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My Ever First Blog Award!

I would like to thank Jenny @ Cassandra's Corner for giving me my first ever blog award. I am so excited and thankful to have been recognized!

So with this award comes some responsibility. Here are the rules:

#1 Choose 5 up and coming blogs to pass the Liebster Blog to. Each blog must have less than 200 followers.

#2 Show your thanks and appreciation to the blogger that gave you the award by linking back to them.

#3 Share 5 random facts about yourself

#4 Post the award to your blog

5 Random Facts about Me:

1. I love gummy bears.

2. My mom bought an old farm in NJ and while clearing it they found a grave stone on it and it had my name on it, Angelia, but from the 1800's.

3. I love going to Goodwill and spending way too much time looking around.

4. I am addicted to King of Queens, Seinfeld and Big bang theory reruns.

5. My husband and I met on a blind date and will be married 16 years in November.

So it brings me great pleasure to send you over to http://cassandrazcorner.blogspot.com follow her blog. Thank you so much for recognizing me!

Please also pay a visit to the following fabulous blogs that I'm passing this award along to:

Motivated Mommy of Two

The Delightful Crafter

Simply This and That

One Chic Mom

A Casarella

Web Wednesday! Grout Cleaning

Any one that has tile knows that grout can be a bugger to keep clean. Well that is if it is unsealed anyway. I have not been lucky enough to have sealed grout in my homes here in Florida. I do however plan on sealing mine after this cleaning;) There are companies that will come out and clean it for you, but there is a hefty price tag, upwards of $200 bucks is what a friend of mine paid. I have been a stay at home mom while finishing my degree and I don't have money to spend on something I can easily do myself. I think of being a stay at home mom as my home and family is my job so if it takes a couple hours to do my grout then so be it. Not spending $200 dollars on having a professional do it like paying myself $200, well in my mind any way..LOL I cleaned my tile about 2 years ago and after I found the process that worked for me it went pretty easily. Well with the wonderful online access to many different blogs and such I had bookmarked some seemingly great ideas that I wanted to try this time. This is my floor as of Monday morning:

These are pictures in my kitchen. We use the garage door, which comes into the kitchen, most of the time to come in and out. It is just easier since I park my car in the garage and the kiddies park their bikes in there so it is just the most used entrance. Now even though I have mats outside the entrances and with 2 dogs I must vacuum quite a bit, the grout just gets nasty. I have tried mixing baking soda, ammonia and vinegar that I found here and letting it sit then giving it a scrub and this is the results I got:

The above photo shows that it did get quite a bit cleaned. I just cannot deal with a lot of scrubbing because of a surgery I had on my wrist, it gets very painful.

This is right in front of the door. It was still damp sorry about the picture. I think the mixture would work well in a less high traffic area for me and I am going to give it a go in another room to try it. I decided to go back to what I have used in the past. I copped a squat on the floor, turned the radio up and me and my secret ingredient got to work;) Here is my finished kitchen floor:

What did I use? Soft Scrub with bleach, a bucket of vinegar and water. I squirted a little bit of Soft Scrub on the grout, wet my grout brush and gave it a light scrub. Let it sit for a few minutes and went over with my scrub brush with a long handle, I wanted to scrub all my tile also. I then mopped up the residue and went over it with my Hoover Floor Mate filled with vinegar and water and this is what my grout looks like. Here are some before and afters next to each other:

My floor not only looks clean but over all the kitchen feels cleaner. I do have to say looking at the before and afters makes me feel yucky! I want to show some pictures of the last time I did this just to show some more shots of the results I have gained by this. I have a 3500 square foot 2 story home and I did my complete homes tiles like this in 2 days. This is the before, it was before I got into blogging and taking pictures of everything. These were taken with my Blackberry and these were taken in my kitchen nook:

Do you have any recipes for success with grout? Please share if you do! I am so wishing I would have sealed my grout back when I did it the first time! Also I was in Publix yesterday and Soft Scrub was on sale 2/$5.00 and I also saw they have it with baking soda! I may need to give that a try. Thank you so much for reading and visiting my blog. ~Angi

Labels: Cleaning, Grout, Homekeeping

Granny's Banana Bread Recipe

I love recipes that come from older generations. They have a sort of tried and true aspect to them. The recipe has most likely been made hundreds of times and liked just as many:) I have a recipe for banana bread that was given to me by my grandmother and I just love it and so does everyone else that tries it.

