Rambling about domesticity

[dancerjodi]

I've been trying to make little changes here and there to cut costs, reduce waste and make use of the stuff that we have around us. There's a slight adjustment at the beginning, but things are beginning to seem old hat.

A while ago we bought reusable grocery bags which we've consistently remembered to use. They carry more stuff, are easier to bring into the house and can be employed for various uses outside of the grocery store. They fold up into a little square sized thing that fits in your pocket (we used out one at Keene a couple of weeks ago to carry our jackets around until it got cooler at night and when we were wearing the jackets the thing folded up into a pocket. Brian and I have both been kind of surprised about what a big difference they've made.

Then after picking up the Green Clean book I tried my hand at making some of my own soaps. I replaced all of the antibacterial stuff with castile soap (bars in the bathrooms, liquid in the kitchen) and have been using a lot of borax and washing soda, vinegar and that kind of thing. I'm still not sold on how effective they are at cleaning the bathrooms, but other stuff has been great (dishes, dishwasher, laundry, spraying down countertops and such). The difference in cost and from the commercial cleaners not to mention how much more comfortable I am having my cats lick our bathtub or sink after there's water in their (um, ew!) is nice.

Next up is reusable cloths. We have 10 cloth napkins that I bought the first year we were in our home in Waltham and were hosting Thanksgiving that usually sit in the attic until November - why not use them everyday?! I'll need to pick up some more (or I could be motivated and sew some for myself with the tons of scrap fabric in the attic, though I'm not sure there's a lot of fabric up there that's properly absorbant and all). Which reminds me, I have to sew a curtain for the dining room side of the den door (to hide the tiki-ness inside, doesn't match so well with the medieval armor). I found the perfect fabric scrap up in the attic for that last night. I also want to make more of an effort to use the dishtowels, reusable cleaning cloths and stuff like that for cleaning around the house. We have enough of them, and it would reduce the paper towel use and such.

Basically, its been a fun challenge to see what I can re-purpose around my house. We've done a good job of weeding out a lot of things, but there is still a good deal of stuff hiding in nooks and crannies that go unused.

On a complete tangent, I still want to refashion the corner of our kitchen near our back door. Now that our cats' litterbox is there we can't open the back door all of the way, and its just annoying and kind of ugly. Maybe we'll try our hand at custom cabinetbuilding for once? Brian and I still need to stew about it for a bit. We'd save some money this way and it could be a neat project to try and tackle but we've also never done anything like that before.

This is the area I'm talking about (link below), note the hugeness of our microwave which is making the planning very difficult (really, should we just get a smaller microwave? we bought this because we wanted stainless at the time and it was the cheapest one, thought that seems wasteful and is an expense we don't really need). The small shelf with our microwave is gone now, and the radiator is unobstructed (though I put a bar stool in front of it) - the microwave is now perched on the larger black shelf and I moved my cookbooks to the bookshelf that's in the basement stairway. Something more narrow but higher may hold what we need. Or we thought of making a kind of cabinet/bar w/ storage underneath that would go over the radiator and get narrower as it moves to the right towards our door - it would provide some storage but also give us a tiny bit more prep space. Any ideas? What would you do? We've thought of putting some nice deep shelves over our doorways that will give us a bit more storage space, but there are still the large items to account for (microwave, Kitchenaid mixer) and the things we use often like mixing bowls that should really stay down low). Calling in a cabinetmaker I'm sure they'd have lots of creative ideas, I'm just not sure I want to go that route (part determination to fix the issue ourselves and part me just being cheap).

Pic of the area (just imagine that small shelf on the left not being there):
http://www.diabolis.net/gallery/displayimage.php?album=297&pos=22

Comments

Reusable Grocery Bags

[dancer.livejournal.com]

We bought ours at Hannaford, but any grocery store should have them (they usually keep them near the registers). Ours cost a couple bucks each but they are so much easier to carry stuff in. We still use plastic bags (cleaning out the cat's litter boxes) but we end up with them from enough other stores that its kind of evened out to us getting what we need (rather than having a ton to drop in the recycle thing at the grocery store each week).

Some supermarkets will even take so much per bag off your bill. Ikea is actually charging folks for bags they take now!

Re: Reusable Grocery Bags

[synaesthesia.livejournal.com]

Speaking of Ikea, their smaller blue bags are perfect for groceries and are $0.49 each. :)

(and the .05 charge per plastic bag goes to replant forests, yay)

Re: Reusable Grocery Bags

[dionysia.livejournal.com]

We bought one of the blue bags (a big heavy plastic one) and it's great. :)