reusable shopping bags / green bags

Also known as 'green' bags, reusable enviro bags are now everywhere in many different sizes, colours and designs. It seems as though we have one of every variation in our house. We have TONNES!
They love to attack us every time we open the cupboard under the sink.

I went to sort through the bags we have when I started wondering...
"Do we have too many reusable bags?"
"How many do we actually need?"
"Where should we keep them?"
"What happens if they get dirty?"
"What should we do with them when they wear out or break?"
"What does all this mean for plastic bags?"

I started doing some research to find out more about them. I know, I know. Very nerdy.
But you are about to benefit from my nerdiness.

How many reusable bags do you need?
Did you know that, in a household consisting of four family members, the suggested number of reusable bags required is EIGHT? (greenbag.com.au)
I take that as meaning eight for general shopping use because I know we have way more than that, but some are used to store clothes and things in the wardrobes.
After counting them all I discovered that we actually have at least 36!

I'm thinking I should make an installation artwork with them. That would be awesome.
The Green Bag site suggests keeping the standard reusable bags at home and for each individual to keep a compact reusable bag in their handbag or backpack for day-to-day convenience shopping. Tick!

Do you have too many reusable bags?
Yes? Mission Australia gladly accepts donations of any unwanted bags. Most op shops would happily take bags to give to customers too.

Where should reusable bags be kept?
This question had been plaguing me for a while since I am very unhappy with where they are at the moment. We access the cupboard under the sink regularly and they fall out every time the door opens. Also, our garbage bin resides in that same cupboard which can't be very healthy. Germs!

I went to the brains trust (ie, my friends and family) for some ideas:
30% under the sink
25% boot of the car
15% kitchen cupboard
15% laundry
10% on or next to the fridge 
5% garage

So, really, keep them wherever they are most handy for YOU (probably not next to your garbage bin, though). I have decided on keeping a bunch in the car boot, another bunch neatly folded (I'm allowed to dream) in the laundry cupboard and a couple of compact bags in my handbag.
We'll see how that works out. 

How do you clean a reusable bag?
It's inevitable that all reusable bags will get dirty. Things spill, leak, and flake into the bags.
So, it's important to keep them clean.
It is recommended that you clean your reusable bag with a damp, soapy sponge to get the longest life out of them. Occasional machine washing is ok, just don't put them in the dryer!  

What should you do with old, worn out reusable bags?
Recycle them! Green Bag have a recycling program called RED to encourage the proper disposal of these bags. You may need to check with your local council to see where is the best place to drop these off for recycling in your area. Any non-woven polypropylene (NWPP) bags are classed as a #5 plastic which can be reformed into many things, like school chairs! 

So, what about plastic bags?
After we started using reusable bags for all our shopping, we completely ran out of plastic bags. I then had to buy some plastic bags for the rubbish bin! I hated having to do that, but I didn't really know what else to do. Someone did mention that you can buy 'biodegradable' plastic bags but that turned out to be an even less environmentally friendly option - much to my surprise.

Research carried out for the Commonwealth Government found that, compared with ‘green bags’, the manufacture of single use plastic bags created over three times the greenhouse gas and used almost five times as much energy. And, that same report showed that biodegradable bags are an even worse option than single use bags, stating:
“Little or negative gain was found to be derived from the shift from single use bags to other single use bags such as biodegradable bags and paper bags, with potential litter gains offset by negative resource use, energy and greenhouse outcomes.”

And now...
I care about the environment. Why? Because to love God and to be like Him is to care for the things that He cares for. I care about God's creation and everything that lives in it, including the people and wildlife still to come. Having said that, though - I am not perfect. Not even close. A lot of areas in my life need improvement. This is just one that I'm working on at the moment. And, it's a no-brainer - reusable bags are the best option to care for the environment while shopping.

So, right now I'll be sticking with the regular bin liners for the household rubbish and using our reusable bags for everything else. But, I will be sourcing the bin liners from a new shop, since Aldi only stock one size: huge. I'll also keep thinking about possible alternatives for our rubbish.

A lot of the regular plastic bags are now recyclable. A lot of the major supermarkets have a special bin to put them in. They shouldn't be put in your yellow-lid bin with the rest of the recycling, though, because they jam the machinery at the recycling plant and cause a lot of other problems. I also suggest tying them in a knot if throwing them out with the general rubbish so that there is less chance of them blowing away or floating on water and being swallowed by animals.

So, after all that... even though I am currently drowning in reusable bags - they are good and they are 'green' and they are one way of caring for what God cares for.

I now feel like I have some direction. We will cull down to what we need and donate the rest. They will always live in a convenient place and will never be forgotten when we head to the shops.
It will happen. I'm determined to make this work.

