How to get rid of stink bugs in your home

Are you lucky enough to live in a place that doesn't have infestation of stink bugs every year? Unfortunately we've been dealing with them for quite some time! As I've struggled with keeping them out of the house I have learned quite a few things that work... and a few that don't!

One of the things that helped was getting new siding on the house! No, I don't recommend this for everyone! In our defense the wood siding that was on our house was about 25 years old and badly needed replaced for other reasons! Effective, yes! Practical, no! Only get new siding if you need it.

However by getting new siding we found out that some stink bugs were getting into our house through the attic crawl space so we had to address that.

One of the things I tried that didn't work was sprinkling diatomaceous earth all around the entire outside of the house. Stink bugs don't crawl up to your house and then crawl up the house and get in. They fly and land wherever they want and try to find a crevice to get in. So anything working on the perimeter of the house will not work at all.

I found a mix of keeping them out and getting rid of the ones that were inside the house already was the easiest way to keep the stink bug infestation down to just a random one or two a week. Still annoying, but not so bad!

Autumn Room Sprays using essential oils

Well, it's official...Autumn is on it's way and the stores are filled with the cutest fall décor. One of the things all the stores are stocked up on right now is anything that smells like apples, pumpkin spice and bonfires. I was picking up new pumpkin shaped jars to make my MYO Autumn gel air fresheners and I decided to make some essential oils room sprays while I was at it!

Ya'll know how much I prefer EOs to store bought chemical fragrances and room freshening sprays are no different! I grabbed some small spray bottles to use for these room sprays and started working on scent combinations. I'm pretty sure I can come up with more fall scents than a candle store!

Actually, did you know that I used to work in a candle store, and yes...I made scent blends! But seriously, I would like to know who is in charge of the bonfire and falling leaves scents they sell in those fancy candle lines because those things are way off! lol Sorry, I digress...

Making your own air fresheners is super easy and it's so much better for your health to use these in your home than store bought sprays that are packed with tons of chemicals! I mean, do you really know what all those things on the ingredient list are? It's kinda scary when you think about it.

Fall air freshener DIY and other homestead gifts

The first cool day has come which means the unofficial start of pumpkin everything season! Lol No really, fall is on it's way and the stores are filled with the cutest Autumn decor. Incidentally just last week I was whipping up a new batch of my MYO air fresheners using essential oils and I got the idea to make some fall themed scents and use some of those cute jars and such to hold them! 

Making your own air fresheners is super easy and it's so much better for your health to have these in your home than one of those scented cone air fresheners that are packed with tons of chemicals! Or even the gel ones.

I mean, do you really know what all those things on the ingredient list are? It's kinda scary when you think about it. 

I have 2 different ways I like to make my own air fresheners. The first is to make a gel with gelatin, water, vodka and food coloring then add essential oils and allow to cool. 

This makes an awesome scented gel that is no spill and can be customized completely. These are great for filling cute seasonal votives and glass pumpkins. (exact recipe below)

MYO Carpet freshening powder

Many of you have already heard the story about the stinky rug spots from the cat issue. I did find a solution for that smell but along the way I tried a whole bunch of natural solutions to get rid of carpet odors. Some of them worked a little, others not at all. 

One of the home cleaning solutions worked pretty well, even thought it was up against some nasty smells! This is the DIY smelly carpet powder I want to talk about today.

It was a cheap and easy way to remove smells from stinky rugs and I started using it throughout the house on my carpets. I especially liked it because it was non toxic and I always had the ingredients on hand!

If you read the story about the cat odor you'll see that I came up with a natural spray on solution that wipes out cat odors from cat pee. That's a particularly tough smell to eradicate! 

Unfortunately this powder wasn't quite strong enough to wipe that out, but it almost handled it and impressed me enough that I decided to give it a go on other smelly surfaces.

How to clean spilled nail polish in seconds

Today I made a huge mess. I dropped a bottle of nail polish on the hard kitchen floor and not only did the top crack right off, but it starting spinning in circles, spewing purple nail polish in a giant spiral all over the floor! Thankfully spilled nail polish is super easy to clean up and within 3 minutes the floor looked good as new.

To clean spilled nail polish off a hard floor all you need to do is dump sugar on it. Lots of sugar, and do it quickly. Thankfully, I was in the kitchen so the sugar canister was nearby. 

Yes, I videoed it for you...because honestly, if I had not seen it work I wouldn't have believed a floor with a whole bottle of nail polish spilled on it could get that clean again! 

It really did though! The nail polish wiped right up in less than 5 minutes! Unfortunately, because of the need to act fast I didn't get a picture till after I started treating it...but I'm sure you can just picture that part. Here's my lovely purple nail polish spiral covered in sugar. 

