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10 Things Saving My Home Right Now

Jade Boyd: [00:00:00] Hello, and welcome to The Seasonal Edit Podcast. I’m your host, Jade Boyd, and this is a podcast where we talk about planning and productivity, doing less, and living in your season. Today is episode 135, and we’re talking about 10 things that are saving my home this fall.

So if you’re new to the podcast, let me back up and share about what I mean when I say home, what is saving my home this fall. Because I think of life and my to-do lists and organization around priorities, all of that in four categories: personal health, relationships, home, which is what we’re talking about today, and then business/work if you have a traditional 9 to 5 job

And everything in my life that I’m responsible for, I nest under one of these four categories just to help me simplify the things on my to-do list and the areas of my life that I’m responsible for to make sure I’m not missing anything. And within [00:01:00] that home category, it encompasses everything that I do to manage a household, like all of the unpaid work that comes with managing a home.

And I think about that in four different categories as well. So there’s interior design or design in general, all of the To-dos around, like, replacing furniture or decorating or getting your kid new bedsheets or decorating your porch for the fall, which is what we spent this morning doing, and is super fun.

Anything to do with design falls under, like, managing your household. I count meals in this category because food is, like, a whole job in itself, and I just think that’s part of the responsibilities of managing a house, is feeding the people in the house. Laundry and cleaning, so yeah, all the cleaning, maintenance [00:02:00] things, and because laundry is a huge cleaning item, that kind of gets its own shout-out.

And then money in general, so managing a household budget or finances, investing, all of that. Those are the things that I think about when I’m thinking about managing a home in this category. So the things that I’m sharing might be a little bit across the board for you, so just so you’re understanding where I’m coming from, that is how I think about the category home in my mind.

And women are often the default person responsible for running the home, and research has shown that that’s true even when both partners are working full time. And this in itself, like, even a fourth of this could be a full-time job in itself, and then we’re like, "Well, why is this so difficult?" Wow. Because it is really difficult, and I don’t claim to be perfect at this or have some magical system to give you.

But what I do think is helpful, and what I [00:03:00] have found helpful from other content creators recently myself, is knowing specific things that are working for people, even if they don’t work for me. Just, like, seeing how people are thinking about things, the products or systems or, like, simple tricks and hacks that are working for them.

That is the most helpful thing, rather than trying to adopt somebody’s, like, complicated meal planning system that works for their family and their kids and their lifestyle and their priorities. That’s obviously not gonna work for me. But if someone shares a specific food that they really like, maybe that food would fit into my categories for my family as well, and what’s mattering most to me in this season.

So I’ve seen a few different content creators do episodes or blog posts like this. I think the most frequent one that I see is The Lazy Genius Podcast, which is one of my all-time favorite podcasts to listen to right now. But we’re just gonna go through the line of 10 things that are really working for me.

Some of them are specific and [00:04:00] some of them are mindset shifts, so like I said, it’s kind of a mixed bag. And hopefully the introduction gave you a little bit of a better idea of where I’m coming from here. But we’re just gonna start with number one. So one of my absolute favorite people to follow is Caroline Winkler on YouTube, and YouTube is like my new social media.

I think it’s the only platform that I scroll or enjoy, like, engaging with content these days. I’m really not on Instagram at all anymore unless there’s a reason that I’m there to check it, like someone literally texts me a link to Instagram or I have to message someone and I don’t have any contact information for them other than Instagram.

But YouTube is really the only platform that I allow myself to consume content, and I love YouTube because it is long-form. Feels like higher quality content. And Caroline Winkler is this amazing content creator who does interior design I don’t even know what [00:05:00] to call them, ’cause she’s not an interior designer, but she’s very talented at interior design and she’s making over her own home, but also does tips on specific interior design topics and also will make over some of her subscribers’ spaces.

And her intro right now, if you go to her channel, channel, first of all, her content is just hilarious. She’s so funny as just a human being. It is… It feels like watching TV. It– I can’t recommend it enough. It’s just so funny and also so thoughtful and I learn a lot from watching her decorate. But one of the things that she has really emphasized over the past maybe year or so since she moved into her new house is that she’s designing her home by changing one small thing and solving one problem at a time rather than saying like, "This episode is the living room makeover and we’re gonna make over the entire living room at the same time."

