Spot The Difference

Sometime before Christmas, I was given an old drawers unit that was unwanted by our local community centre:

As you can see, it is tatty and grim-seventies in style, but functional. Exactly what I need, in fact, for my poetry collections and stationery; and I am extremely grateful to have it. My intention is to upcycle it in the summer i.e. give it a coat of paint.

The brown plastic drawers are miserable to look at and not conducive to making this housewife laugh, but I had a solution. The Hub bought me some gorgeous sticky back plastic: silver, glittery and textured. I confess, I like to stroke it, especially when I’m stressed. I have it on notebooks, backing a framed document signed by Queen Victoria, and now here:

I was really pleased with my temporary cheerful fix.

And then the Hub did this:

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Yes, folks, that’s right: every time I sit at my desk, I get to look at the Hub’s ‘PENiS’.

Three guesses what I’m going to do with my next roll of sticky back plastic.

 

Talking of being green…here’s a great post with simple tips to make your life easier and re-use your toilet roll tubes.

 

TwistedSifter

 

Life hacks are little ways to make our lives easier. These low-budget tips and trick can help you organize and de-clutter space; prolong and preserve your products; or teach you something (e.g., tie a full Windsor) that you simply did not know before.

Most of these came from a great post on tumblr. There is also a great subreddit ‘r/lifehacks‘ with some fantastic tips as well.

 

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I Love Him But He Has To Go

This was my Love Potato when the Hub first left him for me:

This is him now:

I took the decision to throw him into the food recycling bin last week, but he’s still sitting on my kitchen counter.

I love my little Love Potato; how can I possibly toss him aside?

Saving The Planet = Saving Cash

A car boot sale gets its name from the way goods are sold out of the back of a car. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I haven’t posted tips for a long time.  I think these bear repeating.  Just because I’m not here, doesn’t mean I can’t make myself useful.

Partly due to personal circumstances; partly due to witnessing people scrabble around in my bins for food when I lived in South Africa; partly due to a desire to save the planet; and partly due to natural parsimony, I am a keen recycler and money-grubber.  Why not join me?

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• Wash everything except very dirty things on a cold wash; modern powders and liquids are strong enough.  You don’t need to be at 30 degrees
• Never wash a half-load, only a full one
• Only fill the kettle with enough water for the number of cups you require
• Use carrier bags for indoor bins instead of buying bin liners
• Cut up old sheets, towels, clothes, etc. for dish cloths and dusters
• Pour unused water  into your plant pots  – better still, buy a rain barrel
• FREECYCLE/FREEGLE!  You can give away your old junk and receive somebody else’s.  It’s a worldwide thing so there’s probably a group near you.  It’s free.
• If you are a UK book reader there’s also readitswapit, which is great for swapping books.  All it costs is second class postage.  It’s easy to list your old books (it must be, because I did it).  My one piece of advice would be: don’t list heavy or hardback books unless you don’t mind mortgaging the children to cover the postage.
• Use rechargeable batteries
• Buy refills whenever possible
• Put stale bread out for the birds
• Save soap scraps and make your own block of soap (having said that, I’ve only managed three blocks of soap in five years, but every little helps)
• Cannibalise furniture, appliances, etc: when we redecorated our living room, the Hub took apart our old wall unit and used the wood to make shelves in a cupboard; he also took out all of the screws to re-use
• Defrost food in the fridge overnight, rather than in the microwave
• Ensure leftover food has cooled down before putting it in the fridge
• A fridge will work more efficiently if it is well stocked, but not over full or practically empty

And one more: recycle clothes.

• Swap with friends – my friend and I estimated that on average six children (including our own) shared any one garment.   The more people you share with, the more clothes there are to choose from, and therefore the less worn out each garment becomes.
• Donate unwanted clothes to charity shops – they will collect if you can’t carry them
• Sell them by the bag load on a car boot sale or through the free ads
• If you can’t sell it or give it away because it’s too old, cannibalise it: cut off all buttons, take out cords and shoelaces, then use what’s left as rags
• Buy from charity shops, car boot sales and jumble sales – the more we do that, the less consumables will eventually be produced

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Many of these tips might seem obvious but you’d be amazed at how few people are aware of them – do your children and the planet a favour, and pass on the message!

