Lindsay Ballard, Author at Makely

I’m not a huge fan of over the top Christmas decorating. At least in my own home, it’s just not practical. Between all of the school activities around the holidays, gift wrapping and just general hustle and bustle of daily life, I just never find the time (or the need) to cover every square inch of my home in garlands and glitter. And honestly, if I’m going to put a lot of work into decorations, they better be something that I can enjoy year around.

Some years I decorate more than others (like last year compared to this year), but I always make it a point to have a good looking Christmas tree. Just like with the rest of my holiday decorations, I don’t think a Christmas tree needs to have tons of fluff. Instead, I like to follow a simple recipe, and my tree always ends up looking nice.

This year, I helped a dear friend get her tree trimmed, and I detailed the steps below. I wanted the tree to look like her, and she wanted to make sure that it had some of my style elements. The end result is fun!

Recipe for a Well Trimmed Christmas Tree

1. Start by setting your tree up and string it with lights (if it is real or isn’t pre-lit). For Olivia’s house, we were working with a pre-lit, artificial tree (we were sent an Oh Christmas Tree from Treetopia). It was really easy to set up straight out of the box. Each of the three sections is labeled, and you literally just stick them together.

Once the sections were put into place and we fluffed the branches out to the desired fullness, we plugged each section’s lights together and plugged them into the wall outlet.

It’s lovely already!

You can choose clear or multi-colored lights. I know that a clear-lit tree is very on trend right now, but I’ve always been a big fan of multi-colored lights. Surprised? No, I didn’t think so. When stringing a live tree or one that’s not pre-lit, I start from the bottom and work my way up, making sure the light strands are equally spaced as they spiral around the tree.

2. Add some garland. I don’t always add garland to my Christmas trees, but I do like the way it looks. I do prefer my garland to be on the thin side instead of extremely wide – that way, it doesn’t hide the ornaments.

Olivia and I found this spiky, icicle garland and thought it would be a fun touch to her tree. We started working from the top and wound our way down the tree.

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When I woke up this morning, I realized what terrible shape my house was in. Between my kids being out of school the entire week, me trying to finish the painting project that will never die, hosting Thanksgiving dinner and taking care of a visiting cat, it was gross – there was just no way around it.

We had a “family cleaning party” and worked on getting everything put away in its proper place. Just having everything straightened up always makes the house look about 75% better, doesn’t it? Well, until I looked down at the tile floors.

Can you see the brown spots? Yeah, those aren’t supposed to be there. Yuck!

Luckily, HomeRight recently sent me a new chenille mop pad for my SteamMachine Plus Steam Mop. Until now, I’d been using the microfiber mop pads that come with the unit (as you can see from the dirt stained areas on the microfiber pad below).

The microfiber mop pad has cleaned up my tile floors just fine. It takes more work that I expected, though, because it only really picks up dirt around the edges. And as you can see in the below image, a quick swipe of it over the floor doesn’t get up as much dirt as you might hope.

I think it’s because of the way the SteamMachine Plus Steam Mop (affiliate link) is built. The center of the mop head is raised. I’m sure there is a fabulous engineering reason for this, but it doesn’t change the fact that you have to make sure you clean every bit of your floors with just the sides of the unit.

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