While your humble abode might not be ridiculously filthy, there’s no harm in giving it a deep clean annually. This can give us the opportunity to declutter, reevaluate our storage, tidy up the nooks and crannies and clean the aspects of the home that rarely see the duster, the polish or the hoover. Deep cleaning is more than getting the wet vacuum cleaner out, you need to consider how you will get each of your rooms looking brand spanking shiny new. Take a look at this guide to help you give your home a thorough deep clean.
Each room needs to be cleaned with a fine tooth comb. Each room will require different jobs to be completed. You might need a carpet wash in one room and a chimney swept in another. Go room by room and make a list of each job that needs completing. Your annual deep clean may take a few days to complete as you should finish cleaning one room before starting another.
Before you begin cleaning, you need to clear your living spaces of clutter. This might mean your ornaments or it might mean your bookcase full of CDs, the stereo and your cookbooks. Put them in another room along with your furniture so that you have a virtually bare room. This allows you to clean even the deepest of nooks and crannies.
Any clutter that you no longer want to keep should be dumped, recycled, given to a charity shop or sold. Don’t keep hold of it if you don’t want it. It will take up valuable loft space. Put some of your better quality stuff on eBay and make a bit of money for your efforts. What is one person’s junk is another person’s treasure.
Bedrooms
Bedrooms are the spaces that tend to hold the most dirt. Without going into too much detail, you spend around eight hours a night lying in bed, so dead skin cells will permeate through the room. At the very least you need to clean your mattress and whip on a couple of new protectors. You may need bed bug removal if you spy any critters and you will want to rub down the skirting boards and bed frames. Hoover your carpet and wash your drapes. When everything is clean you can redress your bedroom so that it becomes your haven of relaxation once again, without as much clutter and smelling fresh and delicious.
The bathroom within your home should be cleaned on a regular basis, but there are some jobs that you probably don’t do as often as you should. Open up the plug holes, pour down some drain unblocker, and clean the hair and gunk from your shower heads. Check out the cistern of your toilet to make sure there is no limescale developing and mop the lino. A bathroom needs to be sterile and hygienic so this is the room that needs to be deep cleaned a little more regularly than annually.
Follow this guide, and you will have a fresh new clutter free atmosphere within your four walls. You will soon master the art of deep cleaning your home.
Tia, and TipsfromTia.com is trying to keep you looking good and feeling good, from the inside out. If you’ve got a problem or a tip email me! Be sure to Like and share on Facebook or Follow on Twitter or Instagram.
Do you sometimes have that feeling, when you look into the mirror, that attractiveness is for other people?
We all have a bad day when we feel vulnerable; one of those days when all you want to do is to hide away until you’ve made peace with the reflection in the mirror. Bad days happen to the best of us. But they are not without consequences. Indeed, it’s hard to stand for yourself when your inner critic is stuck on a loop of ugliness. Attractive people never have self-doubts, you tell yourself. But that’s where you’re wrong. Attractiveness is in all of us, and that includes you even on your bad days. You need to find your way back to the real you.
There’s no denying it; you’re not going to feel at your most sensual when you’re wearing a pair of oversized joggers. What you wear plays a significant role in how you think. Feeling attractive is all about choosing a delicate lingerie set that revive your inner femme fatale. After all, you have to dress the part! It’s up to you whether you prefer a cheeky babydoll with a bow or a pair of alluring French knickers. There’s a moment when you have to give your mind a chance to look at yourself from the right angle, and that includes buying the clothes that make you feel like a woman.
They look after their body
Your body is a temple. You’ve heard the saying countless times before, but you’ve never really thought it through. There’s a double meaning to the temple imagery. Indeed, it means that you need to treat your body with the utmost respect, in terms of how you feed it and look after it. But it also means that, like a temple, it has the potential to shine – aren’t temples filled with the most delicate decorations? If you’re the kind of person who lives primarily on takeaway and goes to bed without removing their makeup, the chances are that the temple might be in need of repair works! But ensuring you give your body the vitamins and minerals it needs to stay strong and healthy and that you protect your skin, you’re guaranteed to feel like a goddess!
Tia, and TipsfromTia.com is trying to keep you looking good and feeling good, from the inside out. If you’ve got a problem or a tip email me! Be sure to Like and share on Facebook or Follow on Twitter or Instagram.