Remove cat pee smell permanently

We currently have one rescue kitten left at our house and the Bengal is not very happy about it! First she peed in the kittens bed. Then she 'marked' the cardboard box the kitten had been playing in. Finally she graduated to spraying anywhere she could smell the kitten. I absolutely can't stand the smell of cat urine so I did my best to clean up all these messes. I literally tried everything to get rid of the cat odor in my house.

I first started cleaning it up with the rug scrubber filled with pet stain & odor remover. That wasn't strong enough so I bought enzymatic pet odor sprays from the pet store. I also tried white vinegar and I tried essential oils. 

No matter what I used, it only removed the cat pee smell for a few days and then I could smell the cat pee again. I spent way too much money on this stuff! I was completely convinced that nothing but the strongest, most potent, specially made formulas would work.

I was wrong. 

I soon found out, I had the solution in my cabinet the whole time....and it wasn't chemical laden crap from the pet store!

Peroxide, baking soda and dish soap. Sound familiar? These are the 3 ingredients in my Best Skunk Spray Remover EVER! recipe. The proportions are a little different, but it works just as well to remove cat urine smell as it does for skunk spray! 

It's a lot more natural then all the artificial chemicals I was spraying in my house, plus it works better than all the other sprays and cleaners I had bought!

Home remedies to keep spiders out of your house

This time of year, I find myself confronting wildlife in my personal space more and more. First it was a mouse taking up residence in the back of my ATV. Now, it's spiders in the house. Nothing creeps me out more than spiders and seeing 3 in one week inside my house sends me into a panic! 

Unfortunately as seasonal temperatures change, spiders are looking for a good spot hole up for awhile and a house seems like a good deal to them. Luckily there are several things I can do to keep spiders out of my house.

I'm well aware that most species of spiders are completely harmless, yet that gives me no peace of mind whatsoever! If I see a spider in my house I'm either squishing it, or sucking it up with the hose attachment on my vacuum. 

That actually works really well for spiders that have gotten themselves up to the ceiling. As a bonus you can vacuum up the web at the same time!

Now is a good time to mention that I'm actually allergic to spider bites...so you can understand why I've tried so many methods of getting rid of them over the years.

6 Easy ways to reduce plastic use

Lately I've been doing a lot of thinking about this plastic free kick everybody's on. I took a look around my house and I realized everything is plastic. There's literally plastic in every room, on every surface and in every drawer. It's almost impossible to avoid plastic.

I've heard the phrase plastic is forever a lot lately. The meaning of course is that plastic doesn't break down and it doesn't deteriorate. It is not biodegradable. Once plastic is created it never goes away and that's a sobering thought. I don't want to make a big impact on the environment however I don't know how to live a different way. This is just the way that things are now. 

Plastics make life convenient and are considered disposable so they are literally in everything. You touch plastics thousands of times a day from the moment you get out of bed and step into your slippers, which probably have plastic in the soles....till the last moment of your day when you brush your teeth at night. Think about this, your toothbrush will exist longer then you will even though it's only made to be in use for 3 months. 

That's scary.

I know I need to make some changes but I also know that the harder these changes are the less likely I'll stick to them. That's just human nature. So I've been trying to make changes in my plastic use without it being painful or a giant change in my life.

At the same time, I also don't want to be wasteful! I'm seeing so many people freaking out about BPA's and all the sudden dumping every bit of plastic in their kitchen and bragging about how they threw these big garbage bags full of plastic away. 

Well where do you think it's going now? It's going in the landfill and it's still not going to rot. It's still going to be there. Why not use it till it breaks and then find a better product when it's time?

Make you own air fresheners

Would you like to make your own air fresheners using essential oils but don't know where to start? I have 3 super easy recipes to show you today. The first recipe uses gelatin to make a gel air freshener, kind of like the commercial gel cones in stores. I also use water beads to make a fun, bubble looking air freshener. Lastly we'll throw it way back to when we all put baking soda in our refrigerators to make the third (easiest) one.

I actually still put baking soda in my refrigerator, but I digress.

I've never been fond of commercial air fresheners. I like the scents, I've just always worried about what kind of chemicals they put into them to make them smell like that. Is it really a good idea to breathe that stuff in? So I started using essential oils to scent my house several years back. I put them in reed diffusers and mixed them into soy candles as I made them.

The easiest way I found to use essential oils as an air freshener was by mixing them with  baking soda OR Orbeez (water balls) and simply setting a dish of them out in the room. I was using this method for several years when I found that you can make gel air fresheners with gelatin and EO's. Game changer! It's super easy too...

How to make air freshener with essential oils

I know there is a lot of talk about which essential oils are the best and most pure. When using essential oils for air fresheners though, that's not as important as when placing them on your skin. 

Not that you don't still want to use pure oils...you do! It's just using essential oils as a room deodorizer is the perfect way to use up oils that are a little older, lower quality or the ones in your oil kit that you just can't find a use for. 

