Yesterday I had to run an errand that I never enjoy: I had to take a load of household goods to the landfill. Pushing stuff out of a pick-up truck into big collection bins always makes me feel guilty. Could I have saved it/reused it/recycled it/found someone else who wanted it?
Well, someone might have wanted [...]
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It seems like the most complicated room to put together is a kitchen. Getting the set up and the storage and the workspace just right is hard. And people spend a lot of money on kitchens these days.
I’ve been wanting to redo my kitchen, and I really do need to modernize it enough to fit [...]
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As I have been watching a torrent of water pour out of the sky today, it can seem like we have no need to conserve water. Here in the rainy Pacific Northwest, we don’t have the water issues of other areas of the country. But, we still need to do our part to conserve. Actually, [...]
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Here’s another Anti-Home Magazine for you. This is how we really live, not tidied, not decorated, and not staged in any way.
Right to the side of our front door, we have hung coat hooks on the wall. Even so, I’m always struggling with how many coats, umbrellas, bags, dog leashes, etc. accumulate there. I hang [...]
Read the rest of The Story of My Stuff: My front hall
This will be like the anti-magazine. Instead of making you feel bad because your home doesn’t look like the pictures in the magazines, these pictures will make you feel better because this is what life really looks like. I’d love to see some pictures like this on other blogs, if anyone else wants to play [...]
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These posts are kind of fun, so here I go again. I admit to not being perfect in my pursuit of simplicity, and this corner is the worst offender in my house. This picture was taken this morning, while Hypatia and I are the only ones up and she’s watching some Scooby Doo while she [...]
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The Story of Stuff is a longish (20 minutes) video, but it does a great job of explaining the whole material economy and system, and what’s wrong with it. One of the shocking things in the video is the fact that after 6 months, only 1% of what we buy is still in use. The rest [...]
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Born to Buy: The Commercialized Child and the New Consumer Culture by Juliet B. Schor
Schor is an economist and sociologist, and the author of two other books: The Overworked American and The Overspent American. This book is full of research, statistics, and interviews with advertising industry people and mainstream parents. It’s not a fun read [...]
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The chicken coop we aren’t using anymore
Becomes a new raised bed for the garden.
A old shelf that used to hang on our dining room wall (itself made from a old outdoor fence from my dad’s house), becomes a garden decoration for the kids’ play house.
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I have drifted away from using my bread machine, as I’ve been buying more and more prepared gluten-free goodies that can be pulled from the freezer and popped right in the oven or microwave. But, as part of my pledge to simplify our food consumption, I’m going back to making homemade bread.
My bread machine is [...]
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