband is retiring from the military and we're not exactly sure what the future holds for us once his service is finished.  We still own our "starter home" we purchased back in 2006 before the twins were born.  The mortgage payment is low so we felt like it was the right choice for our family now.  With the smaller house comes less space, mainly storage space.  There are four bedrooms but only 3 total closets.  You didn't do your math wrong, lol.  I said 4 bedrooms and 3 closets.  That means one bedroom doesn't even have an actual closet.  No worries.  Living in Europe taught us that closets are really optional anyway.
Back to the point of all this.  With such limited space, it's important to purge, purge, purge now, before we ever get there.  So I decided to start with my closet.  As you can tell by the picture, I've been needing to do this for a  while.  I am not, by nature, an organized person.  I have to actually WORK at being organized.  So I started by making an even bigger mess by dragging everything out of the bottom of the closet.  I'll save you the pictures of the sorting process but I ended up giving away something like 6 paper grocery sacks packed full of shoes, handbags and clothes.

I love this little trick I found on Pinterest somewhere at some point.  It really does keep my boots standing up nice and straight.  These pool noodles came from the dollar store and I used scissors to cut them to size.  Two noodles gave me enough for three pairs of boots.  (I have a spare pair of noodles ready for the next cute pair of boots I find.)

I had a few plastic shoe boxes so I used those to store some of my dressier shoes I don't wear often.  As part of the down-sizing, I've been cleaning out my craft storage and had these two drawer-type shoe boxes so I put those on bottom.  I love that I won't have to disturb the stack to get to those shoes.  I also still had the boxes from a few pairs.  Writing on the outside of the box allows me to remember what's inside without having to peek in the box.

 

Once I got everything sorted, I put it all back in.  But shoes are stinky.  And I noticed my closet had *ahem* a slight odor.  There are several ways to fight closet odor, but I'm trying to use fewer chemicals in my house.  All I used was a little Purification essential oil blend on a cotton ball then tucked the cotton ball away in a corner of the closet.

Smell gone.  Purification is an essential oil blend sold by Young Living.  If you want to know more about why I use Young Living Essential Oils, read here.

I find it amazing what you can stumble across when cleaning out closets.  Like a 20+ year-old picture of your husband hehehe.  (shhh.  Don't tell him I put this on my blog.  He might want revenge, and NOBODY needs to see 20+ year-old pictures of me!)