Play

I am anti plastic in kids toys. All theses brightly colored light up sound toys, seem to kill the imagination of kids.
We are not going to have that stuff. My goal to the toys that come into our house is 90% have to be non plastic 100% non-battery.  Yesterday I found an amazing deal a play kitchen that is wooden and pink and retro fantastic. I was so excited and it was ten dollars.Exciting.

Fabric

I love going to the thrift stores and looking the the fabric. I found theses cool patterns for a dollar.  I'm not sure what I am going to do with them  but they are interesting.

New year New plan

We are always working toward a better life. A big part of  that is reducing the trash that our household makes, and reducing our impact on the world. We where both brought up in frugal reused, recycle types of households. My goal in our house is  to not  use toxic stuff, on our bodies, in our house, or our yard.

We have gotten rid of paper towels replacing them with micro fiber towels,
we don't have paper napkins, we use cloth
we buy mostly in bulk, and make food from scratch
we use vinger and baking soda for most of our house hold cleaning.
We make our own laundry soap.
We buy 98% of out stuff second hand.
We are trying to be more local/homemade
We don't eat stuff that is not real. (HFCS, other chemicals)
We are fazing out store bought lotions, soaps, ect for natural alternatives,
Come spring we will start our compost bin again (it sadly failed in the fall and needs some work so that it is not a doggie all you can eat bar.)
We are planning a good sized garden, planning on joining a CSA.
Thinking about getting some chickens.
we have reusable coffee cups,
homemade not store bought
planning on canning food and making beer
planning on biking more maybe making a no drive day.


when i write out what we do a and plan on doing it makes me realize one how much we do, and to how much we can still do.

Soap

On our quest to make our home less toxic and in the spirit of diy, we have embarked on making shampoo.
The  other day I made a yummy body scrub out of coffee grounds, and  today we ran out of shampoo. After reading Skin Deep and how toxic the stuff that we are putting on our bodies, I vowed to make over our shower. We are going green, and that means that we are making shampoo.  I read a lot about making shampoo.
What we ended up doing, and we will see how well it works it using  Castile soap, made out of olive oil it should be good!  All  the reviews are  pretty good online so here we go.
After trying it for two weeks we gave up on the homemade shampoo it is horrible,  We tried a few different combinations of  Castile soap, olive oil, mixing it with other shampoo nothing worked so we've broken down and have switched to another type of shampoo that is organic and much better than the other stuff that we had been using.
We may try again the Castile soap smells good and makes a nice body wash but as shampoo it just made our hair dry,oily. 

Remodeling ~ Bathroom

Before

After

           

We spent the 1st day of the new year painting our bathroom and the second day hanging bead board. We worth it though, I think.  Our bath room is tiny and a looked a little depressing so we decided that the first project of 2011 would be to give it a face lift.  When we bought the house it had really ugly wall paper that we pulled off an painted the walls white. It was a little boring and so we decided to freshen up the little space with wainscoting, and chair molding. A classic, look that fit the style of  our house. We painted three of the walls a very pale yellow green and the wall with the sink a dark gray the end result is fantastic. With the bead board and little updates it looks much more fitting in our old house.