Have you got any tips to share?  Despite what the Hub keeps saying, I don’t know it all.

Move Over

Image by buba69 via Flickr

What would it take to get you to move?

From this chair?  Lunch.

From this house?  A better house.

From this country?  A green card.

From this planet?  The dulcet tones of Captain Jean-Luc Picard.  He could persuade me to do anything.

If someone you trusted offered you $1000 to move to a different city, would that be enough?

Could I take my lunch with me?

Upon reflection, no.  That would barely cover the moving costs; especially to Betazed.

Would you need other things: the promise of friends or better weather?

I have friends; even some real ones.  Global warming will catch up in Stockport eventually, so I won’t need that.

What would they need to offer you before you’d instantly say yes?

A job.

Or if you already want to move, what would it take to get you to stay?

A job.

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Actually, I love moving house.  I love the clear-out that moving house always entails.  I like putting things into boxes, putting their contents into lists in a pretty little yellow notebook, and putting the boxes with their labels (Kitchen/Bedroom/Lounge etc) into the new rooms in the new house.

The junk gets sorted into categories:

• Charity
• Recycling
• Sell
• Garbage

And sub-categories:

• Charity: Clothes/Bric-a-brac/Books
• Recycling: Bottles & Cans/Paper/Green Waste
• Sell: Whatever I Don’t Need/Large Unused Items/The Hub’s Stuff
• Garbage: Tat/Junk/The Hub

Hmm.  Ask me the question again.

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Green Around The Landfills

Image via Wikipedia

Whose responsibility is it to change the world?

Ours.

And what will be your contribution?

Eat less.
Fart less.
Kill all the cows.

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To be fair, I am doing my bit:

• I reduce, repair, re-use and recycle whenever possible.
• I swap my books instead of buying new.
• I Freegle, Realcycle and Freecycle at every opportunity.
• I don’t just throw cans into the brown recycling bin: I take off their labels for the blue recycling bin.
• I turn old wardrobes into cupboard shelves and socks into dusters.
• I buy my clothes in charity shops or accept them gratefully from friends.
• I only boil enough water for my cup of tea.  The rest of them do without because they can’t be bothered making their own.
• I let Stockport Homes re-wire my house, install a condensing boiler, double glazing, insulation and energy-efficient shower.  (How good am I?)
• I use the same old jokes whenever I think I can get away with it.

I don’t think there’s much more I can do; do you?

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While proofreading this post, I realised I had read ‘save’ instead of ‘change’. 

Let’s try again:

Whose responsibility is it to change the world?

Ours.

And what will be your contribution?

Get my kids to do it.

They’ll have to take over; I’m exhausted.  I’m so busy saving the planet, I don’t have time to fix it.

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Related articles

• Get Creative with Your Recycling! (brighthub.com)
• The Importance of Recycling (greenerthinking.wordpress.com)

What A Load Of Rubbish

Image via Wikipedia

I’m as big a fan of recycling as the next man; bigger, if anything: I’ve been doing it since before it was either fashionable or compulsory; but I’m ready to give it all up and dump the contents of my three un-emptied wheelie bins on Stockport town hall’s doorstep.  I’m sure it would be four un-emptied wheelie bins if I had put the last one out with the others.

I have a green bin for garden and food waste; a blue bin for paper; a brown bin for glass, tins, certain plastics; and a smaller black bin for non-recyclables – the black bin is woefully inadequate for anyone’s needs and likely to stay that way until manufacturers are pressured into reducing packaging but that doesn’t excuse the town hall for getting it so badly wrong: they should either have given us all larger black bins, or emptied them weekly instead of whenever the mood take them.

