The Magic Shower Cleaner

Happy Friday!

Today has been a day of experimenting.  A few weeks ago my husband sent me a picture with a caption to try this magic shower cleaner.  I'm sure that some of you have seen the same picture going around on Facebook and Pinterest.  The picture displays the ingredients and the caption tells that after using this special mixture that you don't have to scrub the shower to get it clean---you just wipe the mixture off and tada!  Today I finally got the chance to try it and see how it works!

Here are some embarrassing before pictures of our master bath shower (WARNING: You're about to see soap scum and filthy soap ledges).

Now let's talk about this shower cleaner mixture.  You will need vinegar (regular or cleaning vinegar), BLUE Dawn dish soap (it has to be blue), and a spray bottle (I just used one that we had in the garage).

You will need 1 cup of vinegar and 1 cup of Blue Dawn dish soap.  The first thing you want to do is heat up the cup of vinegar.  I put mine in the microwave for a minute and a half.  Put the warm vinegar in your spray bottle and then add your cup of dish soap.

Once both ingredients are in your spray bottle, give it a little shake.  The mixture will look something like this:

The next step is to spray it on the walls, ledges, and bottom of your shower.  I made sure to cover all areas thoroughly.

One of the most important steps is to let the mixture sit on all areas of your shower for an hour before wiping it off.  Once an hour has come and gone, use a sponge to wipe off the mixture.  You shouldn't have to scrub at all.  Most of the grime and soap scum came right off, but there were a few areas in our shower that needed to be rubbed a little harder (probably because I haven't cleaned our shower in awhile).  I did use our wand style shower head to wet certain areas as I went along.  This helped things to not get overly-sudsy.  After wiping down all areas of the shower and rinsing them with water, our shower has never looked better! Take a look for yourself at how shiny and sparkly clean it is!

Amazing isn't it?!  I can't wait to take a shower in there tomorrow!  It's going to feel like we bought a brand new shower.  I'm honestly not even sure that these pictures do it justice!  I highly recommend this crazy cool shower cleaner!  I actually tried it on some of the filthy tiles in our bathroom as well to see if it would get the dirt off of them.  Guess what!---It worked on those too!

Now that you've seen the evidence that this mixture does indeed work, you need to go try it out on your own shower/bath!!  If you do try it out leave us a comment or a before and after photo down below to let us know what you think of it!! 

Happy cleaning! :)

Transformation Thursday: Pantry Edition

Hello world!  Did you miss us? This is our first post since last summer.  Since I am a school teacher and my husband is an engineer, it is REALLY hard for us to post during the school year.  Summer vacation is really the most opportune time for us to do projects and post about them on here.  This summer I'm not sure that we'll post every day, but we will try to post often. :)

One of the projects I got into this week was cleaning out our pantry in the kitchen.  I was beyond tired of opening up the pantry each day to find that it was jam-packed full of expired canned goods, old candy, and stale graham crackers (I quite literally found four or five boxes of opened graham crackers). Here's the pantry before:

It took about an hour or two to take out everything in the pantry, wipe down the shelves, and mop the floor.  Our pantry now looks like this (!):

I tried to put certain items on the same shelf for organizational purposes.  On the top shelf I placed all of our tins for Christmas cookies, our Advocare drink mixtures, and our Melalueca vitamins.  These are all items that we don't use all that frequently (hence the reason why they're on the top shelf).  The next shelf down has my tea maker, Naturebox snacks, disposable cups, plates, bowls, silverware, etc., my stand mixer attachments, and our Advocare cleanses.  These things we use every now and then.  The next shelf holds our cereal, crackers, and other snacks.  The shelf below that has all of our canned goods and the one below that has bags of various nuts.  The bottom shelf is where we store our bread maker, freezer bags, coolers, casserole carrier, and bonfire sticks.  Here's a closer look at my organization job:  :)

Eventually I would love to invest in some containers (OXO containers would be great with labels!) to put snacks and basic ingredients in.  In my head I imagine our pantry looking something like this image sometime down the road:

Pantry post found here 

But for now as a cheap and temporary fix, our pantry looks like the images I've posted above.  It is a little less of an eye sore now when I open the door.  Thanks to PicStitch, I created a pretty good before and after image of our pantry.