Instead, she’s doing more incremental episodes where she’s like, "Hey, I [00:06:00] found this really great wallpaper and it’s going up in my living room, but at the same time I’m replacing this credenza in the hallway and sharing like this is the problem that I’m having, this is the solution that I came up with, this is how I’m f- you know, implementing that solution and like ta-da here’s the end result."

But it’s not entire room makeovers in one episode which I think can be so harmful for our mindset when we’re designing our own homes because we expect it to take 30 minutes and then be completely designed and done and in reality that doesn’t happen in real life unless you hire an, a professional interior designer to come do that work for you, right?

Most of us just don’t have the time and aren’t able to source and afford to buy that number of products in a short timeframe. And so number one is more of a mindset shift for me. Well, I guess her YouTube channel slash a mindset shift that I’m just solving one tiny problem in my home at a time and it’s okay to work on [00:07:00] various rooms based on whatever I’m excited to work on or what’s most pressing to solve in any given season.

And I’ve just found a lot of freedom in that mindset and something that I do in my home because I really love interior design and I just geek out on this stuff, I have a Canva document with different pages with mood boards for every room in my house so that I’m not just buying random decor and then, you know, over the course of six months if I buy a few different things Realizing that, oh, none of this works together and this actually looks horrible.

I test everything against my mood board so that if I am sourcing something, I can be patient in waiting for that exact thing that I know is going to go in the room and match the actual vision that I have for that room in the long run. And I think that has been really helpful to stop me from impulse buying things that are like, I really like this lamp on its own, but it doesn’t actually go anywhere [00:08:00] in my home, if that makes sense

We should probably just do an entire different episode on interior design, because I could talk a lot about this. Um, but number one is Caroline Winkler and her YouTube channel, and also the mindset that you don’t have to solve everything and design your whole house at once. It’s okay to let that organically develop over time, solving one little thing at a time.

Okay. Number two, the second thing that is saving my home right now is the Frugal Friends podcast, and this, again, kind of comes back to that money category and budgeting category. I think the more time we spend with people, the more we adopt their behaviors and attitudes, right? Like, there’s so much research on this, and, you know, the keeping up with the Joneses, of paying attention to what your neighbors are doing and buying.

But I think the tr- the same is true for content creators. Like I said, if you’re following only people who are doing 30-minute makeovers of their entire house, then you’re gonna assume, like, "Hey, that’s really great. I can do that, too," [00:09:00] and might even unintentionally find yourself leaning towards doing things that you’re watching online.

And I think the Frugal Friends podcast has been the opposite for me. I am so frugal with my time, and oftentimes the things that take less time cost more money, right? And my time has always been my most valuable resource, and I’m happy to pay more for something that saves me time and convenience. But I know that I should be slowing down a little bit on my consumption and taking the time to find things that are more frugal or more affordable or, you know, not just necessarily always just paying full price for something just because I like it.

And I think listening to the Frugal Friends podcast consistently, first of all, they’re really fun to listen to. Their episodes are not like finance episodes. It’s like hanging out with two friends talking about how they spend money, and they also break down so [00:10:00] many marketing tactics, which I think is just really helpful to understand from a consumer perspective.

Also, if you’re a business owner, obviously helpful to understand from that perspective, too. But they do a lot of psychology and a lot of just, like, current happenings. They pull a lot of social media clips showing how these things are playing out in real life, and I’ve just really enjoyed listening to th- listening to their podcast, and it has made me a more frugal consumer just for the sake of spending time with frugal people consistently, if that makes sense.

So that has really been saving my home in the finance category this season.

Okay, number three on the li- on the list is hiring a mother’s helper, which I was so resistant to for such a long time b- because there’s a lot of pressure as a stay-at-home mom in this season to feel like I have to do it all myself, and what am I as a stay-at-home mom if I’m hiring somebody to [00:11:00] watch my kids?

But after having two this summer and being in such a challenging season where both my kids needed such different things, often at the exact same time, I hired a high school student to be a mother’s helper and just be around helping me while I’m at home. So it’s not like they’re babysitting my kids for me.

I’m still around the house getting things done. But the key is I’m actually able to get things done. Like when the baby’s napping, they could hang out with the toddler, and I could get some stuff done around the house on my own, which just saves my sanity. Or they could hang out with the baby, and I could take the toddler around the house with me to do things that she can actually be involved in and help me with or enjoys doing.

