Disclaimer: I have not been paid to recommend any products or stores or items. These are just the tiny ways Hubby and I have been trying to change our home in an effort to live a healthier life and to reduce our impact on the world around us.🌍💖 Do you have any other ideas? Hints? Tips? If so, let me know please in the comments below, hugs x
Hi Honeys,
How are you today? Well, we did it! We've reached the last day of Blogtober for another year and I'm still playing catch up, so today there will be two posts to complete it.😊
Today's (technically yesterday's but it has so many photos and so much content, well it got to be 1am and I just couldn't finish it, so, here we are💖) Well anyway, for this post😊 I thought I'd share ten tiny changes we've made in our home over the past couple of years. Just tiny changes but (hopefully) they all add up.
Some of these tiny tweaks have been made to try to live a healthier life, some have been to try to lower our impact on the tiny planet we all share.🌍💖
As I said honeys, there are a lot of photos in this post so it might be a good idea to grab a cuppa and maybe a cookie (or two🍪) I'll meet you back here after the page break? See you in a few mins...
Welcome back honeys, do you have your cuppa? Me too☕🍪 Put your feet up and get comfy then dear ones and I'll share the ten wee things we've changed.🤗💖
1. Glass replaced our plastic food containers...
A few years ago, I read an article online saying the toxins in plastics can leak into foods, especially when heated in a microwave. This set off panic alarms in my head because both Hubby and I have cancer in our families, we've both lost close family members to that hideous disease, so we try to be as careful as we can.
Every day I make sure Hubby has a proper lunch, not a sandwich but a sit down meal. Not a three course, silver service type of lunch (although he's worth it, bless him💖) but enough to keep the munchies at bay till he gets home again. This means that most days he'll have to use the microwave in the office breakroom to warm his lunch. Hubby had a few lunch containers, those ones with the lockable lids? Of course they all had to go! I then spent the afternoon going through our cabinets. All of the assorted plastic was taken out and sorted, what could be recycled (most of it actually) was.
This left me with amazingly decluttered cabinets but also with the issue of what to use to pack Hubby's lunches! Not just Hubby's lunches though, what about leftovers, what would I use to store things in the freezer? Then, while browsing online for ideas, I discovered the Ikea 365+ range of glassware. Perfect!
In addition to the Ikea glassware, we also bought four sets of preserve jars from Poundland. There are three little jars in each set, giving us a total of twelve, and ours are constantly in use.
Mostly they're to be found in the fridge. Each little jar will have frozen fruit from our freezer placed inside, just enough to fill about a third of the jar. The jar is then topped up with fresh, natural yogurt.
These are then placed into the fridge and make a perfect healthy snack when you feel hungry between meals or can be taken to work by Hubby for a mid morning treat. This helps to avoid trips to the vending machine for chocolate.😊
It takes just a few minutes to make up lots of little jars of healthy yumminess honeys, the frozen fruit slowly melts in the fridge flavouring the yogurt. The little pots will last around 3-4 days, could be longer I suppose, I've no idea because ours don't last any longer than that.😋
The tiny preserve jars are also perfect for the steamed vegetable puree I make for our furbaby Jade. You can read about that here honeys. We even use one of the jars to store cinnamon sticks for Hubbys tea too.
Having all of these lovely glass dishes gave us the meal prepping bug honeys. We discovered that if, on a Sunday, we made a huge batch of lovely, fresh, crunchy salad and packed it into those glass dishes with the airtight lids, it easily lasts through till the following Friday! This is wonderful!! During the summer months I can make sure Hubby has healthy salads available to take to work with his lunches and all it takes is a couple of hours on a Sunday afternoon.💖
2. No more single use plastic...
Of course this distrust towards plastic spread through our home honeys. We collected sturdy, re-usable shopping bags obviously, but then, after a late shift and having popped back in to do my own mini shop, I discovered these on sale...