Not too shabby if I do say so myself! :)  I'm just glad that another part (though it be small) of our house is a little more organized.  Lord knows I need everything to be organized or I go a little bit crazy.  Am I the only one that feels this way?

What have you gotten into this week?  Have you organized your pantry?  Share your photos with us--We would love to see! :)

Touring Our Master Bath

Howdy ya'll!  It's been a LONG week with lots of crazy stuff going on.  Despite everything that's been on our plate, I thought I'd write a quick post sharing our master bath with you. 

Here she is in all of her green and goldness (IMAGINE THAT--MORE GOLD!).

I think there are several things that stick out in our bathroom as being hideously ugly. Number one being the GOLD shower and towel rod. Barf.  Number two being the green and white tile floor.  Some might not mind it, but we are not huge fans.

 

Oh look, more GREEN and GOLD.  Notice a trend?  Those green blinds and the window treatment came with the house.  I'm pretty sure the only reason why we still have them up is for privacy purposes (that and we haven't gotten around to replacing them yet).  The gold jets in the hot tub are old and need to be replaced (any suggestions as to where to buy new jets or how to install them would be VERY helpful!).  The last time we used the hot tub, the jets had black gunk coming out of them.  If you look up at the ceiling in the above picture, you will notice a hole.  We have a sky light, which we like, but don't like.  We like that it provides natural light in the room, however it also makes this room very hot with the sun beaming in during certain parts of the day.  

This isn't the best picture, but it shows our one modern looking piece in the room.  We imagine that the people who lived here before us were in the process of updating the bathroom, but didn't make it too far.  We hate that the vanity doesn't match anything else in the room, but one day it will.  The one nice thing about the vanity is that it has so much storage space.  That light fixture above the mirror has GOT TO GO though.  Eck.

Meet our master loo.  To the left we have a giant closet where we house our towels, shower supplies, etc.  

So there you have it.  You have officially met our master bath.  At some point in time, I will write a post about our to-do's for this bathroom.  We have quite a few ideas as to what we think we want to do in here, but we haven't set anything in stone.  If you have any suggestions as to how we can modernize this bathroom, don't be afraid to leave us a comment in the section below. :)

 

Whip It Up Wednesday: Glazed Lemon Zucchini Bread

This past weekend Eric and I took a trip back to our hometown to visit our parents.  My mom shared with us that she had some zucchinis in her garden this year.  She had already baked 16 loaves of zucchini bread and still had TONS of grated zucchini left over.  I told her that I really wanted to make Glazed Lemon Zucchini Bread, so she offered me some of her zucchini.  I gladly accepted the zucchini and planned on making the bread for none other than Whip It Up Wednesday!  You can find the original recipe here.

Glazed Lemon Zucchini Bread

Ingredients

2 c. cake flour (for those of you that don't know, cake flour is different than regular flour--it has more of a powdered sugar texture)
1/2 tsp. salt
2 tsp. baking powder
2 eggs
1/2 c. canola oil
1 1/3 c. sugar
2 Tbsp. lemon juice
1/2 c. buttermilk
1 c. grated zucchini

(Note: the original recipe has the zest of 1 lemon.  I did not have a lemon, so I did not add this)

Glaze Ingredients

1 c. powdered sugar
2 Tbsp. lemon juice
1 Tbsp. milk


The How To:

1. Set oven to 350 degrees.  Grease a 9x5 loaf pan.
2. In a medium sized bowl, combine the flour, salt, and baking powder.  Set aside.

