Cleaning for busy homes – part 1

Happy New Year! hope you all had a good holiday season and are well rested 🤪 Well, I have been forced back into the work and kids are back in school also. I thought I will go to writing the blog again since it’s been agggesss!

Everyone is busy these days – working or not!  Many people, I know call regular cleaning help but many also do it themselves. Personally, I prefer doing it myself because I have a thing for cleaning 🙄

There was a time when I called for regular help because I was working full-time and studying part-time but now that I own a house and not studying anymore, I like to do it myself because I have a professional cleaner hidden inside of me 😑

I am starting this series to share my cleaning routine, which is very simple-to-follow and has matured with time with tried-and-tested, easy-to-use products.

When I regularly start to use a product, I choose it for its ease-of-use, how fast it cleans and how safe it is for the surface. Cleaning routine for me in never something that will take my full day or hog a big slot because that just bores me and I am sure a lot of others.

Today I will share the routine to clean bathrooms, hope it helps you.

Products

I stock most products from Dunnes Stores or Tesco during weekly offers.

• Domestos
• Dettol or CIF anti-bacterial surface cleaner – as needed
• W5 Limescale remover – Lidl
• Floor wipes
• Surface wipes
• Kitchen Towels
• Scrubbing brush
• Disposable rubber gloves

Routine

Mostly, I deep clean on Saturdays but we all know that once a week cleaning is never enough, especially if you have children. On Saturday, I would follow this:

• Put some bleach into the toilet bowl, inside the edges and all shadowy parts.
• While the bleach works, use the wonder product, W5 limescale remover to clean the shower enclosure, just pour it on a microfiber cloth or the surface directly and wipe off, it just works magic and has made my life so easy, since no real scrubbing is required anymore. After wiping off all the walls and glass doors, rinse with water.
• Now scrub the toilet and run water. Clean the seat with surface wipe and dry with paper towel. At the end, pour some limescale remover into the bowl and scrub with toilet brush, flush the toilet. It will bring instant sparkle and prevent limescale from building.
• Clean the mirrors with surface wipes and clean dry with kitchen towel or use window cleaner and kitchen towel. Wash the toothbrush mug and wipe off the little shelf.
• Clean the sink with bleach and rinse, followed by pouring the limescale remover into the sink as well as on and around the tap. Scrub a little with brush. Clean the rest of the sink with surface wipe and dry it off with the paper towel.
• At the end, mop the floor using floor wipes and clean the bin.
• This cleaning could last till the next Saturday if you keep a bag of floor and surface wipes and wipe off the floor and sink every other day while you are using the bathroom. The use of limescale remover discourages the build up of limescale.

My bathrooms are always clean by following this routine and this hardly takes 15 minutes for me or 20 if am cleaning full walls.  Nearly an hour for 3 bathrooms, which is not bad. The idea for me is to keep the things constantly clean instead of cleaning from scratch.

I could do with some pictures but I think for post like this, this would suffice.

Happy reading and cleaning ❤️

x x x

 

 

 

A Little Bit About This Summer

Summer is Ireland is a myth. Lol. Not really, I mean we do have 3 months of warm sunny days with frequent light and heavy showers with the regular (chilly) wind. To be honest, there are few days that are actually bright and sunny with no wind. But it is also true that we can count them on our fingers. This year, we already have had some and few more to go.

No matter what is the status of the rain, wind or temperature, Spring and Summer are beautiful in Ireland as it is indeed a beautiful place to live.

I thought I would write down a series of posts on Summer as we have already done a few interesting things to celebrate the presence of sun. Hopefully more to come!

Let me mention first, that with the arrival of Summer I had to say good-bye to 2 of my wisdom teeth and the extraction for one of them did not go too well so I was sick for a good 2 weeks and lost some weight, blah blah blah.. But I want to keep that for a separate post as I also want to let others know what really to expect from a tooth extraction.

OK let’s go back to beautiful floral Summer.

We started it off with a lovely barbecue at our friend’s. It was a lovely calm day with no wind at all, giving me excuse to just sit down in my place with light chit-chat and delicious food while children were busy playing and men doing the BBQ.

What is Summer without a beach? Yes it is also true for Ireland 🙄 North Bull Island is our favourite beach because it is actually sandy (not rocky) and very accessible.

The girls went with the Dad to enjoy beachhhh…

At that point around, I was hit by my teeth extraction and after few days when I started to recover, we went for a casual walk in Phoenix Park. I loved the photos from that day.

Whether it is Spring, Summer, Autumn or Spring, it is incomplete for us without visiting the Kildare Village.  Not that I don’t like the shopping there but we love it primarily because they decorate the entire place according to the season. This year also, it was adorned in Spring/Summer theme. Here are some photos from the day.

With all this, we are also celebrating Ramadan, I don’t have any good photos to share because I was mostly sick to do proper justice to food in Ramadan except for the pakoras post that I shared a while ago. Still going on so hopefully will have more to add to my gallery.

Hope you all are enjoying the Summer while it lasts.

