clean house

Who doesn't love commercial cleaning wipes? They're wickedly convenient--but also wickedly expensive and often contain harsh chemicals.

The alternative: make your own!

Homemade cleaning wipes are easy to make, economical, and contain only those cleaning agents you select.

Put homemade cleaning wipes to work for you in your organized home with our easy instructions:

It's Spring!

Warming breezes scour the last of winter from house and garden. Spring rain awakens the earth and calls forth new life.

Meet the rising sap with a new broom. Spring clean indoors and out to prepare home and hearth for the return of warm weather.

Our Spring cleaning chore checklist will help you take care of important seasonal chores and welcome Spring to an organized home:

Taken a trip down the cleaning aisle at the supermarket lately? If you believe the ad hype, you can't keep a clean house without loading your shopping cart with a different cleaner for each surface, floor and sink in the house.

Hogwash! Simple recipes using products from your pantry make effective household cleaning solutions. An added plus: these natural products are more environmentally friendly than commercial alternatives.

Stock your cleaning tool tote with these homemade cleaning sprays and solutions to make short work of household grime--without harsh chemicals or irritating fumes.

Try these easy recipes to clean your organized home faster, better and cheaper:

Autumn days are long and lazy? Not for today's busy families. Between work, children's activities, and vacation plans, even breezy fall days don't seem long enough to get everything done at home.

There's a solution for busy times. Just as your body needs a "minimum daily allowance" of vitamins and minerals, an organized home needs a minimum of maintenance and attention to keep running smoothly.

Think of this as a Magic Minimum: a short list of essential household tasks. It's a bottom-line list of chores and activities necessary to keep things running at a basic level.

With a working Magic Minimum plan, the household stays afloat, even when time is short.

Spring cleaning is on the horizon, and you could use some help. How do you get the kids to pitch in when it's time to spring-clean the house?

Try these five tips to involve children with housecleaning chores:

• Think teamwork. It's downright lonely to be sentenced to clean a bathroom on your own, but paired with a parent, even a 5-year-old can work safely and happily. While Dad wields the bowl cleaner and the tile brush, his helper can scrub the sink, polish the fixtures, empty the trash and trundle towels and rugs to the laundry room.