Related reading: Getting started with Essential oils cheaply.

12 Natural ways to clean the air inside your house!

It's winter in most areas and the windows and doors are shut tight to keep out the cold. Unfortunately, that keeps in lots of allergens, contaminants and irritants that we're breathing in constantly. The more all that toxic stuff builds up, the more it tears us down and that is the last thing we need this time of year! 

So how do you clean the air? I mean really clean the air, not just cover it with a blast of perfumed spray! I have a few different methods I use to keep the air inside my house naturally clean.

Here are 12 different changes you can make for cleaner air...

Cleaning with denture tablets: 8 different uses

Have you ever had an item that no matter what you tried, you just can't figure out how to clean it? It all started a few months ago when I was trying to clean a vase out. I had tried just about every brush and solution I had to clean it but I just couldn't reach down the narrow neck into the larger bottom to get all the scum out of it! Without being able to scrub it, the residue just sat there glued to the sides. Forever.

After soaking it for hours and trying to scrub inside with a toothbrush, my daughter who used to work in a floral shop told me to use denture tablets. Huh? I tried it, it worked and I decided to figure out exactly what else I could use it on. Lo and behold, I've discovered a bunch of uses for these lowly denture tablets!

Denture tablets were designed to clean and disinfect the tiny nooks and crannies of dentures but they can do the same thing for many difficult to clean items in your household. 

Not only are they good at cleaning, but their intended to go on a mouthpiece that you simply rinse then put in your mouth.

That sounds pretty safe to me....

Using denture tablets to clean

1) Clean diamond jewelry (not silver or pearls though): Drop a denture tablet into a cup of warm water and add jewelry. Let sit until the fizzing stops then rinse clean.

2) Clean the water reservoir in rug scrubbers. Fill with very warm water and add a few denture tablets. Let sit till the fizzing stops and rinse.

How to clean candle jars (the easy way)

If you're anything like me you have a bunch of almost empty candle jars sitting around just waiting till you get the time to clean and re-use them. Oh yes, I have big plans to reuse these lidded  candle jars to store and organize all kinds of things! I just never get around to cleaning them. Well today we're cleaning candle jars!

They will look so nice lined up with my dried herbs in them. Or on the bathroom sink. Or used as a vase with a pretty bow around them. Time to get to it! The method is simple....and we're gonna do it today! So gather up all your used scented candle jars and pop them in the freezer and lets get started. 

How to clean silver without chemicals

I hate cleaning silver jewelry and sterling silver tableware. All that rubbing, polishing and trying to get the tarnish out of all the nooks and crannies. Plus the smell and feel of silver polish...Yuck! I have looked for years for a better solution and nothing really worked as well as I'd like it to. Until now.

I finally found a great way to clean Sterling Silver. It's simple, cheap and does not use any heavy chemicals. In fact, you should have everything you need for this homemade silver cleaner in your kitchen.

Here's what I used:

• Glass baking pan
• Baking Soda
• Boiling Water
• Aluminum Foil

I bought treeless paper towels....

Did you know that there are paper towels that are made out of other materials besides trees? Tree free paper products are a thing! Apparently they can be made with bamboo, quick growing grass and sugarcane products. I didn't know that until I accidentally bought some!

My adventure with this product started innocently enough. I was in a discount outlet and I saw a pallet of paper towels marked 2 for $1. That's a great price for paper towels, but not knowing the quality....I wasn't sure if it was worth it.

I thought about it a second and decided that since hubby uses paper towels in the garage for spills and such, I should get a few rolls for garage towels. Any quality will work for garage messes. Into the cart they went and that should be that. Right? Except I hadn't read the package, and when I finally did 2 weeks later it kinda stopped me in my tracks.

Treeless paper towels

That's right, these paper towels are NOT made of tree products. Hmmmm. I'm not a rocket scientist, but I'm sure sugar cane and bamboo can grow a lot faster than it takes to grow a whole tree. This is definitely a more sustainable product then traditional paper towels, plus I love earth friendly products. No matter how much of a good idea something is though, it needs to work too. So, do they work? Yes! While they may not be the 'quicker picker upper' they certainly work well enough for standard use.

Best skunk spray remover EVER!

If you live anywhere near the woods and have a dog, then more than likely you've smelled the stench of skunk spray on your poor dogs fur! There is nothing as hard to remove as that stinky, oily residue! Luckily, it is possible to get skunk spray out of animal fur (or your clothes) with just a few simple household ingredients!

The first few times my dog got sprayed I tried soaps, shampoos, tomato juice....you name it and I tried it. They didn't work though. I finally found the perfect skunk spray remover and it was in my kitchen the whole time! 

It wasn't easy, it took till about the third try to get this recipe just right. Let me tell you how it went.....