Dying eggs this year? Want to use all-natural dyes? Check out this article by Rachel Tayse of Hounds in the Kitchen on making egg dyes from edible materials like red cabbage, purple beets, ground tumeric, blueberries, tea, and coffee.

Encouraged by my friend Vanessa Prentice, I made egg dyes from edible materials this year. I was surprised to find that natural dyes are easy to make, completely safe to consume, and don’t stain your fingertips.

I made dyes from purple cabbage, red beet, and ground tumeric, pictured left to right above. Other edibles that Vanessa recommends include blueberries (purple color), tea (light brown), and coffee (dark brown). Green is a particularly difficult color to achieve, she says.

I boiled the edible materials in water with a splash of vinegar to act as a mordant. A mordant is a chemical that encourages dye to attach to a surface. These mixes simmered until the colorful edible until the liquid was brightly colored, about an hour.

Continue Reading ->

Are you a veteran? Do you know a veteran or veteran’s family in the Columbus area in need? As part of our strong community service standards, Mosaic Cleaning provides two volunteer cleaning services per month through Cleaning for Heroes.

Cleaning for Heroes is committed to promoting a healthy, clean home environment for our disabled or elderly community heroes and their families. They accomplish this mission by providing free house cleaning services to help make their lives easier, as well as other services such as window cleaning, carpet cleaning, air duct cleaning, landscaping, pest control and much, much more! Mosaic Cleaning is proud to be a Charter Member of this organization.

Whether our heroes belong to the United States Military, our local police force or fire department, providing free cleaning services is our way of saying “Thank you!” for the sacrifices our community heroes make every day for us, our community and our country.

Even though this is my business’s site, I try to stay connected since I currently am the business, and so from time to time you may find posts here that are more about the experience of owning Mosaic Cleaning than about helpful hints on how to clean your house. It’s my hope that this balance works for you, and perhaps even brings the personal touch that I offer to my cleaning clients to my readers as well.

That being said, this week’s post is about my 2011 goals for Mosaic Cleaning. It’s that time of year, and my friends over at LightSwitch Creative do a really excellent job of sitting me down, asking the right questions to get to the bottom of what’s important to me both personally and professionally, and then helping me set realistic, achievable, measurable goals to drive the business from where it is to where I want it to be. Without giving too much away, here are some of my goals for 2011.

Continue Reading ->

This week’s Mosaic Mention is gonna be short and sweet. I recently got some feedback from a young professional that she would be very interested in having me come and Co-Clean™ with her, but that my present hours (M-Th, 8 – 5) were making that impossible for her as they conflicted with her own work hours. It’s valid feedback. And so, I’ll be extending my hours to accommodate her as well as anyone else who’s had a similar thought in the very near future. I’m not sure exactly what they will look like – Perhaps more evening availability? Or maybe a day of weekend openings twice each month?

Which would be most helpful to you? Leave a comment. I’d love to hear your opinion!

With much of the country battened down under the great freeze, who’s not going a little stir crazy with cabin fever right now? Even I, who really enjoys being at home am starting to go a little nuts. It’s hard to be productive when you’re not really even sure you want to get out from under your covers!

So how does this Columbus cleaning lady beat the winter blues? Personally, I fight them by giving to others. For me it starts with this week’s Mosaic Mention: laundry. And I hate laundry…

Continue Reading ->

So uh… I just found out that our main Mosaic Cleaning company email address was broken! Who knows how long it’s been that way or exactly how it happened. The important thing is that we know NOW and have fixed it. So, if you’ve tried to get in touch with me recently via email or the website and I was completely unresponsive, I apologize. Trust me, I value your feedback and potential business. Give it a try again. I’d love to connect!

I have a regular gig to Co-Clean™ with my pal, Laney*.  A Co-Clean™ is a great way to maximize your time and energy toward the goal of house-sparkliness. Here’s what the formula for your Co-Clean™ would look like, if one existed:

You + Me x 1 hour = about the same effect as me cleaning 3 hours on my own or you cleaning house all day on your own.  Or thereabouts….it’s a formula in progress.

A little background on the concept of the Co-Clean™… Laney was looking for an economical and time efficient way to keep her house clean.  She’s a busy woman, whose schedule can be all over the place, making it hard to dedicate an afternoon every week or a day every month to the chores of vacuuming, dusting, scrubbing the toilet etc…  She’s also an entrepreneur whose budget isn’t quite there in terms of farming it all out to Mosaic Cleaning. So we came to an agreement where I will come over on a regular basis and the two of us will tackle what needs to be done, all in about an hour. This is a brilliant concept for a few reasons:

Continue Reading ->

So.  Business has been a little slow. I understand… the economy and all that. Paying a locally-owned cleaning company to do what one can probably do oneself can seem counter intuitive. But I know that I provide a valuable service, if not in saved time alone, then in terms of stimulating the local economy: I get paid by you, then I go to places like the Clintonville Farmer’s Market for some picked-today Acorn Squash, or Beechwold Hardware for another bottle of Zud. Then I use said Zud to make your bathroom sparkle, you pay me again and I head to Northstar Café to split a breakfast burrito with my significant other. And so on and so on.

I know that eventually, I will have a client base that understands and appreciates not only what I do for them, but what they are doing for Clintonville and greater Columbus. But until then, I have to find ways to fill my schedule with paid work. Canning my own tomatoes is great and all, but I’ll need more than a few jars of sauce to make it through the winter

So, in an effort to drum up cleaning business, I will be canvassing a neighborhood where I currently have a couple of clients. I’m distributing flyers door-to-door to encourage anyone who has ever thought of bringing a stranger, albeit a stranger recommended by their neighbors, into their home for a couple of hours at a time to whip things into shape. When I figure out how to create the link, I will post a link to the postcard, which I have so lovingly and thoughtfully designed for just this purpose.

Will some of these postcards be trashed immediately by their recipients? Most assuredly so. But my hope is that just enough of you will see past the monetary outlay to the bigger picture, and divert some of your hard-earned dollars my way. Then my hard-earned dollars go into making our community stronger. Win-win all around.

Wish me luck with my endeavor. I love the customers I already have, I just need a dozen more like them!

“What’s In My kit?”

My cleaning kit consists of the items I take on every clean.  I’ll post my green clean caddy contents in a later post. Here are the regular cleaning products and materials I use on a daily basis:

Caddy – Some say a cleaning apron is better, but I definitely like my caddy. The caddy is great because you can store all your items in one place, it’s light enough to carry around, and once you establish your routine, it keeps you organized and focused. I have separate caddies for my regular cleans and my green cleans. You want a caddy that’s big enough to hold at least 3 spray bottles, a can of Pledge, 5-6 rags, 4 sponges, 2 slim bottles a toothbrush, a scrub brush and a cup.

I got mine from (gasp!) Target. I couldn’t find an exact link on the Target site. Cost: approximately $10. Here’s a similar one: http://www.organize.com/utility-caddy-large-blue.html

Bucket – standard 2.5 gallon variety pail with a handle. Cost: approximately $10. My bucket carries my knee pads to and from the clean. I use it during the clean when I mop floors. Here’s one similar to mine: http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Dgarden&field-keywords=bucket

Continue Reading ->

Don’t think you’re ready to commit to having a professional cleaner come in for you? We can do a Co-Clean™ too. What the heck is a Co-Clean™? That’s where we come in, work with you to decide what house cleaning needs to be done, and split the housework with you… So you perhaps will take the kitchen or bedrooms while we take the bathroom and living room. Our Co-Clean™ customers love it both because it’s economical and motivating to them to have a friend come over and help tackle the bi-weekly or monthly cleaning monster!