3. Next, whisk eggs in a large bowl.  Mix in oil, sugar, lemon juice, and buttermilk (if you are adding
    the lemon zest, do it here) until well blended.

Whisked eggs pictured above.

Oil and sugar added to whisked eggs.

Lemon juice and buttermilk added into mixture.

4. Fold in zucchini.

5. Little by little, pour the dry mixture into the wet mixture and blend together.

6. Pour batter into greased loaf pan.

7. Bake bread for 40-45 minutes.

8. While the bread is baking, mix the Glaze ingredients together.

9. Spoon the glaze over the bread while it is still warm.  Let the glaze set for a little while before cutting into the bread.

10. Enjoy!!! It is mighty delicious! :)

Do you have a favorite kind of zucchini bread?  Tell us about it! :)

Making Ohio Sparkle

Remember when we shared this wall collage inspiration?  Well I finally completed our first piece of symbolic art to put on the striped wall.  Hooray!  I wanted to craft a piece that showed where we reside.    We love the city we live in--it has so much beauty and character.  So why not share how much we love it by making it sparkle?

The first thing I did was find an outline of Ohio.  I printed it out on copy paper.

Next, I cut around the outline.

Instead of framing a plain piece of paper, I decided to glue my outline of Ohio onto the back of a pizza box.  I used super glue to glue it onto the cardboard.  I wanted it to be sturdy and raised from the background.  After gluing it to the cardboard, I cut around the outline a second time.

The above picture may not be too pretty, but I promise the end result is worth looking at.  The next step was to paint a heart where Dayton lies in the state of Ohio.  I used a toothpick and teal blue paint that I had on hand.

Then came the fun part!  The part that made me say, "Oh la la!" and of course it involved glitter!  I used a Q-tip to apply glue to the top of the paper outline, making sure to work around the heart and not on top of it.  Then I sprinkled gold glitter on top.  LOTS OF IT!  

After shaking off the excess glitter, my sparkling state looked like this:

In order to make the background for my frame, I took a coral colored envelope and cut it to size.

My envelope was 5 inches tall, so I made a mark with my pencil next to each inch.  I then took gold chevron washi tape and ran it along each of the four lines I made with my pencil.

Next I glued my glittery outline of Ohio onto my background.

The final step was to put my sparkling beauty in one of our IKEA frames.  This particular frame measures 5 x 7" and is from the RIBBA collection.  

I believe this will be a nice addition to our wall once we get it all pieced together.  

Do you have a gallery wall full of homemade art in your home?  Share it with us!  We still have lots of work to do before our gallery wall goes up, but we are already excited to see what it'll look like when it's finished! :)

Gallery Wall Inspiration

Yesterday Eric and I had a long trip to our nearest IKEA.  While in the car, we started talking about our front hall and how we have taken a break from it.  Now we are ready to get back at it!  Eric is anxious to put up crown molding, baseboard, etc. I on the other hand have been dying to put up our photo gallery wall.  Not sure what a gallery wall quite looks like?  Check out the pictures below that we are using for inspiration.

Found here

Found here

Found here

From my favorite blog YHL

Found here

Imagine a fabulously white and bright gallery wall on our striped wall in our front entryway. Thinking about making ours just gets me in the mood to jump up and down over and over again.  Ahh!!  In order to get started on ours, we needed some frames.  Guess what we ended up getting at IKEA yesterday?  Frames!  We got a few different sizes and plan on playing around with them to figure out exactly how we want them situated on our striped wall.  Here's a snapshot of the frames.  They are all a part of the RIBBA collection.

My one main goal for this wall is that I want it to hold special meaning to us.  What I mean by that is that I want to incorporate things like our wedding pictures, lucky number, map hearts of where we were engaged, married, and honeymooned, etc.  I fully expect that this wall will take us awhile to complete, but I can't wait to see it done.  

Do you have a gallery wall in your house?  What kinds of things do you have in your frames?  Tell us in the comment section below, or better yet, send us a picture! :)