Author: Kathleen

Just about everything I have learned about home-making I learned from grandmother.  Her home was always sparkling and her laundry was already bright.

Along with my favorite cleaning ingredients, vinegar and baking soda, I absolutely love Murphy’s Oil Soap, an old-time product for cleaning just about every area of the home.  It was first introduced at the start of the 20th century and is all natural and bio-degradable.

I use old white cotton socks with a bit of the oil soap for dusting.  It does an amazing job on wood furniture, flooring and all the wood in the home.

When dusting, it acts like a dust magnet, so the job is done quickly and effortlessly.

In the bathroom it will make your fixtures shine.  Begin by washing them with baking soda as you would with a powdered cleanser, then rinse well, and rub on the Murphy’s using a rag, and wipe again.  You can even use it to clean inside the bowl using the same method, but replace the rag with a toilet brush (unless you don’t mind donning rubber gloves).

When considering how to make Simple Living easier, think about how things were done in “the old days” before all the chemical cleansers became the norm.  Living without chemicals helps not only to keep our homes clean and safe for our families, it also protects the environment.

Last year my husband and I moved to our little farm in Virginia. We bought a small abandoned farm where we are beginning a new chapter in our life. A new simple life.

For several years we had been raising our own food  by gardening and raising chickens for meat and eggs. Now here at the farm we have the space for the addition of Nubian goats for milk and a Great Pyranees named Sophie to our homestead.

Currently we are living in our 32′ motorhome while the century old farmhouse is being restored. It’s small, but comfortable.

This will be a busy year as we establish our first garden and build new homes for the livestock as well as begin work on restoring the old farmhouse.

This quiet life-style is quite different from the hectic pace we lived for so many years.   No more sounds of sirens, squealing tires, and loud neighbors.

Here, where there are no city lights, we can see the night sky in all it’s glory, and watch as hundreds of fireflies light up the fields.  The only sounds we hear are the insects, and once in a while a distant “mooo” from a neighboring farm.

This is where we intend to live, quietly, peacefully and simply as our grand-parents did a century ago.