DIY Life

The school bell is about to ring in a new year, but there is a group of adults who need just as much attention for Back-To-School preparation as the students: the teachers. Most people don't realize, but a summer break for a teacher is not a break at all, but an opportunity to lesson plan for the upcoming year, get those state required classes completed, fight in line at the local state board of education for re-licensure, and catch up on the required reading for next year.

Regardless, going back to school is just as exciting and demanding on teachers as it is on students. Unlike students, however, most teachers have the added stress of family and household demands. So, here's a survival guide for the teacher on easing back into the school year without fainting from exhaustion.

I love laundry starch. It makes ironing so much easier. However, store-bought starch often can damage old linens or have a synthetic that does not decompose. Good news: it's super easy to make homemade ironing starch with natural ingredients that easily decomposes.

1 pint cool water
1 tablespoon corn starch

Dissolve corn starch into water and put into spray bottle. You can use other starches as well, but corn starch is most convenient. Also, the best kind of corn starch is organic starch since it doesn't have the extra chemicals that come with generic corn starch.

Regardless of what starch you use, make sure to shake before each use to redissolve the starch. If you don't plan on using it often, make small amounts or refrigerate the unused portion; however, make sure to let the mixture return to room temperature before you use it. See? I told you it was easy.

There are hundreds of "cures" for hiccups, and although my method may sound just as campy, it has worked for everyone I have suggested it to. It's a simple situation of mind over matter. Hiccups are spasms in your diaphragm; a sudden spasm of your diaphragm causes air to rush into your lungs. Your windpipe responses by closing suddenly, thinking something is wrong. Hence, the "hic" sound. The only way to get rid of the hiccups is to control the spasms, and this can be accomplished through focused, controlled breathing. The best form of controlled breathing is Pranayama, commonly known as yoga breathing.

Much like blinking your eyes, breathing can be manipulated, and by learning to control your breathing, you can regain control of your diaphragm during hiccups. Yoga breathing gets you in touch with the diaphram through slow, deep breathing. The key to this type of breathing is focus and control. Just breathing deep will do nothing, you have to mentally take control of your lungs' sympathetic system. It can be done.

For a how-to on yoga breathing, Health and Yoga has a great page on the intricacies of the breathing technique. The basic idea is to breathe in through your nostrils slowly, and fill your lungs all the way down to your belly, and exhale slowly pushing all oxygen out of your body. Ideally, yoga masters are able to slow their breathing with each inhale/exhale. Great masters can breath in for thirty seconds and out for thirty seconds. Yeah, I'm not one of those people, but I have found that the focused breathing allows me to control my diaphragm and regain normal breathing.

If hiccups last for a long time, however, seek professional help.

On July 22nd, Tanya Ryno posted a great list of how to save money in the house simply by doing a few little things. It's amazing how those little things can add up. Leonid Shalimov on CashBulge posted a few more ideas on saving money around the house. The key to saving money, regardless of your financial situation, is to be aware of your spending, aka Cognitive Spending

Cognitive spending will help you see the bigger picture and, ultimately, will help you see how honest you are being with budgets. There are two major things you need to do to consider yourself cognitively aware of your spending: budget review and purchase awareness. In the following post, I'll walk you through how to be fiscally responsible, yet reasonable.

Somewhere along the way, all our fathers became the same. Anyone who laughs at Chevy Case in National Lampoon Christmas Vacation, John Candy in The Great Outdoors, or Darren McGavin in A Christmas Story recognizes those iconic fathers as representations of our own. Each one of our fathers is determined to fix things himself, come hell or high water, and when I started Do-It-Yourself stuff around my own home, I had visions of my own "Old Man" tinkering with things around the house to "improve" them. However, when he came to visit a few weeks ago, I was reminded how I learned the value of home-improvement from my Dad. A lesson that is not easily forgotten.

You may have noticed your local coffee shop offering free coffee grounds to gardeners. Although it's true that coffee grounds can act as a slow-releasing fertilizer for some plants, it can invite mold and other problems if not properly used. So, here's the break down of when and where to use coffee grounds in your garden.

Coffee grounds add acidic nutrients into the soil, so they are most beneficial for plants that yearn acidic earth, like roses and columbine. The great people at Crescent Bloom organized a list of acidic soil loving plants. Evergreens also pine for these roasted dregs in their root system.

Grounds are are also full of other nutrients like iron, and the caffeine can encourage plant roots to spread. However, grounds should only be applied fresh and in a thin layer once a year. If you apply them too thick, they are more likely to mold and that causes more problems.

Okay, so you have an idea of a home theater, but knowing exactly where to put speakers can be a guessing game. Not anymore. Setting up a home theater is easier than you think. Most people don't want a separate movie room, and for good reason. Most of us are not part of the Motion Picture Academy of Directors and don't need the $600 movie chairs with cup holders (although my husband would argue this). It only takes two great things to make any living room into a great movie room: audio set-up and video quality.

I'm not an audio or visual expert, but I do know what works in my room and my set-up. Every room and personal preference is different, so trust yourself when it comes to making adjustments and modifications for your set up. However, here are the basics for any home theater.

