It's time to get all the way into spring cleaning. We're going to talk products, tips, life-changing hacks, etc., etc.
It’s March! And that means we are legally required to talk about spring cleaning. Granted, neither of us are big spring cleaners, but that’s because we’re pretty committed year-round, clean-as-we-goers. And, oh boy, could we talk endlessly about our favorite products and tips for cleaning and organizing. But for now, we’ll just start with a single episode.
This episode was produced by Rachel and Sally and edited by Lucas Nguyen. Our logo was designed by Amber Seger (@rocketorca). Our theme music is by Tiny Music. MJ Brodie transcribed this episode. Follow us on Twitter @OhILikeThatPod.
Things we talked about
Rachel: Welcome to Oh I Like That, a podcast about things we like and occasionally things we don't. I'm Rachel Wilkerson Miller.
Sally: And I'm Sally Tamarkin. Here we are, Rachel. We are definitely talking about things we like today and things that maybe we don't.
Rachel: Occasionally things we don't, today, I would say.
Sally: Yeah. Okay. So I think it's a good fit. What's the vibe like for you right now?
Rachel: The vibe is fine and good. It is a cozy rainy Saturday here. I would say my vibe is focused. I've been working on a big story at work and it's been great because it is not at all pandemic related and it's been nice to work on something that is completely unrelated to the current circumstances. I'm feeling energized by it, having fun with it. So I have an interview this afternoon and it should be my last one. And then I'm just going to get back to writing it and I'm just like, feeling really pumped about it.
Sally: Hell yeah. I'm really excited for this story. I feel like I'm getting a contact high from your excitement about it because it's something I'm interested in too, and you're doing all this cool stuff and you're also just really zazzed about it and it's contagious.
Rachel: Oh, I'm glad to hear it.
Sally: Yeah.
Rachel: All right. What's your vibe?
Sally: My vibe is also rainy Saturday. It's nice and cozy here, I'm pretty into it. This will tie into one of the things we're going to talk about, which is that I recently did a big reorganization of my office and I'm getting used to various things. It's great. I'm feeling very disoriented. For example, right now we're looking at each other through zoom and there's a microphone taking up like two thirds of my face, which is not how we usually do it. So I'm feeling a little bit disoriented, feeling like I want to mess with the mic a bunch, but I'm not going to. So yeah, I'm feeling, I would say 90% cozy, rainy Saturday, 10% disoriented and dislocated by what is happening in my office. But we're gonna work through all of that together, actually, live to tape on the pod right now. Rachel, tell the people what we're talking about today.
Rachel: Well, that brings us to our first segment, which is one that we're going to call Home Game, and that is all things related to house and home. And our inaugural version of Home Game is going to be about cleaning because a lot of people are thinking about spring cleaning right now, and it feels like a great time to talk about a topic that I think both of us have strong opinions about.
Sally: We sure do. I mean, I feel like we'd be hard-pressed to think of something that we don't have strong opinions about, but spring cleaning, cleaning, organization, house and home, I think are very near and dear to our hearts. And I think also because of the last year and people being at home so much more than they used to be, I think it's also kind of getting nearer and dearer to lots of people's hearts than maybe it used to be.
Rachel: It seems like it.
Sally: Yeah.
Rachel: Occasionally I'll feel a bit like, when I see people talking about this stuff, I have that sense of like, "I was into this before it was cool," which is completely silly, but it just does feel like a lot of people are getting into it and they're like, "Oh man, you ever heard of home DIY?" And I'm just like, "Yeah, man, I'm aware." You know, it's a little bit of that feeling of a true fan.
Sally: Totally.
Rachel: Which is ridiculous, but.
Sally: Yeah, I mean we're in it to win it, I think, in terms of cleaning and organization. And I have to say, one of my overarching comments for this segment is that I've recently taken a temporary part-time job at Apartment Therapy, which is just a dope website with a bunch of amazing content about house and home. And they have a cleaning and organizing vertical. And I feel like Apartment Therapy is my place of spiritual belonging because I really truly just sit around for 20 hours a week reading incredible content about everything related to house and home. But in particular, you know, at this time of year, there's a lot of stuff about cleaning and organizing. And I have to say that I've always thought of myself as a cleaning forward person. Not because I think... I don't know if it's because cleanliness is next to godliness or if it's because I have a lot of sort of chaotic energy and the less chaotic my outside environment is the less chaotic my inside energy is. So I've always thought of myself as a cleaner and organizer, but when you read Apartment Therapy and you see the way other people live their lives and the beautiful organized spaces they create and their cleaning routines, you're just like, "Oh, now I'm in the minor leagues, and I don't think I'll ever get called up to the majors." Like, these people, they mean business. So I'm going to be referring to Apartment Therapy quite a lot, because I think it's helped me have some revelations about myself and my relationship to cleaning and organizing. But we'll get to that in a little bit. Let's start with talking about spring cleaning. We were talking about this segment and we were like, let's do an episode on spring cleaning. And then we both were like, we don't really do spring cleaning.
Rachel: No. I think because we clean all the time... not all the time. I think we approach cleaning from a place that is divorced from the calendar year, but I think actually this year, even if it's not spring cleaning, I think that I do feel the urge to do some big projects right now -- whether that has anything to do with spring is debatable. But it just is kind of a lull period where there's not a ton of other things going on, and so it's a good time to do it. Plus there is going to be a lot of content that is reminding you, but I'm not a huge, "It's spring cleaning, this is when I do the thing." Although I will say I learned a fun fact about spring cleaning when I was reading Home Comforts, which is basically it came from a hundred years ago when people were using wood-burning stoves that created a lot of smoke and soot all winter to keep their place warm, so in the spring it actually made sense to clean, because they had accumulated a particularly large amount of dirt in their homes over the winter. So there's a little trivia fact for you today.
Sally: I love that. That's a fun fact. And also it's a good... I feel like the way spring cleaning is talked about in popular internet culture now, it's like a process of getting out the spiritual, psychological, and emotional soot that has accumulated throughout the winter.
Rachel: Yeah. A hundred percent.
Sally: Which I feel like is even more true during the pandemic year. So yeah, I mean, I sort of feel like every season is spring cleaning season, but you know, especially this year in particular, being home a lot and spending, I really can't believe how much time I've spent in the last year just looking at the exact same spots in my house. We're all spending a lot of time looking at walls and floors and closets and stuff.
Rachel: Right.
Sally: So it is a particularly good moment to get into some big projects. And I don't know, maybe this will make me a spring cleaner, but I don't want it to. I want to continue to-- I want to be an iconoclast.
