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 ...

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 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...

Ok. So its February, and I have just got around to putting Christmas well and truly to rest for the year. I mean last year. Considering that Hot Cross Buns have hit the supermarket shelves already (Isn't Easter in April?) I'm thinking that maybe I should leave it up and just do the Christmas thing 24/7/365. It looks like the way the advertisers want us to go... Anyway. Since I had plenty of time and room to sort out my Christmas stuff, I decided to do it properly. Here's what I did... All the decorations that could be put back into its original packaging was put back into its packaging!. I discovered that rubber bands work well as a way to hold the packages shut rather than the sticky tape that they came with. I had a bit of a cull at this stage too. I donated to charity all the decorations that I didn't like, don't want to use again or are not "my colours". It means that I'm not storing something I don't like and wont use and they are g...

I was so sure I had some tomato puree in the freezer last week and do you think I could find it??? No. Enough ice in there to start the next ice age but it seemed there was no tomato puree, not in the first five layers of ice at any rate. I decided that I needed to give the freezer a bit of a spring clean (although its high summer here at the moment). Now, cleaning the freezer out has always been a bit of a chore. It takes for ever, the food melts long before I have got all the ice out and I often wreck the thing I have using to bash all the ice out of the freezer with. We aren't discussing the dings and dents that I have managed to put into the sides of the freezer either, by the way... I decided there must be an easier way than wrestling with huge chunks of ice that don't want to be evicted from the freezer and so I googled "cleaning your freezer". It turns out there are MUCH easier ways to do this than a morning of ice bashing.. Here's what I did... Fir...

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...

We bought a long time ago one of those plastic peg hanger things that you use to hang socks and undies on the line without taking up a million pegs or metres of clothes line space - and we loved it. It cost $2 from one of the cheapy shops and its lasted, we reckon, close on five years! Not many $2 investments go that far usually. I bought a second one when we went camping a few years ago and it disintegrated last week. The plastic just shattered from its life in the harsh Queensland sun. I rescued the pegs and the hooky hanger-er bit and decided that I could whip something together that might give us a few more years (months or weeks more likely) out of my $2. Here's what I did... Got some prunings - hoping they were hardwood Played with a basic design And cut them to length Using the plastic coated wire my husband saves going into the bin at his work - I tied the prunings together in the basic shape Like this - I only did the fo...