A few of my favorite summer recipes, such as Strawberry Pie, require a large sum of whole, cleaned and hulled strawberries. However, yanking those green tops off can be time consuming, not to mention all the sweat meat lost when we rush. Some stores sell a contraption called a "strawberry huller" but they're clunky and often waste too much of the strawberry.

I'm a big fan of using what you have, but some older remedies work no better than the strawberry hullers. One such technique is the potato peeler. You stab the strawberry in at the top next to the stem, rotate the strawberry so the peeler cuts around the stem and pop it out with a flick of the wrist. That works great with larger strawberries, but what about those petite sweats?

The best berry-hulling tool is actually located in your cake decorating kit. The variety of star-shaped frosting cones is perfect for the varying sizes of strawberries. Use the larger star on over-sized strawberries and the small star on homegrown beauties. You're sure to have a huller the perfect size for your needs. Plus, the cones allow you to dig as shallow or as deep as you need, thus preventing the loss of berry meat. To use, place the frosting cone over the stem and push into the strawberry, then twist and pull up at an angle (a.k.a. just not straight up).

As an added bonus to this tool, there's no need to clean out the cone between berries. Just move on to the next berry and the stem from the previous berry is pushed up and out of the open-ended side of the cone. Icing on the cake, the cone is dishwasher safe.

With all the environmental consciousness of today, maybe your mother wasn't crazy to wash and reuse the zip-top bags. However, drying those suckers can be a headache. Gaiam sells a counter top bag drying rack for $19.00 (seen in picture on the right). You can also opt to use chopsticks in a tall glass to create the same system.

Regardless, make sure you clean each bag thoroughly with warm, not hot, water (hot water will warp the bag). Every little thing helps, especially since it takes about 35 years for a single plastic margarine container to decompose.

Umbra offers a great new way to display your books. The have developed a concealed bookshelf which allow a stack of books to hang on your wall without the visual disruption of a bookshelf.

How does it work? The shelf is a piece of metal bent at a 90 degree angle so that when you screw it into the wall, a wide, flat piece of metal sits perpendicular to the wall. You slide the metal flap in between the back over of a book and the pages, close the book - there are holders for the back cover of the book - and stack other books on top. Viola! A floating bookshelf.

They also have a Flybrary, which holds books perpendicular to the wall.

Both are ingenious ideas that adds a great touch of contemporary style to any room. Plus, they allow you to display your books in a unique way. And best of all they're reasonably priced. The concealed bookshelf runs $11 on Umbra's site and the Flybrary runs $27.

You can find both items at Umbra's website, or find the concealed bookshelf at Amazon or Barnes and Noble.

Every wonder how to avoid chapped hands after heavy-duty cleaning or gardening? There's an easy solution: liberally apply hand cream to hands before you pull on garden or thick dish gloves. As you work up a sweat doing your task, your hands will indulge in a spa treatment. The added bonus is that you will be more likely to wear gloves around cleaners you may not think damage your skin, like floor cleaners; thus, keeping your hands and skin happy and healthy all the time.

Also, run your fingernails across a bar of soap before heading off to the garden. The soap will prevent dirt from sinking into the depths of your nails and it provides an easy way to clean your hands afterwards. Keep your hands looking as good as your garden.

Handwritten recipes from mother's kitchen somehow always turn out better than any book-written recipe. But how do you keep the index-sized cards from fraying or disintegrated beneath food stains? The most-common practice is to purchase sleeves for the cards, but there is an easier way to use your mother's recipes without endangering the card itself: a photo album.

Buy a photo album that has the ability to add sleeves, and you can divide recipes into categories. The photo sleeves will protect your cards while organizing them to fit conveniently on the bookshelf with your cookbooks. Plus, you can use your scrapbooking techniques to decorate the cover.

The pillowcase skirt is the easiest way to make your old sheets into new, fashionable attire. Your pillow may be ready for a change too, having the same wardrobe for too long is not only boring for you, but also something your pillow doesn't want either. Here is how you can put new life into your old sheets, and give your old pillowcase a spin out on the town.

I used to believe the devil created venetian blinds: those nasty metal window treatments found in most dorm rooms, held together by string pulls covered with migraine-inducing knots. However, when my husband and I were forced to rethink window treatments, we discovered the joy and elegance of venetian blinds.

As we save money for a house, my husband and I are renting a great row home. However, as renters, our home-repair-hands are tied. So, when we discovered the walls around our living room windows were too damaged to hold curtain rods (even with molly's), we trekked off to our local home improvement store to discuss options.

Whether it be an eclectic array of family portraits or a refined collection of photography, everyone wants a well-designed picture wall. Debra McDuffee wrote a great post on eclectic picture placement. However, what about a wall? How can you create that eclectic movement on the wall without trial and error?

An easy way to create such a picture wall without the wall damage of trial and error is to use paper cutouts of the frames. Use old grocery bags, lay the frames on the paper, trace and cut out. Then you can tape them to the wall and design their organization. All this without guessing or wall damage.

This works great for anything you want to hang: masks, decorative plates, etc. So go, make that fabulous picture wall without worry.