Rachel: Yeah, you want to maintain your identity outside of popular culture and the pressure to spring clean or other things like that.
Sally: Yeah. I think.
Rachel: That's also fine. Yeah.
Sally: Yeah. So, okay. What big chores are we tackling at the moment? What do you have going on, Rachel?
Rachel: So one thing I should say to contextualize how I'm thinking about chores right now is that we moved last summer during the pandemic. And we moved ourselves because we didn't want to take the chance of having movers in either of our small apartments or coming into close contact with anyone. That was fine, it worked out. The thing was though, we couldn't really have people in our home to install things for us, set things up for us. And we couldn't run to Ikea and run to Home Depot to buy things we needed. And when it comes to furniture, there's only so much you can buy online. You kind of have to see stuff in person. And some stuff is just like, yeah, you can get it shipped, but sometimes it's prohibitively expensive. So all that to say, we are still in a state of half moved in. And you said the thing about like, I've been looking at the same spots for the past year. I have too, in a way that makes me not notice them as much, or only notice them some of the time. So I am looking forward to being able to tackle... we still have boxes. They're arranged in closets and everything is arranged, we're living among them now, but sometimes I'm like, "Oh right. If we hadn't..." We'd already been living together before the pandemic hit, we would just be living in a perfectly finished apartment. Wouldn't that be nice? I can't imagine that now. So right now for me, a lot of the chores are kind of working around that reality. I'm super excited about the day that we can have people in our apartment again or go to Ikea, but that's still a long way off. So my chores are a little bit smaller in scale as a result. But the first one is I've been cleaning my Dyson. I have a refurbished cordless stick vac that I got a few years ago that hasn't been working great lately. So I did a little digging around on YouTube because it had stopped. It was having some problems maybe in December, I found a YouTube video that helped -- basically you have to clean out this one particular spot. I had done that, it still wasn't working. So I went further down the YouTube rabbit hole and learned I should probably clean the filter, maybe even replace it. I should probably clean the secret second filter within the first filter, which I sent you that video of when they pull that inner part out. I gasped at the amount of disgusting hair and dust that was in it, in the video.
Sally: It was horrifying.
Rachel: Yeah, mine I didn't get that big reveal because I had had to run it under water to get the two pieces apart, so anything that was in it kind of got wet and stuck to the bottom, but there was definitely stuff in there. And then I used the Dyson again, after everything had dried and I put it back together and I've got to say, it just was purring like a kitten. The suction was so much better. I ordered some replacement filters because the reason I hadn't been washing the filters is because it takes quite a while to dry, and so I didn't want to wash it and then not be able to vacuum for a few days. So now I can wash one, swap in a clean one, which I think will help a lot. But yeah, I read this New York Times article maybe a month ago, but it was about TikTok videos where people are cleaning their cleaning items, so cleaning their laundry machines or cleaning their dishwasher. And they're really disgusting reveals. I actually don't typically get into cleaning the cleaning items. I should, but I think there's a part of me that's emotionally unprepared for what I'm going to find there and then the pressure to keep it up. But I may get into that now that I've cleaned the Dyson and it's done so much, I feel like the dishwasher might be next.
Sally: Yeah. First of all, I've learned that CleanTok is -- that's cleaning TikTok. Learned that from Apartment Therapy -- you knew that. Okay, great.
Rachel: I didn't, but I got it as soon as you said it [laughs]
Sally: Okay, you got it. I'm a bit of a boomer as folks may or may not already know or learn soon. So I recently learned about-- no, here's what happened. Our washing machine, a little light came on and it was like, wash the washing machine. It was telling you to put this thing called Affresh in there, which is interesting. Affresh makes the tablets that you can wash the washing machine with and the dishwasher. I think they also make garbage disposal ones. And it's interesting to me, I would like to do some digging into the Affresh industrial complex because our washing machine has a light that says add Affresh, and I don't know if it's a Mayfair product. But anyway, I had a very Nick Miller, "You don't wash the towel, the towel washes you" mentality around cleaning the items that clean, but it turns out you totally should. And I did it with my dishwasher recently and also our washing machine and our garbage disposal. And I'm not into the gunk reveal -- I believe that it's doing its job. I'm not here to like look into it.
Rachel: Yeah.
Sally: But it is a thing. It makes things cleaner and smell better, because shit gets really hectic in there, in those appliances.
Rachel: Yeah. All right, Sally, what is first on the list of your big chores you're tackling?
Sally: So, as I mentioned, I reorganized my office. What I was doing, this is part of my whole evolution as a person, which I'm sure you can read about in my memoir [laughs], but just to sort of sum it up here: my style around getting things done is typically to get things done as quickly and cheaply as possible, which turns out makes for not a very sustainable long-term thing. Because if you're not thinking about what's going to work in the long term, you're just solving an immediate problem, then other problems are going to come up really quickly. So for example, when we moved into this house a couple of years ago, I needed a desk like yesterday. And so I got two Ikea table tops and I bought eight legs and I pushed them together and it was fine, but it was pretty cramped. There was no storage. And so then instead of thinking, what kind of storage would be really good for me? I just bought some filing cabinets, I bought some carts, and stuff like that. And my office had turned into this [laughs] like a walk-in junk drawer basically. And working at Apartment Therapy and reading all this content, the most influential thing that I come across in like half of the pieces I edit is someone saying your space should be functional and comfortable and a reflection of you and you should be able to feel good there. And that's really stuck with me because that's not how I have approached making my space. So I decided to take a step back and be like, okay, how do I actually work? How do I want the space to actually physically look? What do I want to look at on my walls? So all that is to say, I ended up getting rid of my two Ikea tabletops and getting an L-shaped desk, which is so much better and more functional. It has storage. I got a kallax, which you can see behind me from Ikea, which I've recently learned is considered the dad sneaker of home decor. As someone who identifies as a dad, I feel like that's fine. And then I actually took my Ikea tabletops and I put them behind the kallax, and now that's a station for mailing things, putting together packages, wrapping presents, because what would happen is when you have a walk-in junk drawer, every part of the office is for every single task. And I'm weirdly extremely good at staying organized digitally. And I feel like in my mind, and in my computer files, I'm very organized, but everything outside of my mind and my computer is pretty chaotic. So I needed to, instead of doing the thing where I was like, "I just need to be better. I just need to be a better person who's better at staying organized," I decided to admit to myself that I need things that gel with the way I organize.