Like she loves pulling the laundry out of the dryer for whatever reason. So it’s just really helped me be able to balance my workload better because this summer, especially when my son was so little, it was impossible for me to do anything during the day other than take care of kids. Their [00:12:00] needs were just so constant, and having a little bit of break by accepting help has just saved my sanity.

And this fall we have the same high school student helping us three hours a week in the afternoon one day, and then we hired another, um, babysitter that’s helping me three hours a week on a different morning. So between those two different segments, it’s not like I’m leaving the house for three hours or not being around my kids for three hours, but I’m having somebody else there who can take the bulk of the responsibility so that I’m better able to get some of the other stuff around the house done.

And that has been so, so good for me on so many levels

Okay, the fourth thing on the list is our robot vacuum, which is like the MVP of our household, and I think I’ve shared this a million different times. We call him Roby. He’s a Roborock vacuum, and my husband was able to plumb it in the laundry room [00:13:00] so that it can… It has a mop on it, and so it can just attach to the water line, and it fills and empties the mop by itself, and it vacuums, and it has probably reduced the dust in our house by 1,000% because this robot vacuum is what is vacuuming our house 90-plus percent of the time.

We really should get out the actual mop and vacuum more often because, I mean, the robot only does so much without… You know, if I’m vacuuming with a handheld vac, I’m going to move the end table a little bit that’s a leggy end table so I can vacuum underneath it. Stuff like that, the, the robot vacuum is not gonna do.

It’s not the perfect solution, but it does mean that we’re vacuuming something rather than nothing in this season. And in this season, something rather than nothing is like the gold standard. So it is definitely saving my house right now

Okay, number five on the list is Attitude, the brand Attitude. All of their [00:14:00] products saves my life. I have been on a long journey of swapping out the products that I use, trying to look for more non-toxic solutions, and this started really, I think, in like 2018 when I started having all sorts of crazy allergies.

And because of one of those allergies, a lot of the products that I was using, I could no longer use anymore. So I went on this deep dive of like, okay, what ingredients are actually in my products? And while I was swapping them, I was looking for cleaner alternatives. And again, this is something that we’re six years into now, and I’m still not perfect at it.

But Attitude products are across the board EWG verified. The Environmental Wellness Group gives them extremely high ratings for not having any toxic, um, chemicals or toxic ingredients in them, and they’re actually really great products. So from shampoo and conditioner, which I think is the first product that I bought from them, to hand soap, to dishwasher soap, to laundry detergent, [00:15:00] to like foaming hand soap for my toddler, to toothpaste.

Like we’ve tried so many of their products across the board, and they’re all just so great. So when I’m looking to swap out a new product category, I’m always looking to see like, has Attitude come out with any new product categories that I need to try? And they have just saved my life because switching out products to non-toxic products is such a lot of…

It’s so much work, and it can be very stressful. There’s a lot of fear mongering, but Attitude has really helped make that process a little bit simpler. So would highly recommend if you’re on a similar journey

Okay, while we’re on this topic, I will continue with number six, which is this non-toxic substack from Girls Who Eat, and they have a substack for non-toxic swaps and an email newsletter that goes out along with those substack blog posts. I think it’s more than once a week. It’s at least once a week, but they’ll do a blog post on, like, which toothpaste to use, and it’s really helpful [00:16:00] because they don’t just give you, like, "Here’s the toothpaste that I’m using and loving."

They really educate their viewers on the ingredients in toothpaste and, like, when you’re thinking about toothpaste, here are, like, five common ingredients that you need to look out for, and here’s why. Here’s what the research says about why this ingredient is harmful. Here are brands that you should definitely not try, maybe like popular brands or greenwashing brands that are saying that they’re clean that are not actually clean.

And then they also link products that they would recommend based on the requirements that they’ve given in any given category. And they have so many different blogs on kids’ snacks and laundry detergent and air purifiers and water purifiers, skincare. Like, it has just been really helpful, again, because it’s so overwhelming to do all of that research on your own and know what is and isn’t safe because there’s so much greenwashing and so many companies [00:17:00] trying to market as if they are clean when they’re actually including pretty harmful chemicals in their products.