Over recent years, home energy efficiency has become a major talking point, with more and more people seeking tips that can help keep their bills – and their home’s impact on the environment – as low as possible. As tends to happen when a topic becomes popular, the good advice tends to be joined by a few myths that can potentially stymy people’s ability to actually improve the energy efficiency of their home as a whole. Below, we’ve outlined a few of these myths, so you know which measures aren’t worth your time – and which ones are.
MYTH: Hand washing dishes is preferable to using a dishwasher
It’s claimed that there are two benefits to hand washing over using a dishwasher. The first is related to the energy needed to heat the water for washing; according to the myth, less hot water is needed to wash dishes by hand, and thus less energy needs to be used to heat that water. The second is in terms of the water itself, with the myth suggesting that dishwashers use more water than people generally use to hand-wash, which means dishwashers increase water waste. Neither point, however, is accurate – dishwashers are the more efficient choice, by every metric, every time.
MYTH: Black radiators are preferable to white radiators when it comes to heating your home
If you were to leave two shirts, one black and one white, out in the sun for an hour, the black one would be much hotter to the touch than the white – so this myth does have a basis in scientific fact. However, the difference is in the type of heat; in our example, it’s thermal heat that makes the black shirt feel hotter, but radiators primarily produce convective heat – which colors do not impact. While radiators do produce some thermal heat, it’s not significant enough for you to see any real benefits from black radiators. If you paint a white radiator black than you might see tiny benefits due to the extra layer of insulation, but it’s not significant enough to be worth going out of your way for – if you like the idea of black radiators as a design feature, then go for it, but doing so won’t make an appreciable difference to your heating bills.
MYTH: It’s better to leave your home heating on all day rather than turn it off and on continually
This myth would make sense if everyone lives in a hermetically-sealed property where it was impossible for internally-heated air to escape – but no one does live in such a property. Our homes are losing energy all the time, which means that if the heat is left on all day, then heat is being lost all day too. It is far preferable to turn your heat on and off as and when needed.
MYTH: Use plastic wrap to cover windows and prevent heat from escaping
Around 25% of a property’s heat is lost through the windows, so this myth seems to pose a sensible solution to this problem – simply use plastic wrap to add an extra layer of insulation but without preventing natural daylight from entering the room. However, the benefits of doing this are negligible, it’s unsightly, and plastic wrap at all is less than ideal from an environmental standpoint. Realistically, modern double-glazed windows that have been properly installed and are well-maintained are always the best way to prevent heat loss via the windows in your home.
So what does work?
All of the myths developed for a reason: because people want to make their home more efficient and cut their energy bills, especially over the winter months. The fact that the above myths have been busted doesn’t change the fact that people still want to see the benefits of a more efficient home – so it’s worth discussing the measures that can actually make an appreciable difference in this regard.
Most of the principles of good energy efficiency will be familiar to most; there’s simply no magic remedy that will slash bills and cut energy usage dramatically. Instead, focus on the fundamentals:
Ensure that your home is adequately insulated
Replace old or damaged windows to help retain heat in your home
Keep the thermostat as low as is comfortable and safe
Swap your conventional light bulbs for LEDs
Turn the lights off when a room is not in use
Unplug devices rather than leaving them on standby
The above methods can really help to keep your home as energy efficient as possible, so you can set the myths aside and focus on achieving tangible results.
Tia, and TipsfromTia.com is trying to keep you looking good and feeling good, from the inside out. If you’ve got a problem or a tip email me! Be sure to Like and share on Facebook or Follow on Twitter or Instagram.
If you’ve ever moved house, you’ll know that while it’s exciting, it can also be incredibly stressful, especially if you’re moving with kids. With these easy tips, you can make moving a lot easier on you and the rest of the family and take out a lot of the stress.
Plan out some meals for the last few days before you move house. Emptying out the freezer before you move can mean you end up eating some odd combos for dinner if you don’t think ahead. To dodge eating dinner that combines oven chips and old leftovers that nobody can remember the origin of, go through the freezer and see what kind of meals you can organise to use up the last of the food without resorting to eating strange combinations.
For the first few days after the move, be prepared by stocking the fridge and freezer with some pre-prepared meals or microwave dinners that are fast to get ready. When you’ve been unpacking boxes for hours, you’ll be grateful for a quick, tasty dinner that’s a lot cheaper and healthier than ordering another takeaway.
