Last time I posted I showed you the digital versions of the artwork I made for Lucy’s room. Well, here’s the final product {yay for Dollar Tree picture frames}!

I dunno, I feel pretty “meh” about them. The colors just did not print the same as they looked on my screen {which is my fault for a: printing at Walmart and B: not bothering to try calibrating my screen}. When we move this year I will probably have them reprinted so the colors are brighter and more saturated. The blue is supposed to look a little more like my blog background and a little less baby blue. C’est la vie.

If you want to see more sneak peeks of Lucy’s room you should check out my other blog, The Year of Sewing.  I will be posting about most of the sewing projects as I go {including some tutorials}. If that doesn’t interest you then just hang in there until I’m done and I do my big reveal post.

Does your child’s room have a theme {colors can be a theme}? I love hearing about children’s decor so tell me about it in the comments, or tell me about your dream room when you were a kid {or for your future kids}.

Bio Blurb & Blog Summary: Cindy has lived aboard her sailboat for 11 years. She blogs about homeschooling, parenting, writing, boat life, and planning their next adventure at http;//www.zachaboard.blogspot.com

I hate doing housework. Or in my case, boat work. Well that's the problem, I actually love working on my boat doing boaty things. What I can't stand is trying to replicate the domesticity of house life on board the boat. But a mom's gotta do what a mom's gotta do.

Making the Beds:
Our bed is a tad smaller than a standard American queen size, but it's walled in on three sides. Making the bed on a boat is a bit like playing Twister. You need to climb on top of and thereby mess up the very thing you are trying to straighten out. My secret? I don't make the bed every day. No way, no how. And I use a nice, thick quilt that's easy to flop over the sheets and give the illusion of tidiness. If all else fails, I close the bedroom door and pretend not to care.

Cooking: I don't enjoy cooking, though I do love to eat good and healthy foods. Often around 6pm time I close my eyes and click my heels and wish for a gnome to come and magically make a meal appear for my family. People joke that I probably don't like to cook because we have a tiny kitchen. Actually, by boat standards we have a fairly large galley. Even if we did live on land, I'd still be wishing for that kitchen gnome. The biggest challenge is keeping fresh food. Our refrigerator is 2 inches tall by 20 inches across by 15 inches deep. Sort of like a big version of a dorm room fridge. Arranging and finding food is like playing Jenga. Our freezer is actually larger than the fridge, but it's a top loading freezer, so the door doubles as counter space so there's often a clearing off that needs to happen before diving into the frost. We have a 3-burner propane stove with a small oven. I have boat friends on much smaller boats who whip up meals that would impress Martha Stewart. I invite myself over and offer to bring the wine.

Washing Dishes: I would love to do a scientific study to settle a debate between my husband and I. His method of doing dishes is the old fill up one side of the double basin with sudsy water for washing everything and rinsing carefully on the other side. I am more of the traditional wash by hand, but turning the faucet on and off between everything to save on water. Why does it matter? Because we're not hooked up to city water. We hold our fresh water in tanks under the floor boards by the keels. Two tanks, one on each side of the catamaran, at about 75 gallons each. When we run out, we need to get our hose, run it from the dock into our tank, and refill. It's a pain, so we're careful about water use. And in the winter, we don't have dockside water. We need to run about 5 hoses in the freezing cold from the marina office, often banging out ice chunks that form in the line from the last person not draining it properly. In the winter we're REALLY careful about water use. So which method uses less water for dishes? My stance is that because I often find food goo still stuck to the silverware after he's washed and then have to wash again, his method is inherently less efficient. When we're at sea, we wash in salt water (we have a pump that sucks it up to the sink) and rinse in fresh to save water. Our "grey water" (dirty dish water) goes down the drain into the water around us, so we're very mindful about using a biodegradable dish soap. Of course if the little gnomes would come and cook for me, I would assume they'd handle the dishes as well.

Laundry: We don't have a washer dryer on board. We have a coin operated laundry room at our marina and we schlep the body-sized bags of dirty clothes back and forth more often that I care to admit.

Cleaning The Toilet: We call it a head. And I call that job not mine. Marine heads flush with salt water into a holding tank that is pumped out when full by the marina. The unique chemical reaction that occurs when salt water and urine mix results in a scaly build up that looks like mortar and smells like a men's room. So I leave the job to the man in my life. The secret is lots of vinegar.

General Cleaning: When you live in a space this small, it gets dirty and cluttered fast. But it also cleans up fast. If we were more organized it would be even better, and I'm slowly getting there. Some things like toys are pretty well organized. We have bags under the salon (living room) table and each one has a different set of toys (blocks, animals, play silks, pirates, etc). My son knows which ones go with which bags and is great about putting them away most of the time. We have a container for art supplies, one for sewing stuff, one for seasonal books, etc. We have cloth bins for magazines and a little cabinet for mail and papers that is generally a mess. We also have the universal junk drawer. I vacuum with a handheld Dirt Devil and with a kid and pets, it happens once a day at least. I try like heck to give the place a once over every night after my son is sleeping because waking up to a mess is a crummy way to start the day. All told, even when the boat is at it's worst, I can tackle the whole thing in about an hour. Cleaning the OUTSIDE of the boat is a different story. Washing, waxing, ugh, why did we buy such a big boat? And where's that bloody gnome?
Sure it's difficult, but we love that it forces us to live simply and close to nature. We've been aboard full time for 11 years and wouldn't trade it for anything. We traveled on our former (smaller) boat before our son was born and plan to cast off again in a couple of years. So even though we may not have hospital corners or pressed clothes (whoever invented rayon gets a Nobel Prize in my book), we love that our son is learning first hand how to live simply and fully. And I get to spend my time soaking up the fresh air and sunshine on top of my home, rather than cooking and cleaning inside of it.