So I found it really educational and also just making this goal of mine a lot easier. So I will also link that. Everything in this episode is gonna be linked in the show notes, so make sure you head over there if you’re also interested in learning from the Girls Who Eat.

Number seven is Costco breakfast sausage. This brand called, I’m gonna butcher this, but I think it’s Amylu, A-M-Y-L-U. And at Costco, it’s obviously, you buy it in bulk, and it’s a little bit cheaper. But we get their breakfast sausage, which my toddler absolutely loves, and we also get their pesto meatballs.

We’ve also tried, I think it was, like, honey garlic meatballs or something from Target. They also have some of their products in Target, and it’s all been absolutely delicious. It’s made with [00:18:00] chicken without antibiotics, and all that’s in it is chicken and spices, sea salt, water, parsley, extract of rosemary, and vinegar.

So the ingredients are very normal and minimal. There’s no, like, chemicals in them, so I feel really good feeding them to my toddler at least once a week for breakfast. I feel great eating them myself at least a couple times a week for breakfast, and it’s just been, like, a huge staple that simplified breakfast and meals in general.

We do a lot of breakfast for dinner in this household. We actually served breakfast for dinner at our wedding, so we’re firm believers that breakfast can be eaten all day long. And this is something that we consistently keep stocked in our freezer, because it’s such a great plan B meal to just pull out and make if we don’t have anything prepped ahead of time.

Okay, along the lines of food, number eight is making sourdough bread. I resisted making sourdough bread for such a long time. My husband geeked out on it, you know, during [00:19:00] COVID when everybody was geeking out on it, and he kind of perfected our own recipe for it. But he has been more busy, and I have had more time recently to make sourdough bread.

At least I’m around the kitchen more often to be able to make sourdough bread, and I finally was like, "You know what? We haven’t been making it as consistently." I was making a sourdough sandwich bread that’s kind of like a discard recipe that was not, not doing it for me, and I… It was an easy recipe, but it just wasn’t the best bread.

I wasn’t looking forward to it. And so I finally took the plunge and learned how to do sourdough bread myself, and I will say that it is, after making, I don’t know, five or six loaves myself, it is a lot easier than I was making it out to be in my head. And I’ve just been doubling the batches, so I’ll make two loaves at a time.

At least that’s what I’ve done so far. I’ve also experimented with cinnamon raisin sourdough bread, which was absolutely delicious, and then I made a, um, [00:20:00] it was a Parmesan garlic sourdough bread, which was also so, so good, and it’s made me excited to try different iterations, and it’s actually a lot more forgiving than you would think it would be.

I think in my mind it had to be so specific and exact, and the recipe directions are so long. There’s just so many steps in the process. And I will say, I’m not the best at like, oh, if we wanna make bread on Friday, then that means on Wednesday I have to feed the dough to get, like, the process started. And then if you forget to feed, feed the dough, then everything is, like, ruined.

You can’t make bread, like, you know, in a couple hours with this recipe at least. So it’s gonna take a little bit more getting used to, but man, oh man, have I really loved having fresh sourdough bread in our fridge again

Okay, on to number nine. Number nine is this shelf that I found on Amazon that goes over our washer and dryer. We have our laundry room [00:21:00] off of the entrance to our garage. So you go in the garage door straight into the laundry room, and it’s a laundry room/storage room/mud room, and it’s a pretty small room.

So there’s a lot going on there, and we were just dumping everything on top of the washer and dryer, which of course have a huge crack in the middle. I’m pretty sure there’s actually still a book, a kid’s book wedged in between the washer and dryer that we haven’t gotten out yet. But it was just really annoying to have the normal, you know, laundry soap and stuff out that we needed to have out for laundry, but then also be spraying dirty clothes and leaving them there, trying to put the car seat up there to get it off the floor.

We just had a million things and not enough space. And so I found this shelf that is perfectly sized to go above your washer and dryer. I’ll link the one that I bought, but there’s a million options if you want to go searching for one that, that better matches your decor style. I think the one that I bought comes in a few different styles too.

But it is amazing how much [00:22:00] storage, how much extra storage it feels like we have now just from, like, solving that gap issue of things falling behind or in between the washer and dryer. We’re just able to fit more things there. We throw our dirty laundry there throughout the day. Like, if my daughter gets jelly on her shirt or whatever, we’ll take it off and spray it immediately.