Clear out old stuff as you pack up your house. We all end up with a lot of stuff, especially with children. A declutter can be very satisfying and lets you start fresh. As you’re packing up, sell, donate or throw out the things you don’t want or need anymore, instead of just moving them to your new home. As an added advantage, you’ll have less stuff to fit into the moving van. Host a garage sale to sell some of it, and make back some of the costs of moving.
Buy a tape gun. Setting up your packing boxes and sealing them up when they’re full will be much faster and simpler if you use a tape gun, which can save you a lot of time and frustration.
Label each of your packed boxes with a note about what it’s in it and the room it should go into. This saves you answering questions from the moving company as they’ll already know where things need to go. It’ll also make unpacking easier, as you’ll find the things you need quickly.
Think about what you’ll need in the first few hours at the new house. This could include things like a box cutter to get into other boxes, toilet paper, essential medication, phone chargers and some cups with tea bags or coffee so you can make a drink while you unpack. Pack these essentials into a box that you keep with you instead of putting in the moving van, so you have them ready to access.
Pack another box of similar essentials for the kids, with some pre-packed snacks for hunger emergencies and a few small toys to keep them busy and out of the way during the moving. Any items they’ll find comforting, like a favourite stuffed animal, is a good way to help them stay relaxed during the upheaval.
Plan out some meals for the last few days before you move house. Emptying out the freezer before you move can mean you end up eating some odd combos for dinner if you don’t think ahead. To dodge eating dinner that combines oven chips and old leftovers that nobody can remember the origin of, go through the freezer and see what kind of meals you can organise to use up the last of the food without resorting to eating strange combinations.
For the first few days after the move, be prepared by stocking the fridge and freezer with some pre-prepared meals or microwave dinners that are fast to get ready. When you’ve been unpacking boxes for hours, you’ll be grateful for a quick, tasty dinner that’s a lot cheaper and healthier than ordering another takeaway.
Clear out old stuff as you pack up your house. We all end up with a lot of stuff, especially with children. A declutter can be very satisfying and lets you start fresh. As you’re packing up, sell, donate or throw out the things you don’t want or need anymore, instead of just moving them to your new home. As an added advantage, you’ll have less stuff to fit into the moving van. Host a garage sale to sell some of it, and make back some of the costs of moving.
Buy a tape gun. Setting up your packing boxes and sealing them up when they’re full will be much faster and simpler if you use a tape gun, which can save you a lot of time and frustration.
Label each of your packed boxes a note about what it’s in it and the room it should go into. This saves you answering questions from the moving company as they’ll already know where things need to go. It’ll also make unpacking easier, as you’ll find the things you need quickly.
Think about what you’ll need in the first few hours at the new house. This could include things like a box cutter to get into other boxes, toilet paper, essential medication, phone chargers and some cups with tea bags or coffee so you can make a drink while you unpack. Pack these essentials into a box that you keep with you instead of putting in the moving van, so you have them ready to access.
Pack another box of similar essentials for the kids, with some pre-packed snacks for hunger emergencies and a few small toys to keep them busy and out of the way during the moving. Any items they’ll find comforting, like a favourite stuffed animal, is a good way to help them stay relaxed during the upheaval.
Plan out some meals for the last few days before you move house. Emptying out the freezer before you move can mean you end up eating some odd combos for dinner if you don’t think ahead. To dodge eating dinner that combines oven chips and old leftovers that nobody can remember the origin of, go through the freezer and see what kind of meals you can organise to use up the last of the food without resorting to eating strange combinations.
For the first few days after the move, be prepared by stocking the fridge and freezer with some pre-prepared meals or microwave dinners that are fast to get ready. When you’ve been unpacking boxes for hours, you’ll be grateful for a quick, tasty dinner that’s a lot cheaper and healthier than ordering another takeaway.
Clear out old stuff as you pack up your house. We all end up with a lot of stuff, especially with children. A declutter can be very satisfying and lets you start fresh. As you’re packing up, sell, donate or throw out the things you don’t want or need anymore, instead of just moving them to your new home. As an added advantage, you’ll have less stuff to fit into the moving van. Host a garage sale to sell some of it, and make back some of the costs of moving.
Buy a tape gun. Setting up your packing boxes and sealing them up when they’re full will be much faster and simpler if you use a tape gun, which can save you a lot of time and frustration.