Sally: Right, right.
Rachel: You know what I'm saying? So for example, I cannot be trusted with surfaces. I can't, because I fill them up with things, whether it's tchotchkes, which, I have some tchotchkes, but they're intentionally there as opposed to just, there's an object and I'm not sure where it goes so I put it on my desk. Papers that I need to deal with, either things I need to file, bills I need to pay -- if I have an inbox that I can see, all my shit gets stacked up in there. The things that I don't know how to categorize them, they go in the inbox and my inbox is like the tell-tale heart. It just sits there beating and making me... I'm obsessed with how there's all this stuff I need to put away, but I don't know where it goes, and I can't gather... So now instead of getting into this whole cycle of self-loathing of "Why can't I just be better at like being organized?" I'm just changing the way I get organized. So I don't have to get into this whole thing of changing my personality fundamentally. So I now have hidden storage.
Rachel: Nice.
Sally: You know what I mean? So I don't have, no more tell-tale heart. So that's kind of the other thing I'm doing is that instead of making a bunch of really quick decisions so that I can just solve the 'problem', quote unquote, and then discover three months later that I didn't really solve the problem in a permanent way, I just created other problems. I'm just taking my time and I'm seeing, how do I use this room? How do I want to use this room? And once I figure that out, I will get more permanent storage, but for now I'm keeping around my file cabinets and my carts. And it'll just be a temporary solution. So anyway, that's my whole thing. It feels like a profound shift in how I deal with my physical space. So again, you'll read about it in my autobiography.
Rachel: You know, I think what you're saying is really smart and it reminds me of a tip from Marie Kondo's book that basically says Americans love to buy bins, and just in whatever configuration appeals to them, regardless of what actually they need, what they have to put in them and where those things should go. And she basically says, don't buy bins before you do a big clean out, buy them after, when you actually have a sense of the things that you need and where they should go. And I think that's something that's really smart. And I try to abide by that, and a good temporary solution is, you can use leftover boxes that you have instead of a bin, just in that timeframe where you're trying to figure out where you should put things and where things need to go. You don't have to buy a bin right away. You can use a shoe box or a shipping box or whatever the case may be, a suitcase maybe. And then if you're like, okay, it does make sense to have something about this size in this room, I'm going to buy a bin that matches that. But if you start with bins, then it's so easy to end up not having what you need. So I think the approach of taking your time and figuring out how you use a space before you decide where things go makes a ton of sense.
Sally: Yeah. And that actually reminds me, another thing I've gotten really into is I walk around the house now with a small tape measure.
Rachel: Oooh [laughs]
Sally: Andrea makes fun of me because she says that my DIY motto is "measure never, cut forever" instead of "measure twice, cut once" because I eyeball things and I'm like, that's probably fine. And then I get a thing and it's totally the wrong size, or I do a thing and it's permanently messed up. So I'm also trying to take more of the... I'm trying to kind of get rid of the "measure never cut forever" gene that lives within me. And that is related to what you just said. The Marie Kondo thing of, first of all, get rid of a bunch of shit, just donate a bunch of things, throw away a bunch of things, then actually see what you have. Then measure some spaces and see what you need and then make some decisions, which is... it's all new for me. But I basically feel like I don't need therapy anymore. I just feel like it solves a lot of problems for me.
Rachel: [Laughs] I'm glad.
Sally: So, what else are you working on? What's your next thing, Rachel?
Rachel: Another big thing is hanging stuff on the walls, which if you've been reading my writing for a while, I've written about this in the past, that hanging stuff on the walls is to me a thing you should do within, I don't know, six weeks of moving into a new space, and people never do it. And then they come over, like when I've had friends over to my apartment in the past, they're like, "Oh man, you just have stuff on your walls. I should do that. I have all this stuff sitting around that I've been meaning to put up on the walls and I haven't done it yet." And that always struck me as like, why don't you just do it? I don't really get it. I am now in the position of having not hung stuff on the walls. I don't know exactly why. I think it's just, I have things I'd rather be doing than measuring a perfect center on a wall and marking it up. And also, I haven't been able to frame stuff as quickly as I normally would because I can't go to the store to pick out frames. So that's a huge part of it, but we framed and hung a couple of things up, which is great. It makes such a difference. Every time I hang something, I'm like, oh right, this rocks, this is the best thing in the world. But then I haven't been as good about doing it again. So I'm actually, as we're having this conversation, I'm hoping to actually do some more of that this weekend. I have a couple of things that are ready to go. I just truly need to get a hammer out and do it. But then we have a bunch more stuff that we need to get framed. And I've been using Framebridge this year to frame things, and actually before this year too, because I had a couple of vintage maps that wouldn't fit in any frames, so I decided to go that route. I've had a great experience with Framebridge so far. It's on the pricey side, I think that's the other reason we've been spreading it out is just because it is a little bit more expensive, but they do a good job. You can get stuff that's completely custom. And so I'm hoping that this weekend we can sit down and send a few more things off to be framed, if not everything, but just getting those out of here will clear out a little space and then getting them back, we can get them up on the wall. So I think that's actually, if I'm thinking about a true sort of spring cleaning project, framing things and hanging them up feels like the big one.
Sally: I love that. I love that. Yeah, framing is one of those things that's expensive, but it's because there's human labor involved in the things being framed.
Rachel: Right.
Sally: And then also things just last a lot longer if you frame them properly, which, you know, I still need framing to be less expensive. But it is one of those things where you feel like you're forking over money that is a good investment.
Rachel: Yeah, absolutely. So I'm pumped about that. What about you, what's next for you?
Sally: Next for me is we're just kind of dealing with our spice rack situation. So we have a ton of spices and seasonings, and we regularly use five or six or maybe ten of them, but of course occasionally we need other stuff.
Rachel: Right.
Sally: And as I've been thinking more about surfaces, I've been wanting to just keep our surfaces clearer. And I realized that our kitchen has this weird... so the house that we got is a new construction and so a lot of the decisions that were made... I guess sometimes people move into homes and do a bunch of projects and redo things so they are what they wanted, and we didn't do that because everything was brand new and we were like, "Eh, it's probably fine." And now we're discovering as we go things that we just don't like as much. So there's this really, really narrow cupboard, I guess that you pull out.
Rachel: We have one of those too.
Sally: You have that?
Rachel: Yeah.
Sally: We've been keeping weirdly shaped things in it, but. I think maybe it's meant for spices.
Rachel: Yeah, that's how we use ours.
Sally: Okay.