I hope this info has been informative and helpful for you too.

the five-tab file

On top of organising all of my existing files, I have taken on board a system for sorting incoming mail. Enter the "five-tab plastic pocket", purchased from kikki.K for $5.95.
I love stationery, so was very excited to get something cool that also served an important purpose!

You can label the tabs on the pockets with whatever you want.
(I also inserted a sheet of textured green paper into the front sleeve to make it pretty.)

My categories are:

to pay
to do
to read
to save
to file


So, as mail comes in, it is immediately sorted into one of those categories, or put straight into the recycling. At the end of each week I will file everything in the "to file" pocket and we're ready to go again the next week!

I really recommend getting one of these if you need a better way of dealing with your snail mail.
When you use it properly, it is wonderful! 

What's not so 'wonderful' is the human in this equation. We have (mostly) managed to avoid random papers around the place, but my old self is trying to ruin the system. I am not sure where to keep this file, so I put it in the bookshelf near our dining table, so it would be out of the way. I then forgot about it for a little while until I got a letter in the mail to tell us our bills hadn't been paid. Whoops!
So I took the file, complete with the unpaid bills, in to my computer desk so I could pay them. The entire five-tab file then went missing for a couple of weeks!

Any suggestions on where we should keep our five-tab file?

the undies in the fridge

Now there's a thought. Putting on a pair of undies straight from the fridge! Brrrrrr

I would have to say that is the weirdest misplaced item I've found in our house to date.

I don't need a lot of help with spreading random junk around the house but, when small children are involved, you can end up with hilarious results. Often they are just things that have gone walkabout. Sometimes they are things I have confiscated - so end up out of reach near wherever I happen to be. This blog entry features just some of the strange things that I have discovered around our house.

Undies in the fridge (still don't know who put them there or why)













Basketball on the kitchen bench (confiscated item)

Play phone in the utensil drawer (who knows, while I'm cooking I may suddenly need to make an emergency call to Thomas the Tank Engine)

The ride-on-train. (You name it, we have found it in the back of this train. Keys, mobile phone, half-eaten food (!), kitchen utensils....)

The ever evasive 'Teddy' could turn up anywhere. Particularly annoying when Teddy goes missing and our dear child will not go to bed without him - I'm pretty sure Teddy gets lost at least once a day. (check the dirty laundry basket. yep, there he is. eewww)

Rock hard stale bread and one corn flake in the mini drawer from the book end. (must of been there for a while... placed inside so delicately)

Bowls from the kitchen turn up being worn as hats. We are often missing containers and mixing bowls. They become hats, 'fruit salad' mixing bowls, shopping baskets, drums, and more!

As an aside... funny story. James (left) holds two large bowls up in front of his chest and says "Look mum! I've got big booms!"
"You've got what!?" I reply
"Big BOOMS!" He repeats.
So, yeah - he had big 'booms', that is, two big loud drums. He usually calls them drums (or, more acurately, 'grums'), just not that time. Haha.


If we've ever lost a baby we look in the toy box. (actually, any box or opening)









Other things:
Egg whisk in my sock drawer, three matchbox cars in my shoe at one time (had to put my foot in before I noticed), play money down my top, my wallet in the cot (took me two days to find it - I didn't think to look there), last-nights left overs in the cupboard with the platters instead of in the fridge, entire car garage in the dirty clothes basket... actually if I keep going we may be here all day.

I mentioned my idea for this blog to a dear friend of mine who recalled finding a rolling pin in her freezer. She was living with two other ladies at the time and they still don't know how it got there.

Would love to hear about the weirdest misplaced item you have found in your house.

the balcony

I'm ready to share another victory in my organisational battle... the balcony!

We love to spend time on the balcony. We eat, we chat, we sit, we play, we paint.
But the setup used to be a bit of a disaster. While it did often become an explosion of toys, the major problem was the outdoor dining setting.

We only bought the table and chairs two years ago, and we bought it for this balcony. We spent so much time focussed on whether the table would fit, that we didn't even think about the chairs. Because the chairs were a 'laid-back' style, they took up so much space. We had to position the table and chairs in a 'diamond' configuration just so they would fit, and even then, it was quite a squeeze to get in and out. If you were unlucky enough to get a seat near the end wall, then you were stuck there til someone else moved out of the way. So it just didn't fit well, but we made do.

Also, when choosing a WHITE setting, we seemed to completely forget about the fact that we live next door to a freight train line! Oh, the soot. So much soot.

What were we thinking!? We weren't.

So, we agreed that we were both getting increasingly frustrated with the big, white, dining set, so, I was given the go ahead to sell that one and find something more appropriate. Boy was I excited!

Here is what we started with:

A mess, basically.

So I set to work researching different dining settings and configurations. We wanted to have at least four seats with a table, but we wanted to maximise play space when it wasn't in use too. So I was doing google searches for "compact outdoor dining" and the like. There were a few possibilities that popped up, but I think the final choice well and truly ticked the "compact" box.