You know those toilet bowl stains that just won’t go away? Oh, no? You never have that problem? Well then you are clearly on the wrong blog. I think you were looking for Domestic Diva not Domestic Dork.

Now, who’s left? Ah, yes. Welcome to all my fellow dorks. As I was saying…

You know those toilet bowl stains that just won’t go away? Man, I hate those! Cleaning toilets is bad enough without having to deal with the stains from the black lagoon. Well, I’ve learned how to vanquish them and now I’m going to tell you how!

First head to the store. You’re looking for pumice stones. Sometimes you can find them in the aisle with the cleaning supplies. More likely you’ll have to head to the cosmetics section. Look near the nail polish and other pedicure items. Buy as many of them as you can afford (because if your luck is anything like mine then next time you’re looking for them the store won’t have them anymore).

On our last trip we only found two in the entire store. Here’s what they looked like:

Square stones are generally more useful than rounded ones because it’s easier to get into the corners with them. But I’ll take whatever I can get. Since I was stuck with one round and one square I used the round one for all the areas I could get it into and then switched to the square for the hard-to-reach areas. No sense wearing those corners down on the rounded areas.

Now for the “fun part,” actually cleaning that darn toilet. You should not drain the bowl when using this cleaning method. You need the porcelain to stay good and wet to avoid scratches. That’s why I highly recommend wearing gloves. All you’ll need to do is suck it up, stick your hand in, and scrub. You’ll be amazed by what an igneous rock and a little elbow grease can do. You might want to flush the toilet a few time throughout cleaning as the water can get murky and make it hard to see what you’re doing.

Now, I’m not about to show you a “before” picture because, really, nobody wants to see that. Ew. But I will show you the “after!”

What cleaning problems do you have? What tricks have you learned or developed to solve them?

Well, my two week trial of the Motivated Moms planner is just about up. So tonight I'm giving you my final review.

Definitely worth 8 bucks.

I'm positive I've mentioned it before, but I'll say it again: I'm ADD. Like many adults with ADD I have tried a million different things to organize the different aspects of my life, homemaking being no exception. I flunked FlyLady. I've read books on housekeeping and seen no improvement. I've tried making my own chore charts. Most things I tried were just too complex to mantain without getting overwhelmed.

Herein lies the beauty of Motivated Moms: it's simply a checklist. If, like me, you love lists and checking things off motivates you to do more then it can't get much better than Motivated Moms. Well, a full time maid and cook might be better but that's gonna cost a whole heck of a lot more than 8 bucks.

Actually, I like to think of it as a "mom" in paper version. "She" knows all there is about keeping the house under control. "She" knows what needs done and when. And "she" tells you without nagging or guilt tripping.

I have noticed that not everything applies to me (so I just ignore those items). And (as some have commented on other posts) the frequency with which certain tasks are listed might seem strange. Here's what Deann at Motivated Moms had to say:

"Then the kitchen cloth/towel - it just gets soppy a lot and the dishcloth will smell 'sour' if I don't change it every other day. I grew up having to SMELL the dishcloth before using it because my Mom didn't change it often enough. Ewwwwwww. LOL But trust me, we don't live in a germ free environment that looks like a museum. We live here, it's not a show place, so there are things that get laid down "just for now" and right now there's dishes in the sink because I made homemade pizza for lunch and haven't gotten in there to clean up yet (hey, at least I put everything in the sink and wiped all the sauce and cheese splatters off the counter and stove, that counts, right?). I think most people would be surprised at how normal (sometimes messy, sometimes clean) my house is but with the planner and keeping up with bits and pieces as I go through each day helps it to be at a reasonable level of tidiness at all times. There's still messes but they are reasonably contained and I know I'll get to them eventually as things come up on the planner."

Today I tried this recipe for egg popovers from Meal Planning Mommies. I made mine with whole wheat flour, ham, onion, and green pepper. Adam had his with cheese on top. I didn't because I'm cutting out dairy for the present to see if that's why Lucy has been throwing up, and fussy. But Adam says the cheese was good (it's OK, we can trust him). I have to say I'm quite pleased and will definitely make them again (next time I want to add spinach). They're yummy, healthy (if you add veggies and use whole wheat), and most importantly they're really easy to make.

See, here's the thing about me and cooking: I don't like it. Until fairly recently Adam has been the cook around here because I hated cooking so much. But if I can find more recipes like this I can see myself learning to maybe, possibly, theoretically like cooking. It's getting easier now that I'm working on establishing a regular meal plan (something I've tried to do many a time). However I think the real trick will be to remind myself (while I'm working in the kitchen) of two things:

1. Hot, healthy meals are a gift for my family and
2. It feels really good to successfully create something from a mishmash of raw ingredients.