Rachel: It works for that, but it's not perfect for that, but I think that is what it's for.
Sally: Okay. Yeah. It took me a while to understand that. So basically I embarked on a project of figuring out, you know, because we have our spices come in a lot of different, you know, some are tall and skinny, some are small and bulbous. So I ordered a bunch of glass spice jars, and I'm going to decant them all and organize them and then they'll go away in that thing. And then the ones we use regularly will be within arm's reach. And that just feels like, it's just a way of doing some decluttering and using the space a little bit better. Because again, when we moved in... this house still feels very new to us. And we moved in, my partner Andrea is amazing at unpacking and putting shit away. We would still be living among boxes if it was up to me. But within a week of being in a house, everything was unloaded and put away. But you don't really, again, you don't really realize how you're going to use the space until you're really in it. And so I feel like now we're in the stage where we're kind of figuring out where to move things around to both save space and make things more convenient. And also, I don't think I really fully appreciated until this year, how much... I mean, I feel like people have been saying this since time immemorial, but it's only now hitting me how much your space influences your mindset and how you are. And for me, when I see a ton of stuff on surfaces, even if the stuff is cute or functional or useful, it makes me just feel really chaotic. So the spice rack situation is I think going to help a lot with that.
Rachel: That's great. This is inspiring to me because we have the similar spice rack and it's fine. Things mostly fit in there. I have never been motivated to decant things because I'm not sure that I can keep up with it after the fact. I'm like, I'm just going to buy a new thing of oregano and then I'm just going to have it, and that's it. Or I'm going to buy a tiny thing of pumpkin pie spice and it's going to stay in the little McCormick thing. So I've never been quite able to master the spice rack, but I'm very impressed by people who do. And I can look at that and be like, that is a better way to live, what I'm doing doesn't make sense, but I'm not ready to change my ways just yet. But this is inspiring me to at least clean ours out, combine certain things that could be combined and get it a little bit more organized so that we can more easily find things when we need them.
Sally: Yeah, totally. I'll actually put a link in the doc to the thing I'm getting, because I did a lot of measuring, which again, I think I never used to do, to make sure that I could fit two spice jars next to each other. And if you have the same kind of cabinet, maybe it's the same measurements. It might just be standard. And it also comes with a little funnel to decant, and also labels so you can label it. So I'll put that in the show notes. And then if anyone else is ready to take the psychological leap, they can get into it.
Rachel: That sounds good.
Sally: What is your next project?
Rachel: Well, this isn't one that I'm doing right now, but I'm just throwing it out there as a thing that I'm really looking forward to. So as I said, we have not been able to have people come into our home to install things. And there's a long backstory here, but basically we have two large windows that need some kind of curtains or shades. The only way to really deal with this is custom shades or regular curtains that only go so far. Like if you want shades or blinds, they're going to need to be custom. We got them in the living room and we had them installed before we moved in to be safe, but it was going to be fairly expensive to get the living room done too. So we were like, we'll just do curtains in there. That was not the right call. The curtains are fine, but they are just not enough. We need shades. So we ended up ordering, we had already been measured for the second set of shades and we ordered them. But then we kind of were like, we don't feel like it's a good idea to have someone come in and install them right now. This is, I don't remember. I think it was last September, October. And we were just like, I don't know, yeah, it's probably fine if they're masked, but do we want to take the chance? No, we don't. So we've had this box, it's like ten feet long with these shades sitting in our kitchen since last fall. So I'm so excited to eventually... I think the end is in sight in terms of when it will be okay to have people in to do things like that. I think it will be this year. I'm so, so, so looking forward to having those shades installed, because right now we've got curtains in the bedroom that we don't really love, and then this window cling that you can put up that kind of looks like frosted glass. So we've been using that to bridge the gap, because our apartment overlooks a courtyard. So like there's enough internal foot traffic, and all the apartments face into this courtyard. So it's huge. And it's like, in our bedroom we need more privacy. And so the window cling is working, but it's not my favorite thing. I'm just so excited to be able to get the shades installed. Maybe this summer, maybe this winter, who knows. But that's a big thing that when the day comes, I think after we're vaccinated or after vaccines are more widely distributed, the first person I see is probably going to be somebody from the shade store who's coming to put this thing up for us and I can't wait.
Sally: Yeah. We have a bunch of projects that need to happen in the house. Some of them are on the urgent side, and that's definitely -- we keep putting off, you know, back in the beginning of the pandemic when we were like "It'll be a few months" and now it's getting really dicey. And so I think definitely one of the things I'm looking forward to about widespread vaccination is house things that cannot wait a second longer either, because of a comfort issue or an emergency that's definitely going to happen.
Rachel: Definitely. All right. What else you got?
Sally: So the last thing I would just say that we're doing is just a general edit, you know, just walking around the house and noticing when we have things that we haven't used in a really long time, or that we don't like where they are anymore, clothes we haven't worn, we've accumulated a bunch of stuff to give away. And it's all sitting in the basement ready to go to Goodwill. And it's everything from, of course clothing, but then also stuff we bought for our cat when we first got him without realizing that not all cats like all things. And so there's like a lot of things that he doesn't use, so we have to give that away. And it's stuff that just sits around in a corner and it's like, we can actually get rid of that. Old magazines, we have some electronic stuff that we don't use so I'm giving away some of that, selling some of that. Just an edit, just an overall, can we pare down? There's something that feels really stressful to me about living among a bunch of stuff, period. But living among a bunch of stuff you don't use, I feel like when people get rid of all of their belongings and move into a tiny house, I'm like, that sounds great because you have the weight of a bunch of things off of you, but I could never do that because I also am obsessed with all my things. That's a whole another chapter in my autobiography. Anyway. So that's what we're doing right now.
Rachel: So Sally, outside of the big spring cleaning, or once a year chores, what are some little chores that you've been doing throughout the past let's say six months, or just any time, that you feel give you the most bang for your buck, really pay off, that you strongly recommend to people?
Sally: So I grew up in a home where my mom was cleaning as she went, she's a real clean as you go type of person. She doesn't walk by a surface without wiping it down, or walk by a book without putting it on a shelf, you know, sometimes to the point where you get up to go to the bathroom and come back to, your book has been put away and your coffee mugs in the dishwasher.
Rachel: [Laughs] Right.
