John and I prefer the ‘reduce’ option when it comes to newspapers and choose to read our news online most of the time. But every now and then, we buy a paper to read on a journey or over lunch, or get a free ad-rag shoved through the letter box.

It seems a shame just throw them in the green bin once we’re done – but aside from keeping a few around for temporary dustsheets, we don’t have that much use for them.

Any ideas?
Continue Reading →

Weeks and weeks of growing, then oxidated until it’s black, then dried, then shipped, then packaged, then shipped thousands of miles, then shipped to a warehouse, then shipped to a supermarket, then shipped to our home, then dunked in a tea pot for three minutes, then thrown onto the compost heap.

Any suggestions for a better ending for that tale?
Continue Reading →

We feel the same about interior decoration as we do about cleaning: our desire for a clean and well-painted house is marginally outweighed by our desire not to actually clean or paint our house. We’re the type of people that live in half-decorated rooms for months and months on end (our personal best is the living room which took 18months to “finish” – finish in inverted commas because, another 18 months on, we still haven’t sorted out the flooring or painted the radiator yet).

Anyway, in a very unlike us moment, we decided to paint the kitchen last weekend. When we’re done, we washed the emulsion brushes out with water but hit a dilemma with the gloss brushes: is it better to wash them out turps (or some turps substitute as was the actual case) and then pour the resulting painty-turps down the drain or, since they were cheap brushes to start with, just throw them away?

Obviously, throwaway culture is bad – because so much effort went into making the brushes in the first place and then transporting them to us via a DIY emporium – but is pouring a whole bunch of chemicals down the drain any better?

I’m always inclined towards the throwaway option because even after endless time with a tub of turps, I find it so hard to get the brushes re-usable clean again that I end up throwing them away in the end anyway – but THROWAWAY CULTURE, BAAAAAAD! So you see my dilemma.

Since both of those seem pretty bad options, are there any alternatives that we should be considering instead?

(Photo by levi szekeres, c/o sxc.hu)

Between jam, honey, olives and sticky-sticky sauces from the Chinese supermarket, we go through quite a lot of jars and it seems a shame to just recycle the glass and bin the lid.

So any suggestions about how they can be used again? I know it seems, on the face of it, quite an obvious thing to be able to reuse but you never know what other people haven’t thought of…

Oh, and it would also also be great if anyone knows any foolproof ways of
a) thoroughly degunking them (including smell, which always seems to linger on) and
b) getting the label and all the sticky off easily.
Continue Reading →

We don’t use rubber gloves that often because, frankly, we don’t care that much for cleaning and when we do clean, we don’t care that much about our hands to bother with gloves. But sometimes we pull out the marigolds. For those icky jobs. The ones that involve bleach. Or cat poo. Or both.

When we do use rubber gloves, we don’t always to remember to be careful and have a tendency to pick up thorny rose bush branches, or snag fingers on cheese graters, or test how low a match will burn before the rubber melts (answer: pretty low). We find rubber both rips and melts more easily than skin and heals much slower too.

After mixing and matches odd as-new gloves to make pairs, we’re usually left with a number of random gloves that have small holes in them (usually in the finger tips) and so are no longer waterproof. They lurk in the cupboard under the sink with the old tea towels until they dry out and scream to be thrown away. Any ideas on how they can be put to better use?
Continue Reading →