I don’t often get enraged – war?  Seen it all before.  Starving children?  Pass me my gourmet meal and tell them to eat their sticks and stop whining.  But dare to ignore my bins on collection day and I swell to three times my not inconsiderable size and blister the skin of any local government official within a twenty-mile radius.

Here’s what happened:

Tuesday 30/11/10 – Midnight*

* You have to do it the night before because you can bet if it’s a minute past seven in the morning of collection day their little radar detects it and uses it as an excuse to ignore you for a month; but you can’t do it early evening because they’ll fine you for cluttering the pavement    

• Put out full green, brown, blue bins – ensuring they are placed at the edge of the property, lids fully closed, not blocking public access but visible to blind refuse truck driver, before seven a.m.
• Snow

Wednesday 01/12/10

• Binmen ignore blue and brown bins on 300 Stockport streets because of ‘bad weather’ yet, somehow, the green bin truck gets through

Thursday  02/12/10 – Lunchtime

• Bring in empty green bin, full blue, brown bins
• Stamp feet in frustration
• Chat to neighbour, discover neighbour’s daughter-in-law’s contact at town hall has told daughter-in-law who told neighbour who tells you that blue bin will only be emptied on 29 DECEMBER!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
• Once breath returns to body, get on phone to council
• Told by very nice Ros who lets you shout at her until you calm down that you will be collected next Wednesday.  Even though it’s a full week late, accept it as a gift because you won’t have to face a Christmas garden piled high to the top of your six foot fence with detritus

Tuesday 07/12/10 – Midnight

• Put out full black, brown, blue bins – ensuring they are placed at the edge of the property, lids fully closed, not blocking public access but visible to blind refuse truck driver, before seven a.m.

Wednesday 08/12/10

• Watch truck sail past with the contents of every black bin on your street – except, of course, yours
• Yodel on phone to very nice Bev until reassurances are given that full black bin will definitely be collected next Wednesday and blue and brown bins should still be collected that day because you are on the roster and they work until seven at night
• Bring in full black bin

Thursday  09/12/10 – Lunchtime

• Bring in full brown, blue bins
• Get on phone to make an official complaint – politely; you’re too exhausted by the whole process to care any more.  You’d top yourself but as the same people who run the refuse collection, run the cemeteries, you’re not sure how long your smelly body would be standing there bothering your poor grieving family.  Although, as you are the only person who can be bothered to put out the rubbish and even when you do it ends up piled six feet deep in your garden due to non-collection, they might not find you until you begin to stink like your own cooking anyway.
• Get caught short
• Hear answer phone message as you are on the loo, telling you brightly that your blue bin will be collected on Saturday (as announced in this week’s Stockport Express – remember those 300 streets?); your brown bin will be collected on next brown bin collection date; and what’s a black bin?
• Give up

The only good thing to come out of this sorry mess – although ‘good’ is a relative term – is that I got a short poem out of it.  The Poetic Asides prompt was to write about a group of anything:

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A Garbage Of Refuse* Collectors

The binmen of Stockport?
They’re rubbish.

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*Feel free to pronounce ‘ref-use’ as ‘re-fuse’; I won’t be offended.

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There is a poem about rubbish people of a different kind on my sapoem blog.

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I saw this on ribshackred‘s blog and I thought you might like it:

An Utter Declutter

Image via Wikipedia

 

We have a lot of stuff; we’ve always had a lot of stuff.  It didn’t matter in South Africa when the Hub had a warehouse attached to his office: we stored everything there and our home looked lovely; it’s not so great now that we live in a three-bed council house.  Part of the problem is that we hang on to things we might need later on, like every plug from every defunct appliance we’ve ever owned – bearing in mind that it is a legal requirement that every appliance sold in this country must come with an integrated plug, it’s like letting your older children leave home but keeping their feet in case the next one you give birth to needs spare tootsies.  Okay, that’s ridiculous; but so is hanging on to twenty-five years’ worth of electric waste.