Sally: However, I love you mom, but also that has instilled in me a clean as you go kind of approach, which makes it easier to do bigger cleans down the road. But also, I feel like I get really stressed out when I see that a surface is accumulating grime or a corner's accumulating dust. I feel like I'm talking a lot about how stressed I feel, just making a lot of connections right here right now. Can we just tell my therapist about this episode? So really, a good way to, I have these informal things. Like every time I start a new bag of coffee, I clean the coffee grinder, which, cleaning the coffee grinder is one of my favorite tasks, it's a whole process. So then there's other things you can do, like every time you change the toilet paper, you give the bathroom a once-over. And I actually recently was reading this, there's a story that was published a few days ago, a week ago now by the time this episode comes out, on Apartment Therapy, which we'll link to in the show notes, that is basically just a bunch of, it's like fifteen clean as you go habits. So it's like, clean off your desk every time you put something new on the calendar, clean out the fridge every time you sit down to make a grocery list, scrub the kitchen sink when you run the dishwasher, clean the bedroom floor every time you wash your sheets. So just a bunch of things where you sort of tie these two tasks together, and I feel like it really ends up adding up and makes it so that, you know that feeling of the few days to a week after you do a big clean, nothing feels better, but three weeks after that, it's sort of terrible and you're just completely ready to burn your house down and start over. I think if you clean as you go, you have less of that burn it all down feeling by the time it's ready to do a big clean.
Rachel: That makes sense. I think that's very good advice. And I'm going to read this article and try to incorporate some of this into my own life.
Sally: Nice. Yeah. I was freaking out as I read it. What about you, Rachel? What are your little, a little chore that pays off?
Rachel: So, one thing that I did maybe in November, December, was hanging up a bunch of 3M hooks in various spots in our apartment, and -- love a 3M hook, they're so versatile because you can get them in all different sizes. So I just ordered a ton of different sizes based on what I thought we needed. One thing is that we seem to accumulate a strange amount of robes, and they didn't really have anywhere to go. So I'm looking at the back of the bedroom door, we have really big fat 3m hooks, we each have a robe hanging on it. And then I put some inside of our closet because we have some lighter weight robes that are perfect to go inside a closet door. I put two on the door of our laundry room -- it's not a room, it's a closet. So it's big enough for a combination washer and dryer. And then it's like a fairly tall room, so there was a lot of space above it, but there's not enough floor space to put a hamper in there. And so I put two 3M hooks on the back of the door so that when you open it, there's a hanging hamper that hangs by hooks. And that's where we throw cloth napkins or dish rags, basically any sort of household laundry that we want to do that didn't really have a home. So that's a perfect spot for it. I saw a little hack on Instagram, I think it was, where you can put 3M hooks inside of your under your sink doors and then hang rubber gloves from them. So just anywhere that you could possibly need to hang something. Oh, I put a couple on the back of the bathroom door for shower caps, because there's a hook there for robes, but shower caps didn't have anywhere to go. So thinking about the spots where you toss something across a surface because it doesn't have anywhere else to go, and it's too big to fold up and put in a drawer, that's probably a good spot for a hook. And so, yeah, it's such a cheap way to get things off floors, off surfaces, and into a space of their own that I think really pays off.
Sally: That's awesome. I love that. And I'm thinking of a few places where I want to do that right now.
Rachel: Cool. What's your next one?
Sally: So, something that I actually picked up from my partner is before she ends a day of work, she writes down the stuff she has to do the next day, and also just kind of shuts down her office. Like, obviously turns off the lights, turns off the computer, but also puts things back where they were, blows out the candles and puts the candle --she works by candlelight a lot. I mean, she also uses light bulbs and electricity, but she has a scented candle going, is what I'm saying. Puts pens back in the jar, just basically resets the office and makes a list of the things that have to happen the next day. And that's a thing that I have started to pay a lot of attention to in terms of the household. So basically, same thing with my office of just resetting it so that when I walk in the next day, it feels like a place to start work, not the place that I ended in, you know, the end of the workday comes and I'm excited and I'm hurriedly shutting things down and leaving gum wrappers and coffee mugs. So getting out of that habit and just sort of resetting the space, but then also doing that -- I think the kitchen and the living room is a big one where, as I've mentioned, I'm really bad with surfaces. And if I don't make an effort to reset those spaces, they become really chaotic. And so in the kitchen -- and I'm going to link to this in the show notes -- there's an article on Apartment Therapy yet again about shutting down the kitchen. And it's basically a writer talking about all these steps you go through at the end of the night to shut down the kitchen, almost like a restaurant would at the end of a shift before the next shift. Most of it is stuff that is a little bit too next level for me to do. I don't know if this is maybe a horrible thing to admit, but I don't spray down my sink with disinfectant and scrub it every night, and I'm not going to start, but there are a bunch of things like sweeping or vacuuming every night, setting the dishwasher every night... just putting things away. I'm notorious for taking a thing out, serving myself food or whatever, and then just leaving it on the counter. So what I've been trying to do more now is just really shutting things down in whatever room I'm in. And in the living room it's taking my video game controllers and the remotes and putting them away, and not letting my Kindle and my books and various magazines pile up, but actually resetting that space. And I think that's the kind of thing that it takes somewhere between a few seconds and a few minutes to do, but the payoff throughout the day and the week is huge.
Rachel: That's a really good tip. And again, I'm feeling very excited to read this article and inspired to do a little bit more of this. I also want to give you another tiny tip of mine to add to your shutting down the kitchen routine, which is if you don't have it in you to disinfect and wash your sink every night, which I think is like a pretty normal way to feel, might I suggest drying your sink? This is a tip that I got from Home Comforts, and I think about it a lot, that's like, if you don't have a lot of time to tidy or clean -- let's say in another world, you have guests coming over or whatever -- cleaning out your sink, so getting all the dishes out of it or whatever, give it a rinse out, but then dry it with a paper towel or a clean towel so that the surface is dry. She basically says the sink is the center of a room and drying it makes it look so much better. And this is so true. Every time I do it, I'm like, "Oh man, it looks finished in here, it looks cleaner in here, it looks different somehow." So if you can't wash your sink or scrub your sink when you're shutting down the kitchen, consider drying it and see what that does, because I do think it makes a big difference.
Sally: I love that. I will definitely check that out. That seems a not prohibitively overwhelmingly big task to get into.
Rachel: Yeah. It's a small one that I think has a lot of payoff.
Sally: I love that. Awesome. Okay. So what do you have next, Rachel?
Rachel: I have a little tip that I got from Unfuck Your Habitat, which is a great book and website about cleaning and having a clean space. She actually has a tip, Sally, that I think you would appreciate, or a method called tidy your tops, which is about: set a timer for ten minutes and clean all the surfaces you can, or tidy all the surfaces you can. So just go through and put things away, which I think is a really good tip.