Clingfilm has forever been the bane of my home-making life. Can anyone actually cut a piece from the roll, and manage to cover the bowl or sandwich they want to wrap, without it all sticking together and becoming a great mess that goes into the bin? If you can control clingfilm, I am in awe of you honeys. It hates me.😊
Reusable, silicone baking mats mean that I no longer buy aluminium foil.🌍💖
I can remember a large fireguard being moved a short distance away from the fire and larger items like towels being draped across it and placed in front of the coal fire to dry. Bedding might be taken to a launderette. It was a world away from the automatic washers and dryers we all take for granted now honeys.
We have two trolleys in our kitchen honeys, they act as meal prepping central because they are home to our glass dishes collection, and those tiny jars we use for yogurt and other treats. There are also lots of items stored in their home under the worktop on one of the trolleys. You can see details here honeys.
What a wonderful find! I have a theory. I think an item is worth having when you not only use it all the time but that you wonder what you ever did without it. This is so true of these little produce bags.
They have so many uses but obviously chief among them is the ability to take them to the store with you and use to pick your produce. They are made to avoid altering the weight of your produce (the checkout operator will place the end with the thread off the scale so only the part of the bag holding the produce is weighed.) I do adore these little bags honeys and of course it avoids the need to use those single use bags supermarkets supply in the produce aisles.
3. Sustainable ways to wrap...
Then I discovered beeswax wraps...
Love them! So long as they are treated gently, and washed very carefully (by hand) they last some time and they can be refreshed using a block of beeswax too. Perfect for wrapping cheese, leftover sandwiches or even covering containers without lids in the fridge.
Speaking of covering containers in the fridge, I recently discovered a set of very stretchy, silicone covers in Home Bargains that are perfect for exactly that! There are six covers in the set, ranging (as you can see in the photo below) from small to large. I'm not sure of their sizes honeys but the largest one easily fits our large glass Pyrex mixing bowl and the smallest fits the preserve jars.
Alongside the stretchy, silicone covers are a little set of three, colourful silicone covers I bought from Ikea. They've introduced larger versions now too. The smallest one I used to use to cover leftover halves of lemon in the fridge when I made my lemon water.
Now though, since I squeeze and freeze the lemons needed for my lemon water (you can see how here honeys, it's saved me money and time too) I no longer do that. They are great to seal glasses/tumblers in the fridge or even the odd leftover onion when you've used only half and don't want to make everything in the fridge smell of onion.🧅
4. Replace regularly used products with longer lasting silicone...
Speaking of silicone...
We've collected around a dozen or so of these reusable, silicone bags. They're in constant use in our freezer. Chicken and other meats are immediately separated into amounts needed for planned meals, or immediately meal prepped, and then placed into the freezer.
These bags are very thick and sturdy and they're hard wearing too so they'll last much longer than the large zip lock type bags I used to use.
On to something else I use every day honeys, straws. I use straws when I drink because I have an involuntary spasm every now and again that makes my throat contract and closes my airway. It's always a struggle to be able to breath again. It's not fun and I've known since I was very young that if nothing else kills me, that will. Hence, I use straws. Don't judge me please.🤗
Reusable, silicone straws are a perfect replacement for the plastic ones polluting our rivers and seas, causing so much harm. As I said honeys, I don't have a choice and have to use a straw so these brightly coloured straws are ideal and far more practical (and long lasting) than the paper ones.🌍💖
5. Replace paper kitchen products...
Microfibre clothes. Is there anything they can't do! Well, yes. I mean, obviously they won't turn into a magic carpet or give you the winning lottery numbers (of course I've never asked one of them, to be fair... 😄)
OK, so they might not be magical but they have done something fabulous in our kitchen. They've replaced all of our paper products! Microfibre clothes are (mostly, there are exceptions) roughly twelve inches square of lovely, soft microfibre material.
As you can see from the above image they're available in lots of different patterns and designs, and in lots of colours too. If you have a spill, reach for a microfibre cloth. Need a napkin? You don't have to use one of your best napkins, why not have a small collection designated as "everyday" napkins? Likewise, why not pop one in with packed lunches?
We have designated microfibre clothes for the kitchen and others used for cleaning in the bathroom and can tell them apart by their colours. Plain blue ones belong in the bathroom and are washed, dried and returned there. I'm a fan honeys, love those little squares.💖
6. Take reusable bamboo cutlery to work and avoid plastic "take away" cutlery
Why use plastic, throwaway cutlery when eating away from home? Bamboo cutlery (either packed with your lunch or kept in your bag or your desk at work?) makes the perfect replacement and it's sustainable too.