Here's what I came up with:

It is a wicker dining setting with a tempered glass table top ($499 brand new from ebay). I added picture frame dots (approx $5 from Mitre 10) to the table top to keep the glass from sliding. You will see in the photo bottom, right, that all of the chairs slide in together underneath the table when not in use. Look at all the space!! I have also been covering the table with a nice cloth to keep the table top clean between uses. (Thanks for the suggestion, mum!)

Bit of a shame it only came with cream cushions, though. They are now cream, with pink and green chalk, and small dirty foot prints. At least they zip off and are machine washable.

Thankfully, I was able to sell our old setting for $100. (Yay ebay, again!)

I also bought some brick grip hooks ($20 for a pack of two on ebay), as you will see bottom left. These are brilliant. We can hang our candle lanterns on the balcony without having to drill into the wall. Plus we can move them around if we want them somewhere else. These hooks just "grip" the bricks, as the name suggests, and you hang your stuff on them. All this wind lately has put them to the test, but they haven't budged. I thought it would be good to be able to have something a little bit decorative out there since we don't have enough direct sunlight to support any plant life. We couldn't even grow a grass head out there!

It looks so nice on the balcony now with the new setting and the candles lit in the evening. During the day, the boys run around like crazy out there, and they use the table and chairs as a cubby house too. (They find so many uses for these things!) We are getting better at putting away the toys when we are finished with them. I also decided that the tiny magnetic letters and numbers from the white board should be hidden away for a while. They are a pain to clean up, and too many of them were ending up on the balcony below. Oops!

In the end, though, I think my eldest is just pleased that he now has a great spot to "sit and watch the world go by."

nothing really matters... except for these things

I am still chipping away at organising each room of my house and am close to being able to reveal another completed room. (Yay!) While I have been doing this, I have also been pondering ideas about organisation, and how it (or the lack of it!), effects me.

I like to think that I'm a pretty easy going person when it comes to household matters. I don't really mind how things are done, as long as they do eventually happen. But, there are a few exceptions. Some things that I'm, for want of a better word, 'anal' about. My husband even believes that my genetic makeup contains a small percentage of obsessive compulsiveness! Here's what we've got:

1. The dishwasher
I am extremely particular about how things are stacked into the dishwasher. There is a certain place for things. That is where they must be. That is where they fit best. I have been known to restack the dishwasher on numerous occasions if things are not in the right place. I do appreciate it when people 'help' me by offering to put the dirty dishes into the dishwasher. But I will just have to redo the job later. Unless my husband gets to it first and starts it washing before I see it!

2. The blinds
Vertical blinds have a front and a back. It is true, and you can tell. They have unslightly folds and joins which should never be seen. Never. It is the smooth side that should always be seen inside a room when the blinds are closed.

3. The toilet roll!
The free end of the toilet roll should always be coming over the top of the roll, never from underneath. It looks better and is much easier to roll, stop, and break when in this position. If I come to your house and your toilet roll is not on the holder correctly - I will fix it. I really will.

 

4. Books
The books on our bookshelves are always sitting in height order. I will chose which side the tallest books look best then taper the rest down from there. The only exception to this, is children's books that are really long and stick out too far. I can't have them sticking out in the middle of nowhere, so they get placed among the larger, taller books, so their weird length can be absorbed. (See Old MacDonald in the photo as an example.)

5. Power Points
Unless they are being used, they should be in the 'off' position. In stair wells and in other people's houses, if I see an unused powerpoint that is switched on, I have to turn it off. I also maintain that leaving them on must be some kind of safety hazard. As well as them being switched off, we have outlet protectors on all of our low and unused powerpoints.

6. Computer Files
As I mentioned in a previous blog, the computer files must be named and arranged in an orderly manner. In particular, my work files. I have naming and filing systems for these.

7. Pens
While not strictly a 'household' issue, I think this deserves a mention. If I start writing on anything with a pen, I must finish it with the same pen. Not merely the same colour, the exact same pen. The main things that pop into my mind are crosswords and official forms. I do remember an occasion when I was planning on spending a bit more time on a cryptic crossword I had started, but ended up doing something else because I couldn't find the right pen! Seriously, though, there are all kinds of shades of black and blue when it comes to pens. They even have different thicknesses when pressed to the paper. Some just 'write' differently. Not sure why this matters - but it really does. The satisfaction of having a lovely, neat, completed crossword... mmmm yeah.

I am happy to share another pen-related thing. I did give up on my need to arrange my children's pens and crayons in colour order a while ago. I realised quite quickly that if a child sees you packing something away, they want to play with it. Even if they haven't touched it for days. So, they are now shoved back into their packs as quickly as possible just so that they can be put away.

And there you have it - your suspicion that I am a strange person has been confirmed.

I'd be interested to hear about your obsessive ways too! If you are brave enough to share....

the bathroom is complete!