Sally: That's great.
Rachel: But the tip that I specifically wanted to mention is one where she says put a trashcan in every room, or put a trashcan in rooms where you are likely to generate trash and where you spend a lot of time. So I have a tiny trashcan that's on my nightstand so that, I don't know if you do sometimes, sometimes I'll take my makeup off next to bed and I can throw the trash in there. My girlfriend has one on her nightstand because she takes her contacts out from bed quite a bit and they're disposable, so she just throws them away. And having a trashcan there for that, for tissues, just whatever, is a really good spot for it. If you spend a lot of time in your living room on the couch and you're likely to eat there or be sitting there and blow your nose or whatever, put a trashcan nearby. It's a really easy way to make sure that you don't let garbage pile up in different rooms in your home. Particularly I think, living room, your desk, and your bedroom are places you might not think to put a trashcan. So think about putting a trashcan there, or start with just an empty box or a brown paper bag. It's a good way to test out, do you need a better thing here? If it's helpful to have a receptacle in there, you can then be like, okay, I'll get a little trashcan for this room. So just look for opportunities to put a trashcan out, and that's a way to keep things feeling cleaner and tidier throughout your house.
Sally: I love that. God, I feel so alive. This episode is perfect. This is everything I needed in life.
Rachel: [Laughs]
Sally: We are people who love a good product, and so I think probably what we need to do is talk about our top cleaning products or hacks. I think we both have some methodologies to share as well.
Rachel: Great. You want to go first?
Sally: Yes. I would like to sing the praises of the Mr Clean Magic Eraser. I don't know what it's made of.
Rachel: I do, actually.
Sally: Oh, tell me.
Rachel: It's melamine foam, which I know because I edited an article that Tom Vellner wrote for Buzzfeed about how you can basically buy melamine foam without the Mr Clean brand, no offense to Mr Clean, but it's basically about using melamine foam as a dupe. However, back to you, back to Mr Clean.
Sally: That's an amazing hack because the Mr Clean Magic Erasers have become a line item in the budget and they definitely add up, and the generic ones are not good. They're very crumbly. So I might look into that, but whenever I have a spot -- I totally sound like a commercial right now from like the 1970s. But when I have a spot where I can't figure out why I can't get something clean, I try a magic eraser and it works, and it's never harmed a surface or stripped a surface or anything. So in our old apartment I was having a really hard time getting the grout clean and I switched to magic erasers and it was amazing. And then we have this really annoying situation in our kitchen, which is that we don't have a vent hood, which means that anytime we cook, instead of a lot of the greasy air being vented out, it's being vented onto our cabinets over the stove. And so they get really yucky and grimy and greasy. And I kept trying to wash them, and it's really hard to if they're wood, and it's grease on top of wood. And I was like, I don't know what I can get that isn't just going to smear the grease around. Let me tell you something. Mr Clean Magic Eraser gets them totally clean and degreased and doesn't seem to be harming the wood at all, so.
Rachel: Okay.
Sally: Yeah. They seem magical and I don't want to look too deeply into melamine and what it does and if it's an endocrine disruptor and stuff like that, because it works so well that I feel like it has to be pretty bad for me.
Rachel: Yeah. Well, I'm inspired, because I feel like I have some things that could use a Mr Clean touch. So I'm going to get some after this recording.
Sally: Please report back. What about you? What's your first top cleaning product?
Rachel: Well, I'm not going to spend too much time on this because I've talked about this. I talked about it on 'Gee thanks, just bought it!' with Caroline Moss and I've written about it in the past, but I'm going to give a shout out to my favorite stain removers: the Spray 'N Wash Stick, and then OxiClean spray. I'll link to my blog post about it, but basically OxiClean spray is great for organic stains, so blood in particular, it's really good for that, but it's good for everything. It's gotten out coffee, it just is an all-around great cleaning treatment. And then the Spray 'N Wash Stick is something that my girlfriend has always sworn by and I am now a true believer. So we keep both of those things in our laundry room. When I was working in an office, I had a bottle of the OxiClean spray in my bottom desk drawer, and people would often go on Slack and be like, "Does anyone have a Tide pen?" And I'd be like, "You don't want a Tide pen, come by my desk. Let me give you the good stuff to get your stain out." You know, you never know when you're gonna get salsa or whatever spilled on you at work. So both of those are just great all-around cleaning products that allow me to wear white jeans in the winter without incident. So highly recommend both.
Sally: I love that. That's great. I'm not like a person who thinks a lot about, even though I am known to drip coffee and dribble various salsas and sauces on myself, I generally am like, I'll throw it in the laundry, see what happens, but I should graduate to paying attention to stains. So that's a great tip. I want to sing the praises of a little product called Magic Cabinet.
Rachel: Okay.
Sally: Which, I'm also obsessed with the fact that it's called Magic Cabinet. And when I saw it, I think someone recommended it on a blog or something like that, and I was already sold. I was like, you had me at Magic Cabinet. So it's, it's a wood cleaner and polish, and they also make Magic Cabinet for stainless steel. And the thing that I really like about these two products is that they clean and buff at the same time. I don't know that I'm actually using buff correctly, but I guess what I mean is that, like, our refrigerator is stainless steel and our fingerprints are on it constantly.
Rachel: Yeah, yeah yeah. We have this problem. I'm buying Magic Cabinet as you tell me this story. Say no more. Say more, but I don't need any more convincing.
Sally: [Laughs] Yeah. And same with our wood cabinets, they just get marks on them that's not exactly dirt and grime. It's more just like, they've been touched by human hands that have oils on them and it's just so hard to get them clean and also looking clean, because I was finding it really frustrating that I would wipe down or wash cabinets or stainless steel stuff, and I would be like, okay, well, I guess that's now technically clean, but it looks really smudged and yucky. And Magic Cabinet, which you can totally get at like Amazon or Walmart or whatever, cleans really well and also, all the bullet points under the product I've found to be true: protective barrier to help guard against watermarks, dirt and grime, beautifies as it cleans. You know, you just have a feeling of like, oh shit. I'm cleaning, but also buffing this shit. It doesn't smell bad, it actually has a pleasant non-chemical smell. It's safe for food preparation surfaces. And it doesn't seem to be harming the wood or anything like that. So I'm really into Magic Cabinet. And I highly recommend it as a cleaner and a polish. I guess that some people polish wood, but if you use this it's a two in one situation.