Hubby takes a packed lunch with him to work and his bamboo cutlery is the latest "swap" to get away from any chance of having to rely on plastic. They're inexpensive, bamboo is a sustainable product and they can be reused. Hubby has a small cotton cutlery bag that rolls up to keep his in when they're being packed with his lunch.
7. Tea infusers have replaced tea bags...
Tea infusers are very popular in our home right now honeys.😄 Hubby is a huge fan of loose leaf tea rather than tea bags, I've become very fond of herbal teas such as chamomile too. I've read online that the quality of tea in tea bags is not as high as that found in loose leaf tea.
Teabags are, of course, used once before being thrown away whereas infusers, if they're looked after, can last quite some time. They're also made in the most amazing variety of shapes and designs. Hubby prefers a practical, stainless steel one from Ikea but the little flower shaped one, with it's own tiny flowerpot stand charmed the socks off me.😍💖
8. A helping hand on laundry day...
As a child in the early 1970s, all of my friends homes had a pulley, just as my childhood home did. It wasn't unusual back then because lots of homes didn't even have a washing machine and still relied on hand washing over the bath or, if you were lucky, between the two sinks in your kitchen.
One would be a shallow sink and the other much deeper. In between the sinks would usually be a huge "wringer" to feed towels and other items too difficult to "wring" the water out of by hand. Drying your laundry in the summer meant carrying heavy laundry baskets down stairs, out into the communal back courts and pegging it out to dry.
Of course in winter you couldn't do that so, onto the pulley the clothes went and then they were pulled up out of the way to dry.
In early 2015, I spotted a pulley listed on Amazon and couldn't believe my eyes. I quickly ordered one, Hubby fitted it and it's been in constant use since. Over the last few years it's saved us from using our tumble dryer so often. Now, with the soaring price of utility bills, it's even more important to reserve the use of our dryer for large, difficult to dry items like bedding.
Another great way to help cut laundry costs is to use these wool dryer balls...
They are supposed to help to dry laundry faster by separating the items in the dryer and moving them around, allowing the warm air to flow through them. This would then reduce the energy use of the dryer. The wool balls are very soft and light, this is to prevent any damage to the inside of the dryer.
9. Managing food waste in the kitchen...
The most responsible way to manage our food waste in the kitchen is of course to try to create as little waste as possible. We do that by meal planning each weekend for the week ahead. Our meal plans are always adaptable so that if we end up with leftovers we can incorporate those extra veggies or left over broth into something else.
All of the local Councils in the UK have given homes a small comporting bin. Ours is a small brown bin, not too dissimilar from this one....
We do still have the little brown bin (it's being used to store our furbaby Jade's tennis ball collection in it right now💖🐶💖) but we saw this green bin and, since it seemed better quality, we bought that instead.
Any food waste, such as potato peels or egg shells, go into this bin, with its biodegradable liner, and when full it's taken to the huge, brown wheely bin that is emptied every two weeks by the local Council. Truly honeys, the best way to recycle anything, whether its food waste being placed into the compost bin or anything else, is to make it easier to do it than not to. You can see what I mean here. 🤗
10. Meal prep replaced take-away food...
I'm not saying to never eat another take-away or fast food meal ever again honeys, but meal prepping really has changed our lives for the better. I'm fairly certain the last time we had take-out food was over four years ago and neither of us miss it at all. I know it's not just me because, while writing this I asked Hubby and he agreed.💖
Meal prepping and cooking ahead, even for a couple of hours once a week, can mean you have a fridge and/or freezer full of your favourite meals, so the temptation to order fast food will disappear and you'll save money too!
So, there we have it honeys. Our ten tiny changes. Do you do any of these things too? Can you suggest any new tips or tricks to save on utilities or generally make life a little easier while being mindful of the world around us too?
Thank you so much for keeping me company, it means more than I can say.💖 Till next time dear ones, have a wonderful week, hugs always x
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