detours

Sometimes my household cleaning activities are not planned, but snowball out of one action. One of The Farm Chicks talked about this recently on a post and she called it a detour. I detour a lot when I am puttering around the house. Sometimes, each room I enter creates some sort of temporary amnesia in me and I begin working on something in that room instead of just looking for the thing I went in there for and returning to some work in the kitchen. I don't blame age. I have always been like this.

Anyway, about a month ago I got a new faucet in my place and since then I have had a grocery bag full of the under-the-sink contents in my kitchen. I just keep moving it around. Today I finally tackled it. I sat on the floor and went through all the items (really I had very little idea what was down there. A lot of the stuff is hardware that Steve has brought over and I have no clue what it does and am not intersted in learning. I regret to say that I am not one of those tool girls). Once I was on the floor I thought I might as well go through the towels drawer, it is too crowded. So, I weeded out some items from there and then I went to a cupboard I haven't organized in years and I rearranged and weeded out that. Then when I went to put something away in the utensil drawer I saw some of my tarnished silver and remembered the Farm Chicks blog post.

Recently The Farm Chicks blog had an entry on this very subject of housecleaning detours and in it they showed a really easy way to clean silver. I have a few pieces of silver flatware, or maybe it is silver plated, that I have collected over the years at thrift stores. I grabbed several of them and did the experiment.

You line a foil pan and cover the flatware in baking soda and then add hot water. Then you let it set for a while. Some of mine looked shinier in the pan and some did not. So, I did it again. They looked a little better, but the worst of them were still horribly tarnished. Then I just took one out and scrubbed it and the tarnish came right off, now all of them were shiny and way better looking than I have ever seem them. Here is the before:


And after:


I like collecting one-of-a-kinds of these old nice pieces. It is fun to use them for tea parties or entertaining. Sometimes they're marked. I have a appetizer fork from The Westchester Country Club and some spoons from The Palace Hotel.