Rachel: Great. Well, I'm going to get the stainless steel one, because we have a fridge and a dishwasher that could really use that.
Sally: That's another one that it's really helpful for. Speaking of dishwashers, I think, what's your next product?
Rachel: My next product is rinse aid. Doesn't matter what brand you use, but turns out you really need a rinse aid, which I didn't know until a couple of years ago when I think I was on Wirecutter looking for the best dishwasher tabs or the best dish soap. But I came across an article that they wrote about rinse aid that I had never, I was vaguely aware of it as a thing, but didn't really know what it did or why I needed to care. I had never used it. Basically, I'm going to quote Wirecutter here: "You need rinse aid because dishwasher detergents don't work the same as they used to. In 2010, the Environmental Protection Agency and other regulators made detergent companies stop using phosphates, a great cleaning agent, because they can lead to algal bloom." Cutting ahead, this is still quoting Wirecutter: "Every new dishwasher has a rinse-aid dispenser because rinse aid is essentially mandatory if you want your dishwasher to work well these days, according to every industry person we talked to. Rinse aid offsets the limitations resulting from gentler detergents and stricter efficiency standards—it’s just part of the deal now." And they also say, "if your dishes are coming out of the dishwasher wet, or with food bits still stuck to them, give rinse aid a whirl." That's exactly what was happening to me. And then I bought rinse aid and it totally changed the game. So definitely get rinse aid if you haven't been using it.
Sally: Yeah. When we moved into our house and we had a dishwasher for the first time, our dishes were still soaking wet and also not that clean after we ran the dishwasher and I was like, "We've been duped, this dishwasher doesn't work. We have to talk to the builder. This is all wrong." And I similarly ended up doing some research and found the same, I think probably the same thing on Wirecutter. And I was like, oh my God, it's not just a fake thing.
Rachel: Yeah. It seems like it'd be a scam, but it's absolutely not.
Sally: Right, it's not a scam. It's amazing. It changes the game. So everyone, get rinse aid.
Rachel: Yeah. All right. What about you? What's your next recommendation?
Sally: I have this coffee grinder that I got a couple of years ago and it's a real workhorse. It's gotten me through a couple of years of intense coffee grinding and drinking. And it's survived through like, I've dropped it before and had the basket on top where the grinds go crack, and I've ordered replacement parts, but the grinder itself has still hung on. And I think one of the reasons it's hung on so long is that I clean it pretty meticulously. And it comes with a tiny little brush, and when I first got it I would try to clean it with the tiny little brush, and I found it really, really difficult because the brush is so short that it's actually hard to manipulate. It was making my hand kind of ache when I tried to clean with it. And I was like, but you know you have to clean it out. Otherwise, especially if you're like me and you like dark roast coffee, which the beans can be very, very oily, the oil can build up and it gets rancid and harder to clean. So I was like, I need better brushes. And so I just was looking around on Amazon and I found this bundle of all-purpose small brushes and in the product description, it's like, all-purpose for humidifiers and your keyboard PC and car detailing. And it's basically any home project that requires a small brush. And it has five or six different kinds of brushes in there for getting into different tight spaces. And I use them on my coffee grinder, but I've used them on my keyboard, I've used them on my boom arm for my mic when I need to get into a crevice and brush around, just basically anything that is too small to, you know, dust. If I am eating while playing video games and I get a crumb in between a button and the controller, I use the brush for that. So they're really handy to have around. And the exact brush kit I got is not available anymore on Amazon, but I'll find a similar one and link to it. It's like a $6 or $5 investment, and I use them constantly and I love them.
Rachel: That's a really good tip. I'm looking at my keyboard right now, which has been getting really nasty from working from home because there's a lot more dust in here, and I am thinking that this might solve my problem. So I'm looking forward to that link.
Sally: Yeah. I mean, as someone who, again, I'm definitely not going to stop eating over my keyboard, I'm not going to be that person. I'm just going to have to become a person who has brushes to clean the food out.
Rachel: Yeah, that's a really good idea.
Sally: Okay. Your last one, Rachel, what do you got?
Rachel: Okay, so mine is moving away from cleaning actual surfaces and more about organizing in your digital spaces. And I just want to talk about Gmail filters and labels quickly. So if you use Gmail, you can create labels for different categories of things, which I highly recommend. I have all mine in their different colors so I can just look at a glance and see what things are, they help me kind of just visualize what's going on in my inbox in a given moment. But what I make even more use of is filters, which you can use in multiple different ways. So one of the things you can do is set them up so that labels are automatically applied to certain types of emails. So for instance, I have in my personal Gmail, when our building sends us things it all comes from my building's specific email address, so I have that set up to automatically filter to 'home'. And then a lot of times certain types of emails always have the same subject line, so if we get a package, I can set it up so it's like, any email that I get from, you know, building@ gets a home tag, but then if it has the word 'package' in the subject line I can add a sub-tag for those, so that it's even more filtered. That's just an example of how I use it at home, but it's way more helpful when I'm at work because I get a lot of different, I do freelancer paperwork, so I'm getting invoices and I have to send out contracts, and so I use these automatic filters both to categorize things, but also to sort of mark things as needing my attention. You can also put emojis into the labels.
Sally: Nice.
Rachel: So I can just amend, I can add a label that says 'contract' with a red exclamation point and that means I need to send the contract. And then when the contract is filed, I change it to one that's 'contract' with a little check mark. So it's like an easy way to just know, so then I can also just click in my left hand side, I can go to 'contract red exclamation point' and see all of the people who I need to send a contract to. So it becomes a way to use your Gmail as a more efficient to do list, or to make sure things aren't falling through the cracks, and to kind of see where you are in this pipeline of sending a contract, getting it signed, getting the invoice, signing it, having somebody else sign it -- there's all these steps, and to me, this was the best way to do it. The other thing you can do is use filters to make sure you're not seeing certain things. So I get a ton of PR pitches, and a lot of times when I get a new one for the first time, particularly when it's from somebody who is pitching me on something that I would absolutely never write about and they clearly... it's a PR company who's going to send me more, I create a filter. So I go to 'create new filter' and then basically all filter all emails from that person, I do mark as read, bypass inbox, add the label 'PR pitches'. So I don't even see those.
Sally: Oh god, that is such a life hack. My god.
