I’m anxious to fling open the windows and curtains and bask in the warm sunshine of Spring. (You, too?) But the colder winter-like temperatures haven’t stopped the beginning of the Spring Cleaning season.

It’s a ritual.

A purging. A much-welcomed seasonal awakening. It’s our cue to end our seasonal winter hibernation. Time to dust off the dust, gather up the clutter, donate the un-wanted and un-used items taking up valuable space, and better organize our living areas.

One cleaning ritual that I take with me from season-to-season pertains to what I use to clean with. I try to be as ‘green’ as possible anyway, for my health and the health of the environment. This notion really took root when my hands had a very serious reaction to the cleaning wipes I was using. My skin started to peel and basically looked like hamburger. From that point on, I’ve used protectant gloves and more natural cleaning solutions.

There’s nothing wrong with Old-School

Our grandmothers used more natural ingredients to clean their home, partly because ‘the new miracle cleaner that cleans everything’ hadn’t been invented yet. And yet, when that miracle cleaner did arrive, it had some drawbacks that grandmother’s old-school method probably didn’t have. Like chemicals, that were harmful if inhaled.

So, my old-school, or using today’s trendy word ‘throwback’, recipe for cleaning the Winter and everyday dirt, dust, nasty spills and purifying surfaces, is an old effective favorite:

1/2 cup Distilled white vinegar

1/2 cup distilled water

But, I add a little twist to it. Just like you, I don’t want my home smelling like vinegar. So, I have a bunch of inexpensive spray bottles around filled with several combinations of this recipe with the addition of essential oils.

For cleaning glass and mirrors, I may use just the vinegar and water combo. But, for other areas of my apartment I may add these essential oils to the mix, like:

Lemon (deodorizing)
Eucalyptus (purifying)
Tea Tree (purifying)
Peppermint (purifying)

My trusty labeler helps me to keep track of the spray bottle ingredients/uses. And the essential oils add great aromas to my home. I even have a recipe for a great air-freshener/disinfectant: Fresh Air Inside

The post Living Apartment Style—Spring Cleaning Green appeared first on Paragon Properties Company Blog.

Resolutions which might include your inner being wanting to lose weight, eat healthy, spend more time with the family, work less and get organized.

Let’s take one at a time, getting organized, since January happens to be National Get Organized Month. Just a month? It seems that this should be much longer, more like a year or two, but we’ll work with it.

While I try to be meticulously organized (abject failure), sometimes it’s best just to have the objects in a  place where you can find them, contain them, see them.

Purging doesn’t just happen during the “Spring Cleaning Season”, so to help with the stuff I was keeping as I cleaned out the closets, I decided to purchase storage containers. Containers that were see-through instead of cardboard-box-like. This way, I don’t have to pull everything out of the box just to see what’s in it. I even don’t have to place labels on it. I can just look at the container from all sides.

So far, so good.
National Get Organized Month is off to a good start.

See other posts with organization tips here:

The Birds Nest pt. 1
The Birds Nest pt. 2
 

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Well, the future came. The cords and cables are still coiled up, for the most part and not underfoot. The birds nest is still tamed, but, almost three years later I found myself revisiting a portion of my birds nest solution.

The labeling solution needed updating. Despite the good-hearted effort of using the labels at hand at the time, over a few years time the labels on the cables and cords that got the most unplugging/plugging activity needed replacing. Either the identification text wore off, labels were detaching because they were designed to lay flat or labels were being accidentally torn off. So, this time, I was determined to use the correct tools for the job, to not have to tackle this project ever again. I went hunting for a labeler.

Choosing a labeler to fit my labeling needs was an interesting adventure. Presently, I had one need. But quickly thought of others as I viewed the labelers. So many models to choose from; do I go basic or bells and whistles? I settled on the Brother P-touch 2030. Bells and whistles, yes, but the decision was made easier due to it being on sale for $30 off at Office Depot, which brought the cost down to what I’d pay for a basic, no frills model.

This was a little workhorse, featuring:

• Variable size and style fonts
• Multiple line entry
• Block text entry
• Auto Fit or Fit to set length
• Saving of styles and labels
• Templates
• Bar Code Labels
• Mirroring
• Multiple printing
• Auto-numbering
• Portability

These features will be useful in the future. And, this time, I chose the correct type of label tape. A flexible label tape, created specifically for wrapping around the small diameters of cables and not coming loose.

So, I took the time, once again, to label my cables and cords, expecting this to be the last time. Now, I can once again, easily get to the cable and device intended and keep that birds nest tightly managed.

The post The Birds Nest pt. 2 appeared first on Paragon Properties Company Blog.

You know the one I mean…the one lurking under your computer station. The birds nest of cables that you can tangle your feet in. The birds nest that could probably start a small fire. The birds nest that you dread going into when, heaven forbid, you have to unplug a device.

The reason you tuck and shove your cables up under your station is because you don’t want to see them. It’s an unrelenting organizational mess. Like hangers in your closet, cables multiply. So you hide them to not have to deal with the mess. You know, out of sight out of mind. Well that worked for me for awhile, but the day came when I had to go in. I had to go under there and unplug a device.

Unplugging the end connected to the printer was easy, but following the cable behind the station, under the desk, and around to the power outlets, into the nest of other cables and tugging on it to ascertain the correct end, well, that took a minute. Or three.

It seems that it took me longer to find the correct end of the cable than it did to purchase the item, have it shipped to me, unpack it and plug it in.

So, enough is enough.

I determined that I’d had enough of that experience, so I stopped my world. I stopped doing everything I was doing to at least get some sanity into this situation. The question really was how do I help myself? “This won’t be the last time I’ll come in contact with a multitude of cables” I thought as I looked over my shoulder at the entertainment cabinet behind me. There’s just as much of a harder to reach cable mess behind there.

My solution came two-fold. I had a pack of no longer available Label Once erasable jewel case spine labels that I’d come across at the local Micro Center years ago. I’d only used a few of them for, you guessed it, labeling the spines of DVD jewel cases. But sometime after that purchase I started using the ultra-slim jewel cases. So, without a need for them any longer, into ‘the drawer’ they went. You know that drawer. You have one in your home. I won’t call it the junk drawer, because there’s some really valuable stuff in there. But, it’s the drawer were perfectly good stuff goes to sit for a long time, forever or until it’s discarded.

Well, now I had a use for the labels in the drawer. And they worked perfectly. I could write the name of the device on the erasable label and with the label being long and thin with an adhesive backing, I could easily double the label over to fold and wrap around the cable like a sash. This gave the label a little stiffness, so the labels actually stood up, making them easier to read at a glance.

I took the time to write the name of the device on two labels each and placed a label at each end of the devices cable. Whether it was a power cable, a USB cable or a Firewire cable, it got a labeled.

The second part of my solution came by going to the local Meijer’s and purchasing an industrial size roll of Velcro “One Wrap Straps” . And for the next few hours I labeled and coiled every computer and electronics cable I owned so that it did not drag the floor or pile up under the desk.

Now when I need to unplug an item, I know which item I am unplugging without having to trace the cable from start to end. I can just read the label. 

So, what happened to those labels? Well, with the popularity of the ultra-slim jewel cases, the manufacturer discontinued the erasable spine labels. This was a bummer to me because the labels gave ample room for me to write in big enough letters to see the names of the devices as I crawled around in the dimly lit spaces under the desk. You see, small writing is no longer an option. Enough said.

I still have some erasable labels left, but as I looked around the web, the only thing that came close to the solution I created was Kableflags Cable indentification Tags, available from various stores online.

Maybe in the future there will something with big letters.

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