Granny's Banana Bread

To start you want to preheat the oven to 350 degrees. Gather your ingredients and prepare your loaf pans. I spray mine with baking spray, but granny used the end of the butter to butter her pans.

1 stick of unsalted butter, sofetened

2 eggs

1 cup of sugar OR 1/2 Splenda for baking

2 cups flour

1 tsp. baking soda

1-1/2 baking powder

1/2 tsp. salt

2 bananas, mashed

1/3 cup milk

1 cup nuts (if desired)

Add butter, eggs and sugar to medium bowl and mix on low speed until combined.. I use a handheld mixer like this to make this recipe. Add flour, baking powder, baking soda, salt and milk. Mix until combined. Stir in bananas and nuts (if desired) until well combined. Pour into loaf pans. Now depending on your size of loaf pan you can use one pan. I have two pans that I fill half way and the following pictures show my results. If you do use one pan just don't over fill it. Keep it to around 3/4's full so it doesn't end up all over your oven:)

Using two loaf pans your going to bake for about 30 minutes and check with a toothpick for doneness. If using a larger single loaf pan give it 45 minutes and check it, but it could take up to an hour.

I made 4 loaves today and 2 were without nuts and 2 were made with peanuts! This was my first time using peanuts, I usually use walnuts or pecans.

Above with peanuts.

Above without.

So moist and yummy!

Thank you for reading and I hope you enjoy it:) ~Angi

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Labels: banana bread, recipes

Web Wednesday! All about the face(-:

I am always willing to try something new. I have found many things online that I bookmark, pin or download. I have so many I have not tried as of yet that I have decided to create a series called Web Wednesday. I will try things, all sorts of things, anything from beauty to cleaning to recipes. For my debut post I am writing about, well my face. There are tons of diy beauty treatments on the web. I decided to try a diy exfoliating scrub, a steam and a scar, dark spot and black head remover. I have had trouble with my face breaking out since I was a teenager and blackheads are just the worst. I am a Jersey girl and spent my summers on the beach when I was younger. Back then I wasn't so concerned with wrinkles, dark spots or the overall toll the sun can take on us. Well I am 40 now and have some acne scarring and dark spots. I am being brave and showing a picture of my bare face **yikes**:

This is the left side of my face.

Okay here we go this is what I did and my results:

I have heard since I was little the wonders of baking soda for all sorts of things. I came across this diy microdermabrasion recipe and wanted to try it. I made the paste of baking soda and water and massaged it onto my face. I found this blog Shwin & Shwin and they had an awesome Aromatherapy facial steam tutorial and I had pinned it a while back. While I was massaging my face with the paste, I had 4 cups of distilled water coming to a boil with a 1/4 cup of dried lavender as they say to do in the steam recipe. After it came to a boil I poured it into a heat proof bowl and added 3 drops of lavender essential oil.

I set my timer for 10 minutes, had a seat at my table, made a tent with a towel and allowed my face to steam with the paste still on my face. It smelled so amazing! I felt stress free that is for sure;) When the timer went off I rinsed my face and it felt like my face was wonderfully exfoliated and my pores were open and ready for some intense treatment.

I read this blog post about a acne scars be gone face mask and after reading I was definitely going to give it a try! It has cinnamon, nutmeg, honey and lemon juice and she includes what the different things each does for your skin. I only had bottled lemon juice so I used that.

My 8 year old informed me I looked like I had poo on my face...lol

Abby from My Yellowsand Box looks great even with the mask on!! Me not so much! LOL!

Um yeah...the disguise didn't help much:/

It burns for the first few minutes but after that its feel great! I left this on for 30 minutes.

I then rinsed with warm water and moisturized. My face looks and feels amazing! My pores don't feel so huge and don't look so huge either:) Now my spots or scars aren't gone, but most of my black heads are! I have none on my nose or chin! And my skin feels so smooth and fresh. I will be doing this once a week and I will update with any changes and add pics of my results. So this Web Wednesday try out is a keeper! Thanks for reading and please let me know if you tried this or have any other great face clearing tips. ~Angi

My Etsy shop!

I have taken the scary plunge of opening an Etsy shop! I am so excited and also so nervous. I love crafting and sewing things and this just seemed like the next step. Besides the fact I can only give my family and friends so many things:) Here are some items I have listed so far:

Picture frames