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How to polish your silver effortlessly–with Science!
Tarnished flatware waiting for a bath Here at Root Simple, we live high on the hog. We eat off of silver spoons every day. It’s true. I inherited a set of silver flatwear and utensils from my mom’s...
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Spark Joy: An Illustrated Master Class on the Art of Organizing and Tidying Up
I figure by now that there are few of you, at least those of you who have de-cluttering on your radar, who don’t know that Marie Kondo, author of Tidying Up, has a new book: Spark Joy. We’ve been...
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Satan’s Easter Basket is Filled with Plastic Easter Grass
Easter baskets, a springtime ritual so loved by kids and adults alike should not have a dark side. So it’s more than a little ironic that this holiday, which in its secular form emphasizes rebirth and...
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The Horror Beneath the Armoire
I lost my keys, and being in that state of advanced desperation where you search for your keys in the most unlikely of spots, I made the mistake of looking beneath our armoire. This ungainly piece of...
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Waxed Cloth Food Wrap (Made in a solar oven for bonus self-righteousness points)
Reuseable food wrap made with wax infused cloth is a thing. DIY instructions for it are all over the web. It sort of had its moment in the sustainable limelight a few years ago, so I know this post is...
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I’ll Need This Someday: Clutter Control for Artists and Creatives
For the past three weeks two heavy French doors are blocking access to my work bench. Kelly spotted them on the street and we grabbed them for the garden shed she wants me to build (a project,...
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In Praise of Turkish Towels
Turkish towel above a terry towel of the same size. I like to store them rolled, as on top. I’m done with terry cloth towels. They’re too bulky, take up too much space in the cupboard, the laundry...
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The problem with polar fleece: it’s in the ocean, it’s in sea creatures, it’s...
Every earth-crunchy, green, neo-hippie, tree-hugging, back to the lander type (like myself) seeks out natural fibers when buying clothes, understanding them as the healthy, sustainable choice. Yet at...
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How to be a Tudor by Ruth Goodman
Thanks to reader CW for turning me onto this book! How to be a Tudor is a book written by a re-enactor about the nuts and bolts of everyday life for Tudor-period people. It is not an all-encompassing...
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The Ultimate Earth Bed: A Mattress Made of Sand
Michael and Stephanie’s sand bed. Photo courtesy of The Ultimate Earth Bed In 2013 I wrote a post called “A Homemade Mattress?” It was just an off-the-cuff complaint fest on my part, but the response...
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092 A Mattress Made of Sand
Photo courtesy of Michael Garcia Stephanie Wing-Garcia and her husband Michael Garcia devised an innovative solution to Stephanie’s crippling back pain: they handcrafted a bed made out of sand. We...
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The Root Simple Anti-Subscription Box
The Apocabox Concurrent with the worldwide success of decluttering author and guru Marie Kondo has been a puzzling trend: subscription services that will send you a box of random crap. Averaging around...
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A Cheap and Easy DIY Sewing Cutting Table
Kelly, tired of hunching over the floor while she works on sewing her uniform, asked me to make a cutting table for her tiny sewing room, which is located in a vintage 1920s shed in our backyard....
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094 The American Woman’s Home
On the podcast this week Kelly and I discuss a 19th century urban homesteading book written by Catherine Beecher and Harriet Beecher Stowe, The American Woman’s Home. The book was written mostly by...
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Kelly Update and a Great Podcast
Time to get back to blogging! But first an update on Kelly. It’s been exactly two weeks now since the doctors, nurses and staff of Kaiser Permanente’s Los Angeles Medical Center saved Kelly’s life....
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The Secret of Tidiness Revealed
I have a theory that the world can be divided into three types of people: tidy people, untidy people and hoarders. I’ll leave hoarders out of this discussion since that’s a confounding problem...
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Tody: An App that Helps You Clean
This will be another post for fellow members of the untidy tribe. Members of the tidy tribe will find it as unnecessary as those warning stickers on buckets and ladders. But we’ll let the tidy...
View ArticleMy Marie Kondo Obsession
Update: Root Simple reader Ruben left a comment with a very funny New Yorker cartoon about Kondo. It’s the time of year, after the excesses of the holidays, when folks, including ourselves, start...
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The #FewerFeatures Movement
When the control panel on our dishwasher failed last month I found myself asking why our appliances and gadgets have so many useless features. Those features bring with them a greater chance that the...
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Kitchen KonMari Session, Illustrated
Few topics in the home arts cause as much ire, backpedaling and recrimination as the techniques of tidying up guru Marie Kondo, a.k.a. “KonMari.” In the interests of full disclosure, I thought I’d...
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Empty Your Attic!
One of the occupational hazards of how-to book authors and bloggers, such as myself, is a tendency towards ex cathedra statements. But sometimes you’ve just gotta stand out on that balcony and release...
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Three Important Points to Remember When “Kondo-ing”
I’m faced, this summer, with the melancholy task of emptying my mom’s house, the house I grew up in. The process has been an extended, physically demanding and emotional mediation on the nature of our...
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Nobody Wants Your Stuff
A load of toxic waste. I reached a low point, last week, in the sad task of emptying my mom’s house when I got bounced out of the Goodwill donation center like a drunk who had sidled up to the bar one...
View ArticleJerry Seinfeld on Things
“All things on earth only exist in different stages of becoming garbage. Your home is a garbage processing center where you buy new things, bring them into your house and slowly crapify them over...