Bye until next time ❤️

The Great Little Easter Egg Hunt

Hope you are having a great Easter Break. I like Easter break because you don’t have to do the morning getting-ready-for-school and school-drop off routines. You can stay in bed for a little longer too. This year was even better because my sister was with us and she minded the children 😌

Anyhow, keeping the children entertained is one big thing to do during such school breaks, particularly when you are working yourself and tired to death at 5pm.

Fortunately for us in addition to planning for Easter Egg Hunt we have my daughter’s birthday also that falls in April (11th), so it keeps us busy and in and out of the house.

This year I organized a little Easter egg hunt for my girls and 2 of their friends who live in our neighbors (also, they go to same school) 🙂

I loved doing a mini setup of Easter crackers, decorative eggs, giant giveaway Easter eggs and some chocolate to enjoy – thanks to the great deals that are available on all the stores during Easter season!

I hid the chocolate eggs and little chocolate bunnies all around the house and outside in the garden. Well, I hid them so when that I myself couldn’t find 2 of them 🙃

Anyhow, girls simply loved hunting the eggs. See some of the photos from that day. Loved the little bunnies hopping here to there 😄

Later after the hunt kids devoured the chocolates.

And finally the giant chocolate egg giveaway 😃

So this was Easter Egg Hunt for us.

Do comment, how you enjoyed your Easter?

I am happy that I will be back with another interesting post soon IA

See you all xxx

My Green Kitchen

Making a new home is not an easy job. May be it is a never-ending phenomenon. It’s been nearly 8 months since we moved into our new house and since then every month there is something big and multiple small things that need to be done. My expectation that my house would be ready has not been realized yet. And I do not see it completed anytime soon 🙃

There is my pantry that needs some shelving done and some hooks drilled into the wall – not mentioning those little storage boxes and baskets that need to be bought for organization. The ensuite needs to be fully revamped. Good thing is, things are progressing and it will be finished mid of this month 😊 There is bathroom storage to be done and that shower door (yes, basic things like that are still pending).

Anyhow, going through the recent house photos we noticed that our house plants look extraordinarily beautiful; be them food photos, be them party photos or just my Instagram photos after weekly cleaning, they add the extra beautifying impact from the background 😄

Also, they are the safest, most economics and above all greenest decoration option. Safest, because you can never go wrong when adorning with plants and flowers. They never look over the top!

May be I am biased, but I have seen garden living rooms and they look stunning!

To cut long (a bit too long) story short, we bought some more indoor plants for our kitchen. And I am planning for more, soon…

Here, my almost dead orchid got revived by blooming most beautiful singular flower, my citrus plant, however, shed all its leaves, the fruit is still intact though. Not sure it’s normal or it is because of lack of fresh compost – will know once compost is added! The new one here is the aloe vera plant – very excited to use it haha 😄

Most of the new additions are my favorite cacti that come with lowest maintenance requirements.

I had few already in my kitchen window but now I have more added on the press tops. Could not take great photos because of poor lighting but will try again soon and share 😌

My most beautiful is the following cactus plant that I later on decided to put on the sideboard alongside other plants and flowers.

There is one more big plant planned to arrive in next one week but I am already loving my kitchen.

Take a look. What do you think?

Thanks for reading.

See you soon with 2 interesting posts related to Easter break,

Till then, Ciao xx

More than a Month of Celebration – A Beautiful End

Christmas, New Year, shopping and gatherings are not the only reasons for the holiday season to be special for our family; husband’s birthday and our wedding anniversary also fall in these months. Making it extra special.

The birthday was a little family business, as always, where we cut this pretty red chocolate lava cake.

The anniversary night was spent in the city center with dinner at our favorite restaurant. It is our yearly ritual to go and enjoy the most delicious Lebanese food in The Cedar Tree.

If you like kafta, kebabs, hummus and other Levantine food items like mezze, I totally recommend this restaurant in Dublin.

This was followed by the traditional baklava. However, I must add, the baklava is not freshly made anymore and therefore we did not like it much – but I think the photo is still beautiful 😉

We had a little cake cutting ceremony as we came back home – which was a beautiful berry and meringue cake. See some of the photos below (don’t mind me being super obsessed with the cake, taking numerous photos). It was as delish as it looks.

With this, our happening holiday season came to an end.

Hope you are enjoying year 2018.

Bye for now!

x x x

Patchwork Kilim Rugs from the Ottoman Empire

Making a home is an unhurried task, one cannot just rush through it. After months of moving into the new house we are still short of a number of household items. But with most of the essentials covered, we are now slowly and steadily moving towards our list of priority 2 items.

This week, myself and husband are off work so have some time on our hands to ‘ruggify’ our house. We must have some Ottoman genes in us that we both immediately settled on choosing Ottoman styled rugs called ‘Kilim’; vibrantly colored Persian patch-worked and handcrafted woolen rugs.

These rugs are made up of patches of different rugs, hand-stitched and embroidered, which appealed to our Asian roots 🙂

Each rug is unique in color, design and even the size because each patch making up the rug is different from the next patch!

Our house has mostly muted neutral colors with accents of mustards and rusts here and there; these flamboyant Kilim rugs have added a bit of vividness in our happy place.

Take a look at some photos from around the house.

What do you think about our rugs & which one did you like? Do you have a thing for vintage rugs too?

Have a nice weekend x