I often think of my blog and wish I could keep up with posting here regularly. I’m sure I could think of lots to write about, but somehow I just don’t do it! Of course, the turning of the new year makes me think of the all of the things I’d like to accomplish. As usual, my life is pretty busy with caring for my elderly mom who has alzheimers and with working full time. I miss the days when I worked part time so I could more of the things that interested me, like painting rooms or working on my soap making business.

The truth is, I’m not great at the business side of things so that’s what puts me off building up the soap business. If it were just a matter of making more soap, I’d be all over that. It’s fun, creative and relaxing for me – but doing paperwork, keeping track of expenses and inventory makes my brain go numb! I can’t stand it.

I got a new camera for Christmas, so I think I’m going to take advantage of that to post here and share my photos more often. There are blogs I read all the time that are just about everyday things, and I find them interesting. Maybe someone out there would be interested by my everyday life- can’t imagine why, but you never know, right?

This past week I’ve been making soap for my wholesale customer, Carberry Soap Company in Pickering, Ontario. I make round olive oil soaps for them in several different scents: Unscented for babies or sensitive skin, Lavender, Citrus blend, English Rose and a Patchouli soap made with a blend of veggie oils including hemp oil.

In other news, we got new blinds for the kitchen windows and it’s all looking very ‘finished’ now. There’s just one small thing to complete, which is some final painting around the small window over the sink. Somehow the small jobs just get put off, but I’ll get to it soon. We also need to touch up some of the caulking under the crown molding where it has cracked.

The spring after we moved into the house in 2005, we had the tiny bathroom downstairs completely gutted and renovated. We ended up with a beautiful, big, very WHITE shower stall. It looked lovely- for about 5 minutes. Then I started to realise that there is no good way to keep white tile grout clean long term. It just doesn’t happen. Nothing I did worked and I was sick of scrubbing and spraying with bleach solutions. After a couple of years it never looked white again, no matter what I did. Recently I was searching aimlessly online for a solution to this problem. I actually considering having the floor of the shower ripped out and replaced with a solid surface of some kind. I gave up on that idea pretty quickly when I found out what would be involved and how much it would cost. Thousands of dollars and basically an entirely new shower stall= not happening!  I tried to scrape out the grout myself using a dremel tool but I soon realised my knees weren’t going to take it, let alone my back. So- the shower sat unused for months during our kitchen renovations because we had to deal with that first. Luckily, we have 2 other showers in the house.

Eventually, I came across the website of Laurentian Tile & Grout. Looking at the before and after photos on his website, I realised I had found my answer! This miracle worker replaced all of the grout in the shower walls and floor in 2 days and it looks completely brand new again. The new grout is an epoxy that is guaranteed not to stain. Check this out.

Before: (this is clean, by the way)

After:

Yeah, I’m pretty happy with how this came out. Totally worth the cost.

I was just reading that last bit over and realised that I sound like a late-night infomercial!

“But wait, there’s more! If you act right now, we’ll rip out the grout in 2 showers in your home for the price of one!”