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On Sharpening Tools
4,000/800 grit Japanese whetstone It seems to me that there are two foundational skills that inform everything else that we humans do: the study of philosophy and the knowledge of how to sharpen our...
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Swedish Death Cleaning
A big thank you to Root Simple reader Harkinna for tipping us off to the latest decluttering trend, Swedish death cleaning. No, this doesn’t refer to cleaning tips from Swedish death metal rock...
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What Would William Morris Say?
Tidying prophetess Marie Kondo has her “spark joy” test. Hold an object, ask if it “sparks joy” and if not, send it to the thrift store to clutter some other person’s house. I’ve been working on...
View ArticleSoap as a Furniture and Floor Finish
An old idea still practiced in some northern European countries, dissolved soap flakes can be used as a furniture and floor finish. Soap is non-toxic and, as Christopher Schwarz points out in this...
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Do I Need Books?
In order to begin the restoration project we commenced a month ago, I had to box up the contents of our bookshelves. Not once have I had any need or desire to open any of those boxes and retrieve a...
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What to Do With Junk Mail and Shredded Paper
Image: Max Pixel. Perhaps obsessing over reducing junk mail while simultaneously generating a metric freak-ton of construction debris is a bit of a pathological redirection, but I’m really tired of the...
View ArticleA Cluttered Life: Middle-Class Abundance
In the process of installing some new floors and rearranging a few doors and walls we’ve had to completely empty most of the rooms of the house. In the process I’ve come to realize that I like the...
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The Return of the Apron?
Kelly got me an apron for my birthday last year which I thought might be taken as a hipster affectation in my semi-public, sidewalk-adjacent workshop. But on the very first day I wore it I dropped a...
View ArticleA DIY Air Purifier
Attention allergy sufferers: duct tape a HEPA filter to a cheap fan and you’ve got yourself a DIY air filter. With this simple hack you can reduce airborne particles by about 90%. This video,...
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On the Problem of Food Storage and Hoarding
Food pantry before and after. If there’s one thing that life in this bungalow has taught me is that what we call “minimalism” is simply the way people lived in the 1920s. The original inhabitants of...
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Food Storage Revisited
Kitchen spice pantry at the Joseph D. Oliver House, 1946. Photo: Library of Congress. My post on de-cluttering our food storage hit a nerve proving, yet again, that the most direct path to the deeper...
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So Much Stuff
A Silver Lake estate sale. Over at Granola Shotgun, a blog you should follow if you don’t already, Johnny has a post on what happened to all the stuff he and his tenants stored in the basement during...
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A Better Garage Organizational System
I gave übermaker Federico Tobon a tour of the garage when he visited the Root Simple compound back in 2017. He took one look at the pegboard and asked, politely, if I liked it. I could tell by his...
View ArticleBottom-up Urbanism
In another great video from Fair Companies, Johnny Sanphillippo gives a tour of his Sonoma County rental property. Johnny describes himself as a “rodent who scurries about finding the opportunities...
View ArticleA Manual of Needlework and Cutting Out
Please enjoy this manual of the lost art of hand sewing by Agnes Walker published in 1907 and recommended by YouTube sewing sensation Bernadette Banner. What makes the book useful is that, unlike a...
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A Not So Close Shave
Image from Der Golem. I made the mistake of looking at Instagram for the first time in a year and was completely traumatized by the juxtaposition of beautiful meals and glamorous vacation destinations...
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Clean Your Home Without Toxic Chemicals
Kelly and I will be leading a green cleaning for your home class at St. John’s Episcopal Cathedral on May 19th, after the 11 o’clock service (roughly 12:15 p.m. give or take a few minutes). All are...
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On the Safety of Cleaning Products
I had the great privilege of working with adobe yesterday while doing maintenance on our outdoor oven. While I’m terrible at plastering it was a great pleasure to work with this elemental and ancient...
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Non-Toxic Cleaning for the Home
Why Green Cleaning? We’ve been sold a pack of lies. Professional marketers have convinced us that a good housekeeper keeps a pantry full of specialized cleaning products for every item in the house. A...
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A Great New Resource for Preserving Your Analog and Digital Memories
LA Central Library Octavia Lab. If, like me, you’re feeling guilty about those boxes of photos and videos rotting in the garage, there’s a great new resource: the Memory Lab Network. Pioneered by the...
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Digital Götterdämmerung
I approach most productivity books with wariness. Most of the authors of these tomes, I suspect, report directly to creepy old Wotan and just want to make us feel better about all the hours we spend...
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A Poem by Mary Oliver
Image: C.F.A. Voysey Storage When I moved from one house to another there were many things I had no room for. What does one do? I rented a storage space. And filled it. Years passed. Occasionally I...
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Sorting Family Photos
Johnny over at Granola Shotgun once described the phenomenon of alleged minimalists with secret troves of STUFF. For us that secret untidiness resided in a backyard shed. Wanting to put that shed to...
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Embroidering the World
Washstand runner designed by Ernest Gimson and embroidered by Margaret Gimson, 1890. I suspect that I’m not alone in feeling like I spend way too much time looking at screens to distract from the...
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Learn to Embroider at Trade School Los Angeles
Due to my ostentatious Facebook embargo, now in year two, I rely on comrade Lee of nearby Mixville Heights to pass along important notices via an awkward but mostly reliable chain of semaphore...
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Relics From the Age of Repair
Kelly went through some of my mom’s sewing notions this week and discovered a few relics from a pre-fast fashion era when people used to repair, rather than throw out, their clothes. For instance,...
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