We’ll leave that on top of the washer. If towels get dirty in the kitchen, we throw all the dirty laundry throughout the day on top of the washer, and at the end of the day, we’ll throw it in and do, like, a quick wash cycle or we’ll do… We’ll wait and do it with the next load of laundry, throwing everything in.

So we have that system going. But we also drop a lot of the stuff that we come in the door with. Like, if I’m coming in with mail and our water bottles and a package and the groceries, like, we just leave a lot of stuff on that surface before we bring it into our home and actually put it away. And so it’s been so incredibly helpful to have that extra breathing room and not feel like things are gonna fall through the cracks, [00:23:00] literally

Okay, number 10 is a strong one. It’s something that I’m actually very excited about, which is so funny that the last episode I talked about fall capsule wardrobe and how I’ve been storing extra clothes in our storage room, because number 10 is garage sale prep. My sisters have talked me into hosting a garage sale this fall, and

It’s mostly for one of my sister’s benefit who lives out of town coming to the city. It’s so funny to call my area a city, but it is kind of a city in Iowa at least. There’s more traffic. There’s a lot of traffic for the fall garage sales, and she’s bringing a ton of her kids’ stuff, and my other sister also has a few things she wants to sell, and I’m like, "Well, if I’m gonna host this garage sale, I might as well sell stuff of my own."

And so I’ve kind of been going on this decluttering binge, but one thing that I’m really excited about is that I have finally like released my [00:24:00] extra clothing. And last episode I talked about how it’s kind of nice to be able to pull clothing out of storage and like refresh my wardrobe, but I kind of did a deep, deep declutter and have just found a lot of freedom in letting go some of the clothes that are like, you know what?

In a certain season of life, this was absolutely my style. Like, I still have a lot of shirts that are business casual, and I don’t remember, it’s probably been three years since I’ve wore anything that’s business casual. So like releasing a lot of that from past seasons of life even though I like it, I just…

I’m not gonna use it again, and if I ever do need to dress business casual, I probably will be able to buy something new. Like it feels good to just get that stuff out of the storage room. Releasing a lot of my pants from pre-first pregnancy because I’ve actually found new jeans that I really, really love, and so even if I were to get back to a pre-pregnancy size, I would probably buy the s- same pair of jeans in a different size.

[00:25:00] So I’ve just been able to do a huge purge on that, and then it just feels… I don’t know. It feels easier because it’s really hard to even get anywhere to donate things right now as a stay-at-home mom, having to take two kids and time like how am I g- gonna carry this extra heavy stuff and like load up the car with everything else with the kids and then find a time to drive it there and wait in the line to drop it off.

The place that I actually would like to donate things to is like 30 minutes away. I just think their mission is a little bit more aligned to the place that I would w- want to be giving free stuff to, and that has not happened yet. So it just feels like a really great opportunity to also make more money because when you’re letting other people resell your stuff or if you’re donating stuff, obviously you’re making very little money.

So I have come up with my little categories that I want to declutter. A big one is extra home decor, like pictures from our last house that fit [00:26:00] that house’s design and specific spaces in that house that we still two years later have not found a place to hang in this house. Some of that probably needs to be let go of.

My clothes was a big one. We’re gonna do my husband’s clothes, kids’ toys, kids’ books. We’re probably gonna sell the Mockingbird stroller

So anyway, it’s saving my home because it’s given me excuse to ruthlessly declutter some stuff that I’ve probably been hanging onto for a little bit too long. Okay. That’s all 10. So to sum that up again, number one was Caroline Winkler’s YouTube channel and the mindset of changing one small thing at a time.

Number two was the Frugal Friends podcast. Number three was hiring a mother’s helper. Number four was our robot vacuum. Number five was Attitude products. Number six was the Girls Who Eat Non-Toxic Substack. Number seven was Costco breakfast sausage from the [00:27:00] Mylou brand. Number eight was sourdough bread.

Number nine is the shelf on our washer and dryer, and number 10 is garage sale prep. So thanks so much for hanging out with me today. I hope you found something within this episode helpful. If you want the specific links and resources that I talked about today, I can send them straight to your inbox in the Seasonal Edit newsletter.

You can join this newsletter for free using the link in the show notes. And until next time, enjoy the season you’re in.