Category Archive

Home

Our homes are made up of lots of working parts — bedrooms, redecorated kitchens, upgraded baths, ogle-worthy renos, ticks and tricks for cleaning and organizing, and real home tours all live here to represent the spaces of your Offbeat Home.

How our cat demands we use fabric grocery bags — and the 5 tricks we use to remember to use them!

I WANT to help the environment, but that alone usually does nothing to help me remember my reuseable shopping bags. Then the issue went from “Help the environment” to “Help the environment and save the cat from death by plastic.”

Determining if a sentimental item is clutter or a treasure

The always-helpful Unclutterer put together a helpful rubric on determining what to keep and what to trash as you go through spring cleaning, so check it out. This is good knowledge.

Use drawers as shelves

This is the EASIEST way to build shelves I’ve ever seen. Step 1: Find drawers. Step 2: Nail drawers to wall. Step 3: Profit.

True Adventures in Better Homes and Gardens

Photographer Nadine Boughton mashes up ’50s men’s adventure magazines with ’50s Better Homes and Gardens to make thrilling scenes of animal attacks and daring escapades. I am so jealous I didn’t have this idea first.

Family cloth: would you go toilet paper-free?

We’ve talked about all sorts of eco-friendly home hacks, but let’s try the final frontier of reusable toiletries: FAMILY CLOTH. The concept is pretty straight-forward: rather than wipe your butt with paper that you then wad up and flush into the septic system, you use small squares of soft fabric that you then wash and reuse.

No more toilet paper, ever. Wait, EVER!?

Mapping your garden to plan for a better harvest

We moved into our homestead back in 2006 when it was just a blank canvas of lawn, with a couple old rose bushes here and there. After six years of major landscape changes, it’s about time I got around to making a decent planting plan of the homestead. Using AutoCAD and Illustrator, I came up with a pretty rad (and full-color!) homesteading map.

Store LOADS of tights neatly

I love colored tights, but rarely wear them as they’re sort of stuffed in with my underwear and difficult to keep straight. Enter What I Wore’s great idea on storing tights using normal hangers.

The secrets to cleaning a microfiber couch

My couch was already 10 years old when I bought it, but it looks DAMN good, thanks to the secret method I’ve figured out for keeping it shiny and soft. Even in a house of four kids.