Label each of your packed boxes a note about what it’s in it and the room it should go into. This saves you answering questions from the moving company as they’ll already know where things need to go. It’ll also make unpacking easier, as you’ll find the things you need quickly.
Think about what you’ll need in the first few hours at the new house. This could include things like a box cutter to get into other boxes, toilet paper, essential medication, phone chargers and some cups with tea bags or coffee so you can make a drink while you unpack. Pack these essentials into a box that you keep with you instead of putting in the moving van, so you have them ready to access.
Pack another box of similar essentials for the kids, with some pre-packed snacks for hunger emergencies and a few small toys to keep them busy and out of the way during the moving. Any items they’ll find comforting, like a favourite stuffed animal, is a good way to help them stay relaxed during the upheaval.
Tia, and TipsfromTia.com is trying to keep you looking good and feeling good, from the inside out. If you’ve got a problem or a tip email me! Be sure to Like and share on Facebook or Follow on Twitter or Instagram.
Understanding the Causes and Treatment of Problem Thyroid Goiters
Although most thyroid goiters are harmless, often thyroid goiters can be caused by autoimmune diseases tied to hyperthyroidism or hypothyroidism. Treating the root causes can help minimize or even reverse the progression of the goiter.
Goiter is one of the most
commonly encountered types of thyroid conditions. This refers to the
enlarging of the thyroid gland that has roots in a broad array of different
causes, among them autoimmune diseases. Although usually seen as harmless,
goiters are sometimes indicative of a more serious condition or may lead to
various other symptoms, which may require interventions as determined by a
physician.
Addressing extreme forms of goiter is one
of many disciplines under thyroid
management. Patients in Provo can rely on a trusted healthcare
provider to deliver accurate diagnoses and treatment programs to manage extreme
goiter and a host of other thyroid conditions.
All
About Goiter
Goiters refer to a larger-than-usual
thyroid gland, which has many different causes. Most instances of goiter are
harmless, having no associated inflammations, and do not cause any lasting
impediment to the function of the thyroid gland. Often, these so-called simple
goiters do not have a clear cause and can be left alone with little to no
treatment as determined by the attending physician.
Most minor goiters are merely felt rather
than seen, although a sufficiently enlarged thyroid gland is typically visible
when one turns around while looking in a mirror. The only real symptom
experienced by most people with benign goiters is a minor difficulty in
swallowing. Problem goiters, however, do exist. These often involve the
abnormal swelling of the thyroid gland that is caused by a motley group of
different diseases.
Worldwide, the most common cause of goiter
is iodine deficiency, although this is rare in the United States and the rest
of the developed world due to the abundance of iodine in the water and many
types of food. The second most common cause is autoimmune
diseases, Hashimoto’s thyroiditis, and Graves’ disease. Doctors usually
identify problem goiters is usually done through their associated symptoms and
careful testing.
Hypothyroidism
vs. Hyperthyroidism
Hashimoto’s
thyroiditis is an autoimmune disease where the body’s immune system
attacks the cells of the thyroid glands. This causes hypothyroidism, a reduction
in the thyroid gland’s ability to produce hormones, causing a shortage that can
negatively affect the body’s thermoregulation and ability to consume and
process energy.
Grave’s disease, meanwhile, is one of the
most common causes hyperthyroidism, a condition that leads the thyroid glands
to overproduce hormones, causing the body’s metabolism to speed up
considerably. Also an autoimmune condition, Grave’s disease involves the
overproduction of antibodies, which spur the thyroid glands to produce more hormones
in response.
Treating Problem Goiters
Problematic thyroid goiters are
often managed alongside the conditions that caused them. Goiters stemming
from Hashimoto’s thyroiditis, for instance, are often treated through hormone
replacement therapy, which supplements the thyroid gland’s production of
hormones. This helps arrest the enlargement of the goiter but cannot shrink it.
Goiters caused by Grave’s disease, on the
other hand, are treated with antithyroid medications, beta-blockers, and
radioactive iodine. Radioactive iodine is one treatment that can reduce the
goiter’s size.
In extreme cases, surgery may be deemed necessary. Surgery is pursued as a last resort and is often only done when the body’s production of thyroid hormones has already reached baseline levels.
Tia, and TipsfromTia.com is trying to keep you looking good and feeling good, from the inside out. If you’ve got a problem or a tip email me! Be sure to Like and share on Facebook or Follow on Twitter or Instagram.