That's right, folks. The "Get Sorty" project in my bathroom is, more or less, complete! While things may have seemed a little quiet on the blog front, I have actually been at work. Chipping away here and there and getting all the more closer to realising my organisational dreams.

The reason I began with the bathroom is because it is a room that contains items which I have absolutely no emotional attachment to. It was very easy to get in there and turf unwanted and unused items. After I threw away (or gave away) a few bags of toiletries and other random items, I planned my solution. It took a little bit of time to research and track what I was after, but I think it was worth the wait.

This is what the bathroom was like before...

One problem I had was that everything was just shoved into the drawers or cupboard wherever there was space. This meant that no one could ever find anything and when you did locate what you were after, you would end up pulling out about five other things with it.

Another thing was the assortment of towels piled onto the towel racks. Not only did it look dreadful,
but nothing ever dried properly either. I don't know about you, but I prefer not to 'dry' myself with a damp towel. (shudder)

Finally, I thought the storage of the bath toys could be improved too.

So, here is my solution...

 

To address the major problem of clutter in the vanity, I invested in some drawer dividers ($4 from Kmart), a shelf insert ($4.99 from Ikea) and large woven bags ($16.99 set from Ikea). These allow us to keep most of our bathroom bits and pieces within different categories. It looks a lot neater and we can actually find things!!

I also spent quite a while looking for the ideal cabinet to fit towels and other toiletry items in. We were fortunate to have a space of approximately 400mm between the toilet and bath to fit something in. I'm sure you'll agree that what I found looks great and fits so much in it. It is originally from Ikea, but I paid $60 for it on ebay. I really love the frosted glass with floral design.

Initially for our towels I thought a freestanding towel rail might be the go, but my husband suggested that he could simply install another double towel rail. Genius! He had installed an extra towel rail two years ago, but unfortunately they no longer make that style in white. So rather than have a chrome towel rail sticking out like a sore thumb, we opted to get the cheapest white rail we could find. A hard task since the current 'in' thing is chrome. ($50 from Bunnings)

I also bought a plastic basket for the bath toys to keep them contained at the end of the bath. ($4 from Kmart) I chose this kind because I assumed that it would be likely to end up in the bath with the boys. And I was right. It ends up in the bath every time! 

One last thing I would still like to do is get my husband to make a small shelf insert for the cabinet. (I'm yet to tell him this - The Ikea ones were about 10mm too deep. Bummer!) This will allow us to fit our medicine bottles in a safer place high up in the cabinet

And there you have it! One room down, five to go...

the refrigerator of doom

We returned home on Monday from our week long holiday to find that there was a bit of a 'smell' coming from the fridge. The 'sorting' of the fridge was meant to have been carried out soon after I wrote my last blog entry but it never happened. So all of the problem items inside the fridge had been there significantly longer than the time we were away, but that extra week seemed to tip them over the edge.

(And, needless to say, I won't be including any photos with this blog!)

I browsed through the upper shelves of the fridge thinking back over the meals of dinner-times past,
"oh yeah, that was once a yummy shepherds pie..." and finding all of the small plastic containers that I had lost. "So THIS is where they all got to!" Some had a few left over veggies, or bits of pasta that I had intended to use later. I also found half a lemon face down on a dish that had become as hard as cement! You should have heard the sound it made when I tapped it with a butter knife.

Embarrassingly, it gets worse...

I took one look inside the veggie drawer at the bottom of the fridge, quickly shut it and walked away.
Oh my goodness!! Most of the veggies were almost completely liquified! I could make out some sad looking capsicums and the remnants of a bag of green beans. There they were, all dissolving away into a putrid juice. Liquid gold, er, mould...

I buy fresh fruit and veg every week, but don't keep a good track of what is there already, so just keep taking from the top of the pile. Dear oh dear. Mistake.

While there is absolutely no excuse for the state things were in, I am going to make one anyway:
More often than not, at the time I am accessing the fridge, I will be grabbing things to feed hungry small people. They love their food and don't take kindly to waiting any longer than they have to. So I may notice a container with food from two weeks ago, make a mental note to remove it, then walk away and promptly forget.

I have decided now that I should put up with an extra couple of minutes of whinging and remove the suspect items straight away. I am sure it is a massive health and safety risk to leave bad food sitting there. At least, on this occasion, the bad things seemed to be restricted to their own containers or bags.

I have also begun dating things when I open them, such as tomato paste, so I can plan to use them up before they start to rot. And less waste is also an extremely good thing!

My husband suggested that a good time to remove things is before they turn to liquid. Noted. And a fair call too, since he and his iron stomach are the ones to clean out that drawer and completely wash it with soapy water. It is so lovely and sparkly now. (A million times thank you!!)

Together we have turned our refrigerator of doom into a refrigerator of DESTINY!