Having built and filled our garden shed twelve years ago, the stars finally conjoined yesterday to give us sunshine, everybody home with nothing to do, and me in a we can do this if we only gird our loins and get on with it mood.  I needed to empty the shed (not the one pictured, but a good facsimile) so that I have somewhere to store the clutter from the kitchen (it must be emptied before they give me a new one).  The clutter in the kitchen came from the hall when I painted it.  The clutter in the hall came from the lounge when I painted it.  The clutter in the lounge came from my inability to tie the Hub to his chair and never let him shop.  I didn’t have the heart to put the clutter back in the lounge because I was able to see every wall for the first time since Spud was born.  I have been shuffling utter crap from room to room for months, and yesterday I decided it must STOP.

 

 

 

 

 

Tilly couldn't understand where the mess was coming from...

 

 

My family hate when that happens because it means work for them, and they weren’t wrong.  We sat the Hub in a comfy chair on the back step so that he could supervise the chucking-out and tell us what he really needed to keep: spare parts for his never-used scooter (we’re building our own ark here in Stockport) could stay because they will come in handy in 2027 when it is forecast we will finally have a dry summer and the scooter will need de-rusting; but three huge electric typewriters and seventeen pieces of mouldy mdf were defintely out.  A box full of baby toys might have stayed if the boys were ready to make me a grandmother, but I didn’t want to encourage them so they went on the skip pile.  An old tent we got from Freecycle last year was finally opened up to see if it was of any use.  It was: I now have waterproof bicycle and braai covers, albeit bright purple, and three groundsheets.  I couldn’t prise a Linguaphone box of 78s from the Hub’s crying arms, but I did manage to sneak out a couple of motorbike forks and carpet offcuts from a carpet we no longer have, when he was stroking the vinyl and saying Ciao, bella to himself.

We finished up with several piles:

• for the council skip (coming next week)
• recycling (how many fly-blown cardboard boxes do we really need?)
• Freegling (the beauty of decluttering on a public holiday is that people are free to collect straightaway)
• charity (the van happened to be coming this morning)
• to sell (to pay for my broken nails)
• might come in handy at some point if the Hub can hide them from me

We moved the stuff in the house that we really wanted to keep into the shed, where it will no doubt stay for another twelve years until we get our next sunny day.  The kitchen isn’t quite cleared but it’s getting there.  The hall isn’t quite cleared but it’s getting there.  The lounge – well, you get the idea.  I’m doing my best and if it sometimes feels as if I’m holding back an avalanche with sheer will and a roll of bin bags, at least it gives me something to blog about.

I Googled ‘declutter’ and I came across some excellent tips; I will give you the best ones and the sites they came from:

http://zenhabits.net/15-great-decluttering-tips/

• Declutter for 15 minutes every day. It’s amazing how much you can get through if you just do it in small increments like this.
• Whenever you’re boiling the kettle for tea, tidy up the kitchen. If the kitchen is tidy, tidy up the next room – it’s only 3 minutes but it keeps you on top of everything (helps if you have an Englishman’s obsession with Tea as well!)
• The One-Year Box. Take all your items that you unsure about getting rid of (e.g. “I might need this someday…”), put them in a box, seal it and date it for 1 year in the future. When the date comes, and you still didn’t need to open it to get anything, donate the box WITHOUT OPENING IT. You probably won’t even remember what there was in the box.

 http://zenhabits.net/18-five-minute-decluttering-tips-to-start-conquering-your-mess/

• Create a “maybe” box. Sometimes when you’re going through a pile of stuff, you know exactly what to keep (the stuff you love and use) and what to trash or donate. But then there’s the stuff you don’t use, but think you might want it or need it someday. You can’t bear to get rid of that stuff! So create a “maybe” box, and put this stuff there. Then store the box somewhere hidden, out of the way. Put a note on your calendar six months from now to look in the box. Then pull it out, six months later, and see if it’s anything you really needed. Usually, you can just dump the whole box, because you never needed that stuff.
• Pull everything out of a drawer. Just take the drawer out and empty it on a table. Then sort the drawer into three piles: 1) stuff that really should go in the drawer; 2) stuff that belongs elsewhere; 3) stuff to get rid of. Clean the drawer out nice, then put the stuff in the first pile back neatly and orderly. Deal with the other piles immediately!

