If you live in certain climates then cockroaches and other creepies are going to be part of your life. We had terrible problems with cockroaches a few years back and after a chat with a chemist friend I changed from using Borax to Boric Acid as they way to get rid of our cockroach problem. The active ingredient seems to be the Boron that is in both Borax (Left) and Boric Acid. (Right) The main difference seems to be that Borax is a crystal and easier for the cockroaches to ignore as its large and easy to see. The Boric Acid is a powder and dissolves into the sugar/milk mixture that I use and is ingested along with the attractive sugary part of the dish and Voila - no more cockroaches! Here's what I did... I buy my boric acid online via eBay or on Amazon. As you only need a teaspoon at a time, a few hundred grams lasts a long time! <iframe style="width:120px;height:240px;" marginwidth="0" marginheight="0" scrolling="no" framebor...

A friend gave me one of those amazing clear jugs with the pretty blue lights for Christmas after I coveted hers during a coffee and a chat last year. I love that I can see how boiled the water is and how many litres my husband is putting in there for his single cup of coffee and I really, really love the blue lights despite them not adding anything to the boiling of the water! But being a clear glass jug, I could see the dark build up on the base of the jug that is conveniently hidden from casual sight in a metal or plastic jug. I opened the top a few times and had a bit of a scrub but it didn't seem to work and I was reluctant to use more than detergent in it as I drink out of that jug regularly and wasn't keen on poisoning myself with oven cleaner with my next cup of tea. Then I recalled reading something about using citric acid to clean out the build up in your jug and thought I would give it a go one afternoon. Here's what I did... First I dug out my container ...

I have been experimenting with making some of my own skincare products and hair shampoo and conditioners for a while now. Recently I came across a post on the Wellness Mama blog about making deodorant at home and thought I'd give it a go and see what I thought. Here's what I did... This recipe, from Wellness Mama's Blog , is for a bar or stick type deodorant. I didn't have any Shea butter but it mentioned that I could add more coconut oil and arrowroot to thicken it up.   So I used what I had and melted it all together in a pan of water.   I let it cool slightly and then poured it into some used commercial twist up deodorant stick containers that I had cleaned out.   The big disappointment was that once reassembled with the new deodorant inside, it wouldn't wind up... Somehow I had jammed both of them, or more likely, they were never made to be reused, which is a shame on so many levels. So then I decided to try making a more li...

Home made cleaning products are easy to make, cheaper than bought ones and work just as well! I have been making my own for quite a long time and have had no problems with them at all. I reuse the commercial bottles and when they finally give up on me, I raid my (unenlightened) friends who still buy cleaners, for their old spray bottles! So my labels aren't always what they say they are - although I try to put the same type of thing into the bottle with the right label, just in case some else in my house takes upon themselves to clean.... Here's what I do...   My basic homemade cleaners are (L-R)   Watered down bleach, glass cleaner, spray and wipe and air freshener.           Glass Cleaner is made up from a mixture of half water and half white vinegar. Then add two small drops of detergent and one of blue food colouring! If you add too much colouring, it can stain your benches so go easy on it!  Spray it...

We host international students that come to Brisbane to learn English at a local English school. We host students from all over the world, learn all sorts of new things and make lots of new friends. Its a lot of fun and I highly recommend it! Along with the different nationalities and personalities, we get a wide range of domestic abilities as well... It seems that not all people in their 20's have done dishes before... Often I am at work when the students are having breakfast or lunch and getting them to wash their dishes properly can sometimes be a challenge. We have ants in the house, especially in the summer, and they will come in their millions, no, their hundreds of millions to get the smallest crumb or smear of food left on a plate on the bench or in the sink (and in the bedroom). Asking the students to wash dishes wasn't enough, some of them didn't come with this skill. For some of them, washing dishes needed to be quicker than running a sink of hot wat...

I bought these cute wee candle stick holders at the local markets on Sunday - all 3 for $5! I was happy! They looked like they were probably brass but it was hard to tell as they were totally green. I figured that they were either the real deal and I had got a real deal... or they were some cheap and nasty thing and I had bought my self a set of three green tarnished cheap candle sticks.  I thought I'd have a go at polishing them up and see what happened. Here's what I did... First I used a magnet to see if they were solid brass or brass covered steel. The magnet will not stick to solid brass and WILL stick to brass coated steel. If you use this method on brass coated steel you will probably remove the tarnish AND the brass and be left with an uncoated steel object -  you might not want that! These ones seemed to be solid brass as the magnet wouldn't stick in the slightest... Then I pulled them apart (the stick unscrewed from the base) and soaked them in a 50...

I have been experimenting with no 'poo for a while. That's not a complaint of the lower alimentary tract as much as it may sound like it, but short hand for not shampooing my hair. Yes, I do wash it of course, but not with commercial shampoo. And I do condition it - with fairly long hair I have to otherwise, pretty soon, my hair would get stiff and sticky outy and I'd have a scarecrow head! I came across the concept on a blog called " Uniquely Normal Mom " about a year ago and apart from a few trips away, when I didn't take my concoctions with me, I haven't shampooed my hair since! I found with such long hair that methods of dry shampooing with bi-carb didn't work for me and although my home made soap did a good job, it did too good of a job, really, and stripped my hair of any grease or dirt entirely and left it frizzy and very dry.  Christine's rosemary rinse helped a lot but I really needed something slightly gentler than my...

I have a lovely little side table that was made by my Father-in-law a few years ago that sits beside the couch. It's great for snuggling up with a book on a rainy day (plenty of them at the moment) and being able to reach the cup of tea no matter which end of the couch you want to settle in on. The students also find it great to balance their laptops (or are they i-somethings these days?) while they share their Australian adventures with their friends and families back home. Basically its a great little table. It turns out that its was also the perfect size, two Christmas's ago, to land a remote controlled helicopter on. So good, in fact, that it got a brown box tape "H" stuck to it. After Christmas was gone and the helicopter has fallen from favor, I bought my wee table back to the couch and took the "H" off, denoting its use as a coffee table instead of a helipad for the time being and lived with the "H" in sticky stuff for the next 18 month...

We have the worlds smallest bathroom - I'm sure of it. Not only do we have the world smallest bathroom, we have the worlds smallest bath. For many years we have not really used that bath. My husband is too long for it  - he 6'4, the teenager doesn't bathe full stop and I'm too fat to lie in it fully covered with hot water! For our current family configuration - we don't really need a bath. So I decided to get rid of it.... Here's what I did... I went over to the neighbours and cut down (with her permission of course) about five big huge bamboo poles from her big huge bamboo clump. (She encourages all her neighbours to come and harvest bamboo at anytime) and I bought it home and cut it into poles the length of the bath. And then I bought them inside and laid them on the bath like thus! They don't cover the taps - they just slot under them. I know that under all the bamboo the dust will gather and it will be full of the usual bathroo...

At work recently, we cooked up 3,000 lamb shanks (yes that was three thousand- and it took us a week!) for a feast which gave a us a huge amount of unwanted fat. Normally that would have been thrown into the skip but I had remembered reading somewhere that animal fat - or tallow - can be used for making soap. If you have a look on a commercial packet of soap you will see something called sodium tallowate - that's scientific speak for rendered beef fat. I have been making my own olive oil soap for a few years now with reasonable success, so I collected up all the fat I could, rendered it and gave making soap from fat a go! Here's what I did... I rendered the fat, which basically involves heating it to melting point and then filtering it through sieves that get finer and finer and then adding water (don't boil the fat or adding water will make it explode) and leaving the fat to set - on top of the water. The impurities should fall to the bottom and be caught in the wat...