Oh the Holidays! It surely is one of my favorite times of the year. However with it comes not only more fun but also more work. You may be in my same boat and will be entertaining company at any time during this period. How do you manage getting your house (and keeping it) ready for guests without overextending yourself? Here are my tips for maintaining a guest ready house at all times:

1) Break down cleaning your home into smaller chores. Personally, what I do is take on one cleaning chore per day. I take advantage of nap times and clean the bathrooms one day, the next day I clean the hardwood floors, another day I dust, etc. Personally I like to start with the chore I dislike the most just to get it out of the way. But perhaps starting with the easiest task is what may work for you.

2) Set a time each day to do a quick cleaning session. I like to call this the “once over cleaning” and I often use Clorox Disinfecting wipes to quickly clean and disinfect toilet surfaces, and also kitchen counters and tables. This is a great way to keep daily grime from building up and making it harder to get rid of it.

3) Narrow down the number of cleaners you use. My nose is very sensitive to smells so I like to narrow down the number of scented cleaners I use in the home. I use an all purpose cleaner such as Pine Sol to clean floors and also surfaces. That way there will only be one smell throughout the home and not a overbearing mix of scents.

4) Get those beds ready for guests. Make sure all linens are freshened up. Choose the laundry detergent of your choice and don’t forget to use fabric softener. You don’t need to go out and buy new linens, you can revive old linens with a stain fighter and color booster detergent.

5)  Don’t try to do it all!  Listen it’s enough work to cook food for all of your guests to also have to afterwards clean all of the dishes.  Sometimes it is OK to use disposable tableware, particularly when you have a lot of guests coming over.  Don’t be afraid to run the dishwasher more often than normal as well.

Disclosure: I am an official Walmart Mom. Walmart has provided me with compensation in return for my time and effort spent creating this post. My participation in this program is voluntary and my opinions are always my own.

This year my six year old asked if we could decorate the house for Halloween.  I am not crafty at all and I also don’t have the home decorating gene.  But I still wanted to do something that would be fun for the kids and easy for me.

Last year we carved pumpkins, but that was too much work for me.  Probably because I had to carve all of the kids pumpkins for them.  So this year I wanted something less labor intensive and decided to go for Painted Pumpkins instead.  After looking around for ideas, I found an article on Family Circle Magazine about 12 ways to decorate with painted pumpkins.

Painting pumpkins is very easy.  All you need to do is find the image you want to imprint on the pumpkin.  I use ClipArtGuide to find the images I wanted.  I then enlarged them and then cut them out.

The instructions online said to use a grease pencil (?) to trace the image on the pumpkin. But I didn’t have that so I used a washable black marker instead since I was going to paint the images black.  Then painted them with regular black paint.  One tester would be enough to paint this and I did buy at Walmart small painting brushes to get the details.

The Bats were easier to paint and the kids had fun doing those:

Both of my sons need haircuts!, LOL!

And this is how my house front looks like now:

So, that’s how a non- Martha Stewart Type gets some fall decorating done without breaking a sweat!  You can do it too.

Disclosure: I am an official Walmart Mom. Walmart has provided me with compensation in return for my time and effort spent creating this post. My participation in this program is voluntary and my opinions are always my own.

Wanna get Halloween Costumes for free? then enroll friends, neighbors and family in a costume swap party. Chances are that you have friends and family that have outgrown Halloween costumes they can no longer use. But maybe you have some that they CAN. So get together as many friends as you can and swap those outgrown costumes with each other. You don’t even have to give the costumes away. Most costumes are only used for hours so you can lend costumes to each other.

I am so mad!  A couple of Sundays ago I hit my local Walgreens really early on a Sunday morning.  I was hoping to load up on some of the free after register rewards items available and do you know what happened?  Nothing! that’s what happened!  the shelves were completely empty.  I was so upset!  I had 40 of these coupons I was hoping to use that morning and instead I walked away empty handed.  That’s not all of it either.  I found a tearpad of coupons at my grocery store and was hoping to get a good wad of them for me to use later.  Instead I had to content myself with the last three coupons available.

I am just tired of all of these “coupon newbies” who keep clearing MY stores.  How am I supposed to build my Empire State Building Replica ut of body wash bottles?  You should see these newbies at the stores, trying to figure out the deals.  I don’t even bother helping them or telling them about this awesome couponing ebook I came across because I don’t want to encourage them.  I want them to stop so I can go back to being the only one getting the awesome deals at my store.

Does this rant sound familiar to you? Maybe you have come across it on another blog, or forum.  Let me tell you something NOT tongue in cheek like the fake rant above.  It makes me SAD.  It makes me sad to think that there are people out there who think learning how to save money by using coupons needs to remain a secret, a sort of “secret” society.  One where only the “savvy” ones get to partake on the secret loot.

Yes, it is true that the show Extreme Couponing has brought a lot of attention on the subject.  It is also true that it has brought out the worst on some people. But complaining about the inconvenience this causes you is not the answer.  Be Proactive and do something about it!  If you have been the victim of someone who has poor shopping etiquette, take the time to talk to the store manager.  Explain how ultimately store sales suffer when one person hoards all of the deals and the vast majority finds empty shelves.  Suggest they keep a better stock or even suggest they consider implementing store limits.  If your store has changed their coupon policy because of an increase in coupon fraud, help them along.  Help them keep track of fraudulent coupons better by suggesting they visit the Coupon Information Center online and see the list of coupon fraud alerts.

These are just a couple of things YOU can do to lessen the impact of the increased interest in couponing.  I want to hear what else YOU are doing about this too.

I had to make an emergency stop at the grocery store this evening because we were all out of fruit after being gone all weekend.  Being out of fruit is a bit of a travesty around here as my kids eat TONS of it.

As I was picking up what probably was the tenth pint of blueberries to inspect before putting it in the cart, another woman approached the table.  She then grabbed a container of blueberries, glanced at it for probably a second and put it in her cart.  She then walked away not without probably rolling her eyes at the site of me picking another pint of blueberries to inspect.  This same scene repeated itself as I chose the right strawberries, the perfect watermelon, the sweetest smelling cantaloupe and the almost yellow bananas.

It is not that I am obsessive-compulsive regarding the fruit that I buy.  It’s that I think that if I am spending all this money on fruit I better make sure I get the best for the money I pay.

I was never a picker myself.  In truth it was my husband who made me one and I am glad he did.  I can’t tell you the many times fruit or other food items ended in the garbage because I did not carefully inspect them before adding them to the cart:  moldy blueberries or strawberries at the bottom of the container, broken eggs inside the carton I did not care to open and more.

I am often asked: but how do you save money on fruits and vegetables?  Well, here is one way: Spend just a few minutes inspecting the food you buy to make sure you get the best you money can buy.

So, are you a picker or a grabber?  Do you take the time to inspect or just grab the first item available?