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-1211647/How–declutter-home.html

• BE BRAVE  Most people find it hard to throw away stuff, but you can’t attach sentimental value to everything you own.  When your house is cluttered, nothing looks good. So, as you go through your possessions, ask yourself which of them you actually love or use. If not, why not?  Maybe it’s a wedding present you secretly hate, a dress that doesn’t suit you. Let it go.
• MAKE A MESS  To clear up your home, you have to turn it into a proverbial bombsite first.  The best de-cluttering method is to pull every single item from your shelves, drawers and cupboards and lay it all out so you can see exactly what everything is.  This tactic works well for clearing out your wardrobe; as well as gathering rags to chuck, you’ll ‘re-find’ clothes you’d forgotten about.

http://www.myhouseandgarden.com/declutter.htm

• This is my favourite: Start today  Procrastination is the major obstacle to decluttering.  So start now.

 

 

 

Save The Planet, Pocket The Dosh

One of the tasks during my month-long sabbatical from housework was to talk knowledgeably for up to a minute on any subject we fancied.  Having bored the group rigid for weeks on why they should vote – democratic right, decisions are made by blahblahblah – I realised that it’s time to stop talking when people stop listening, so I surprised them with some household tips instead.  As I last shared tips with you in July 2009, I thought you could hear them as well.  Most of them are common sense but it amazes me how many people say, ‘Ooooh, I never thought of that before.’

• Use lamps with lower wattage bulbs – but don’t use two lamps with 60 watt bulbs if your overhead light is using a 100 watt bulb; you’ll be using more energy
• Take a shower instead of a bath
• Turn down the boiler thermostat by 10 degrees – it will be hot enough for your needs, but saves a lot of energy over the years
• If you have an old boiler, rather than heat up the water to wash a sinkful of dishes, put in cold water to lather, and boil the kettle (using just enough for your needs) to warm it up for washing
• Use a bowl in the sink to wash dishes
• Always replace damaged seals on fridges and freezers
• Use the right size pan on stove rings.
• Leave the lids on while you cook; it’s much more energy efficient
• Turn off the ring a few minutes before the food is cooked – it will remain hot enough to finish cooking
•  Turn off at the wall all appliances not in use – you will save £7 a year.  It may not sound like much but it’s better off in your pocket than theirs
• Old birthday and Christmas cards make great gift tags and postcards for competitions
• Keep jars and plastic tubs for storing food in the fridge; you can also pour used oil into them instead of pouring it down the sink or toilet
• Used computer paper and some junk mail make excellent drawing paper for the children (then put in the recycle bin)
• Use the end of wallpaper rolls to line cupboards and drawers (or throw it in the recycle bag); the kids love to draw on it as well
• If you don’t want or need household goods that are still in good repair, donate them to charity, give them to a friend or offer them on Freegle or Freecycle
• Shut your doors to keep heat in
• Open your doors and windows for free air freshener

I put in that last one so that I could tell you about the time I watched a reporter struggle not to laugh in my face.  I was once interviewed for a magazine article on recycling.  I’m a bit daft, as you know, so when she asked me what I thought about aerosols such as air fresheners I didn’t think, as a normal person would, ‘Oh, she’s talking about the damage to the ozone layer.’  No, I responded in a confidential whisper, ‘Well this is strictly off the record but, if I’m alone in the house and I go to the toilet, if you know what I mean, I don’t spray afterwards.’

Save the planet: lock up the dozies!