Rachel: It's incredible. And it's tedious to do it each time, but it's pretty quick. And I still get PR pitches every day, but if ever I'm like, is this really worth it? I go look at that PR pitches folder and can just see the thousands of emails that are in it. And I'm like, oh, this is absolutely worth it, because none of those came through my inbox the first time, or most of them didn't, so that's super worth it. I also will, if I'm getting just tons of pitches about -- a big one is festival season. I'm never going to write about festival season. I don't need your pitch about what people are wearing at Coachella this year. So I can just filter everything with the words 'festival season' in it so that I never see it in my inbox, and doing that is just such a relief. For other big holidays, like Super Bowl -- sorry, I don't need your pitch about it. Respectfully, I'm never going to write about anything Super Bowl related. [Laughs] And if I am, I can find that stuff if I want it. It doesn't delete it automatically, but it's a really nice way to just keep my inbox clear of junk. I also do it for all my newsletters. So in my personal email, I just mark them as read, add the tag 'newsletter'. So then when I want to go read a bunch of newsletters, they're very easy to find, but I'm somebody who likes to kind of obsessively stay in my inbox when it's open, when I'm working. And so having things automatically mark as read that aren't really urgent, but having that label apply there so I definitely still see them in my inbox, is a really good system for me to kind of cut back on having to open up Gmail multiple times a day, just to be like, oh, it's just an email from my building, or just a newsletter. Very few emails or things I need to attend to in the moment, but that doesn't keep me from clicking on them. So using this sort of automatically mark as read and apply a label system has worked wonders for me.
Sally: This is so inspiring to me. I'm realizing right now that what I have in my work email box, I've separated out important to not important, and anything that's a pitch I just send to not important because it's always, any cold pitches I get are things I would never write about in a bazillion years.
Rachel: Yeah. Always.
Sally: Not going to write about healthier Halloween treats. Never. Disrespectfully. Stop telling me to.
Rachel: Yeah.
Sally: But I still have to see them. And they're away from my important stuff, so they don't show up in my browser tab, there's no little number telling me that it's there. But when I go to my inbox, I see all this garbage, which is just... I don't like seeing how much people want me to write about things that I find that I'm completely hostile to.
Rachel: Yeah.
Sally: And I feel like your solution, actually it bypasses me completely and files them away, as opposed to... it's kind of like the difference between, it's like what I was talking about earlier with my office where I just implemented a bunch of solutions so I could really instantaneously not have to deal with the thing, but it's actually not the most elegant or best solution. And I feel like what you're talking about is the most elegant, best solution. And I am abso-darn-lutely going to implement that. So thank you for that.
Rachel: You're welcome. I'm excited to see your system when you come up with that. I'll send you some screenshots so you can see all of the emojis I implement and my color schemes, because I think you'll really appreciate this.
Sally: Yeah. I'm excited for all of that. Well, here we are.
Rachel: Yeah, we did it.
Sally: And about an hour later, I don't even think that... I feel like this constitutes a scratching of the surface of things we have to say.
Rachel: I agree.
Sally: Yeah. So we'll do another installment of Home Games sometime soon. But in the meantime, I think it is time for a nice thing to end on. What do you got, Rachel?
Rachel: What I have is that we're thinking about buying a sewing machine and learning to sew. So my girlfriend and I have both been, we've learned to sew throughout our lives in small, like my mom taught me once and then, you know, just here and there, I would do a class one time, but never really stick with it. She took a class when she was younger, didn't really stick with it. Since we've learned to knit at home, we feel confident that we can learn to sew. And I just feel like sewing is such a valuable skill in so many ways. So I think we're going to spend this weekend doing some sewing machine research and look into... I think my big thing is, I want to buy a sewing machine where that specific brand has really robust YouTube videos, because my experience is, to me, threading a sewing machine is the hardest part. And you can find YouTube videos, but if they're for a slightly different sewing machine, it's not going to be as helpful. So I want to get one where we can follow along very easily with what's available online, but you can get a sewing machine for not too expensive. And I just feel like being able to hem things, being able to, make a little thing for yourself when you want to, being able to do home decor, all of these things -- super excited about that. So that's a thing I'm really looking forward to.
Sally: I love that. That's a really good tip in general, is make sure there's YouTube support for the thing you're getting. So smart.
Rachel: [Laughs] All right, what's yours?
Sally: There is a video that maybe you've seen, Rachel, it's I think pretty famous? It's about making crayons, and it was on Sesame Street in the late eighties, I would say. And I remember it from childhood really well. To me, it's my very first exposure to the category of oddly satisfying things to watch.
Rachel: Nice, okay.
Sally: So watching people frost cakes or decorate cookies, this is kind of like, it's a Crayola factory in the early eighties, it's like two minutes long, the music is absolutely amazing.
Rachel: Okay.
Sally: And you're just basically watching, it's footage of crayons being made in a factory and factory workers. It's both machines and human beings making these crayons. And I just kind of had total recall and was like, "Oh my God, that was really awesome, and I want to watch that again." And sure enough, it has kind of an internet cult following. I watched it again, it's just as satisfying as it ever was. And the guy who wrote the music for it actually has recorded a YouTube video with the music and showing the music in his software program and stuff like that, which was really fun.
Rachel: Oh, cool.
Sally: Yeah. And it's just really delightful. And I think even if you don't have a childhood association with it, watching how crayons are made is just really, really, really cool. Especially because I don't know how crayons are made now, but in the late eighties, it was very much a combination of -- not that I'm an expert in how crayons are made from this Sesame Street video -- it seemed to be very much a combination of mechanical, like machinery, nothing electronic or digital, and then human beings. And it's just really cool to see that. I don't know, it's just a nice little slice of crayon life. So we'll link to that in the show notes.
Rachel: Okay. Amazing. I think I've seen it before, but if I have, it's been years, so I'm excited to give it another watch.
Sally: Nice. Cool. Okay. Well, that's it. Thank you so much for listening to this episode of Oh I Like That. And by the way, I was checking out our reviews and we have almost eighty reviews from listeners, which is amazing.
Rachel: Wow, that's so nice.
Sally: Yeah. It's really nice, and we really appreciate it, and we would love it if you've been listening, if you would go rate us and review us, it really helps people find the show. So if you're enjoying it, just take a couple seconds to say something extraordinarily complimentary about us and rate us five stars.
Rachel: Great. You can also follow us on Twitter @ohilikethatpod. And you can email us at ohilikethatpod@gmail.com. You can also follow us personally. I'm @the_rewm and Sally is @sallyt.
Sally: Oh I Like That is produced by Rachel and Sally and edited by Lucas. Amber Seger, who is @rocketorca on social media, designed our logo.