Wood for the Trees

The clutter took 8 years of us living in the house to accumulate, we're not going to become a minimalist household overnight. The process takes time. Especially when you have kids as free time is often a rarity which then does not make you want to spend it decluttering. So first stem the tide of things coming in. 10 tips to reduce purchases: 1) make yourself stop and think, do I really need it? Before making any purchase 2) don't make impulse purchases. If you think of something you want add it to a list, take time to think about it. Do you still want it a week later? 3) When buying to replace broken or worn out items, make sure you do get rid of the worn out item too! 4) Unsubscribe from shopping e-mails telling you about bargains 5) Unfollow shopping adverts on your Facebook feed 6) 2 for 1 is only a bargain if you actually want 2 and half price is only a bargain if you want the item 7) Can you buy it digitally? Or borrow it if needed for a short amount of t...

So to try and tackle the mounting amount of paper clutter around the house I recruited the four year old. She is the source of most paper clutter around the house and takes pride in her artwork, even the stuff that comes home from school that looks like she spent all of 2 seconds on it. "Look at this mummy!" "Erm, it's a line on a blank piece of paper?" "Can we put it on the fridge?" "Must we?" She once caught me putting some of her artwork in the recycling and put me on orange for the rest of the day. So to avoid this I made her make the decisions. I gathered all the loose paper from around the house and told her to put it in one of three piles. Keep, recycling or take a photo then recycling. I thought most would end up in the keep pile. I was wrong. She was able to make decisions about which ones to keep and was happy for a lot of them to be photographed then discarded. Although we are left with a bigger keep pile than I would hav...

Ah the living room, the room that people see when they enter your house, the area where you relax in an evening, and as its name suggests the area where the family lives so is definitely the worst offending area for clutter.

There is a scene in Red Dwarf where they are about to go into status. Cat brings 11 racks of clothes, he is told he can't take all of them, they won't fit, he has to leave some behind. So he looks through the racks of clothes and pulls out the tiniest handkerchief. "I'll leave this, I guess I'll have to live without it." This is entirely how I feel when I try to tackle the toy pile. I go through and find one toy, probably from a Happy Meal (not that I take my children to McDonalds, ahem) that they no longer play with. It seems to make no difference to the tidal wave of toys overtaking my living room. It doesn't help that there's 3 years between the kids so what one doesn't play with anymore, the other one does. I try to get my 4 year old involved in sorting her toys but she either picks out something that is broken to give away or something that is her sister's. Though she's getting pretty good at telling me which of the scraps of paper c...

Where ever there is a box to empty, where ever there is paper to rip and eat, where ever there is a tissue to tear into the tiniest of pieces and spread around the house, there she will be. My arch-nemesis in the fight to maintain a tidy (ish) house - Destructo-Baby! As fast as a speeding bullet, as sneaky as a hundred ninjas, a master of mess..... I think even if we lived in a cave on the remotest mountain with only the clothes on our back she would find a way to cause mess and destruction. It's just the way she is and I love her and wouldn't change it for anything. Some battles aren't meant to be won.

I was reading an article about  Project 333 , this is a project which challenges you to live with only 33 items of clothing for 3 months. This made me think about my own wardrobe. Despite not being particularly girly or into fashion, I daily had the classic stress of 'i have nothing to wear!' Despite having a wardrobe bulging at the seams. So I decided to have a clear out. First I decided to be tough. All those size 8 clothes that I've hung onto in the hope I might fit into them again. Well, despite being my pre-pregnancy weight, after 2 children I am not my pre-pregnancy shape. So hanging onto those smaller clothes are just taking up room and adding to my stress. (Especially as I keep thinking if I just eat a little bit less or exercise a little bit more maybe maybe... It just adds to my stress levels). Ok so let's be realistic and send them to the charity shop so that someone who is actually a size 8 can give them a good home and put them to use. Secondly a lot o...

As part of my plastic reduction journey I have started using soap on a soap dish. This is great as 1) it's cheaper 2) I don't have to help the kids to use it. My eldest used to demand I help her after she'd potty trained because she couldn't push down the pump on the hand wash. She can use soap by herself. 3) it looks better on my sink than a bottle of handwash did 4)  Studies have found handwash to be no better at killing germs than soap

Sometimes trying to find ethical products falls into one of three categories - they take lots of effort, they're expensive or they don't work very well. So when I find a product that is none of the above it's a joyous moment. (I have 2 small children so I take wins where I can.) Which is why I wanted to introduce you to solid shampoo bars by Funky Soap  at www.funkysoapshop.com . I wanted to reduce plastic and as a family we get through quite a few shampoo bottles. I also had problems with itchy flakey scalp. I had stumbled onto no poo shampoo ideas a few years ago and through this managed to reduce my hair washing routine from every day to twice a week. But using bicarb of soda and apple cider vinegar on my hair did wonders for my scalp but my hair felt like straw. This in when I came across SLS free shampoo bars. (SLS is sodium laurel sulphate or sodium laureth sulphate a harsh detergent which is only legal under EU legislation due to the amount of time it stays o...

This post is actually a bit of a lie as I had started clearing the bathroom before I had the idea to start this blog. And look I tidied the windowsill (but not the playmobil for some reason) for the photo so you didn't think I was completely disgusting! (Why is there playmobil in my bathroom??) You also can't see the bag of loo roll which is just on the floor behind the door as I have no storage. *Sobs* So here are my bathroom tips so far! - Don't have time to actually sort? Find a nice box and put loose objects in there. Look how tidy the shelf over the toilet looks! (Or it might not because you didn't see it before but trust me it looks so much better) All those old bottles which are either empty or have a little bit left in them which you haven't used in a year but there's still a bit left so have kept them? Clean them out and put them in the recycling! All those old bottles which have lots left in them and you haven't used in a year but you pai...

As I sat in my house exhausted from the day of working then getting home to run around after 2 small children I found that I would sit and read about minimalist lifestyles. I would read about how this gave the writers a new sense of life, how it freed them from stress, how it gave them more time to spend on the important things in life. I would sit and read about them after clearing a space on my sofa by pushing the children's toys to one side and sitting in my house that more resembled a scene from Home Alone. (In fact there was like, what, 13 kids in that house? It was far too tidy!) A lot of the writers didn't have kids or had older kids who also had got on board with stuff reduction or lived in the US with big houses with lots of storage or had lots of time to be able to sit and reorganize their cutlery drawer. None of them told about the time the cat brought in a dead mouse and they didn't notice due to the amount of toys on the floor (which are about the same size a...