Category: How-to

  • Easy, Stink-Free Homemade Deodorant Stick

    We’ve been using homemade deodorant for several years now and still love it. The combination of baking soda, arrowroot, and coconut oil offers the best stink protection I’ve come across, and it provides the protection without the use of any potentially problematic fragrances or other chemicals.

    The only downside to this deodorant is that you keep it in a jar, and because coconut oil melts at around 76 F, during the summer it can get a little goopy. Soft is good because it’s easier to put on, but goopy just gets a bit messy.

    Fortunately, adding a bit of beeswax (which has a much higher melting point) completely solves this problem. We get to keep the original formula that works so well and add convenience. If you’ve been hesitant to try because of the jar, give this easy homemade deodorant stick a try!

    Homemade Deodorant Stick

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  • Make Your Own Homemade Shaving Soap

    Make Your Own Homemade Shaving Soap

    Shaving has always been something of a necessary evil for me.

    I like the smooth feeling, but it doesn’t last long and soon you’re right back where you started. I will frequently go days without shaving. This lasts until I feel that my hobo-like appearance is negatively impacting my coworkers’ opinions of me, or my wife won’t let me kiss her anymore.

    I’ve always used whatever generic can of shaving cream I could find at the drugstore, but I recently decided it was time to go a bit more old-fashioned. Because almost every other personal care product I use regularly is now homemade, this was one of the last holdouts. So I bought myself a shaving brush and whipped up a homemade shaving soap using this shaving soap recipe.

    Homemade Shaving Soap Recipe

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  • DIY Non-Toxic Household Cleaner

    DIY Non-Toxic Household Cleaner

    Like us, many of you are trying to eliminate unnecessary chemicals from your daily lives.

    Like us, many of you are also trying to save money.

    There are a number of easy homemade cleaners you can make that are both non-toxic and much cheaper. We’ve been using this natural household cleaner for awhile now, and it’s good on just about any surface. Which really comes in handy if you have kids, because kids will mess up just about any surface they come into contact with.

    DIY Non-Toxic Household Cleaner

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  • Homemade Herbal Healing Salve

    Homemade Herbal Healing Salve

    When you do a lot of stuff outside, you gets cuts, scrapes, and scratches. When you have kids, they get cuts, scrapes, and scratches, seemingly even if they’re in a padded room. During the summer, it’s rare if I don’t have some sort of minor skin wound or irritation, and of course, the kids can’t go more than a week without falling a scraping a knee.

    Needless to say, we’re frequently in need of first-aid attention (although it doesn’t always happen, because I don’t like to stop what I’m doing at the time). Neosporin is nice and all, but in keeping with the household theme, we try to cut back on our petroleum by-products and antibiotic use. Since that’s out, what else are we to do but whip up our own healing salve? It’s 100% natural, effective, cheap, and almost everything comes from the backyard (I haven’t yet produced my own olive oil, which may be tough to do in Ohio, but don’t count me out yet).

    Herbal Healing Salve - lifefromthegroundup.us

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  • How To Install A Paver Patio

    How To Install A Paver Patio

    This summer I put in a paver patio. We like our yard, but since our house was built five years ago, we haven’t really had a good place to just sit outside and enjoy it. A patio’s been on the to-do list, but I just never got around to it; so to create some motivation, we established a goal this year to get a patio installed by C’s birthday at the end of August.

    We battled some wet weather early on (like the entire month of June), but get it done we did, and with a full week to spare.

    I won’t say that installing a paver patio is easy, but it’s not overly difficult. If you like a little DIY, it’s certainly doable, and the concepts are the same regardless of the scale of your project. It just may take a while, and it involves a lot of physical labor: between the dirt, crushed limestone, sand, pavers, and wall blocks, I easily moved dozens of tons of material to get this done. Probably not something to do if you have a bad back.

    How to Install a Paver Patio

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