Homes: Cleaning your house from top to bottom

Home & Garden

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Cleaning your house from top to bottom

By Times Staff, Wires
Published October 27, 2007

Cleaning your house from top to bottom

The latest from those well-organized people at Real Simple magazine: Real Simple Cleaning: Your Room-by-Room Guide to a Beautiful House (Real Simple Books, $21.95). There's lots of straightforward and realistic cleaning advice here, plus playlists of tunes so you can whistle while you work, 10-minute cleaning lists, recipes to make your own cleaning solutions, and tips for specialty areas like kids' rooms and your home office. Plus: Why ketchup is the perfect copper cleaner.

Track down things for turkey day

It's 26 days until Thanksgiving, not that anyone's counting. Things to do: Put your hands on the recipes you'll need when the cooking marathon starts (where is that sweet-potato souffle recipe?). Locate the cooking equipment and serving pieces you'll need - like the turkey roasting pan. Remember what you did with seldom-used entertaining items: cheese spreaders, frilled toothpicks and cocktail napkins. You'll be thankful you did.

Martha upgrades her Kmart line

Okay, okay, Martha Stewart is all over Macy's with her new line of homewares. But she's still at Kmart too, where she has "refreshed" her Martha Stewart Everyday line with higher thread-count sheets (up to 500 threads in Egyptian cotton, priced from $69 to $92), new colors and "refined" construction. There are faux-suede and faux-silk coverlets (that probably means polyester, not that there's anything wrong with that), coordinated bedding and decorative pillows.

Perfectly pressed, and stain-free, too

New from 3M: Faultless Starch Plus Stain Resistance is a spray-on starch with Scotchgard, which is activated by the heat of the iron. The result: Your clothes look crisp and they repel stains. As we face the start of the Eating Season (or just messy lunches), doesn't that sound good? All this and a fresh linen scent. It will be in stores in November at a suggested retail price of $3.29 for an 18-ounce canister.