Today marks the start of a new blog post series: The Weekend Edition. These posts will be similar to the Friday 5 posts I used to do, but a bit more casual. It’s a place for me to share everything from design ideas, home decor inspiration, and DIY, to products I am loving, organization tips, health and wellness and really any other topic as it comes to mind.
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Did you catch yesterday’s post on the status of our staircase and upstairs hallway? It’s really coming along.
Word of the Year: Believe
Have you ever created a word of the year for yourself? I haven’t and honestly it sounded a little weird to me, but the more I thought about it the more I realized this was the perfect year for me to try it out. After a very trying 2018, read more about that here, there was one thing I was really lacking and that was believing. This year I decided believe is going to be my word, my mantra, and my reminder to myself when I get those feelings of doubt or fear. Believe that we will one day have a child, whatever that may look like. Believe that I am on the right track to getting my body healthy and hopefully ready for pregnancy. Believe in this little blog of mine. Believe in my design and styling abilities. Believe in myself most of all.
Using Less Waste
We have been on a slow trend of using less waste in our household. We have almost completely eliminated our use of paper towels and gone to washable microfiber cloths instead. We now have reusable plastic baggies instead of throwing the single use baggies away. We now only use reusable produce bags. We implemented a rule in 2019 of not being able to buy groceries unless we remember our reusable shopping bags (no excuses) or can manage to carry it out without a bag. We just started composting to reduce our food waste and we are dabbling in a few other areas to try to eliminate more waste that comes out of our house. I am thinking of writing a few more detailed posts on this topic because it’s something that is very important to me, given this one world we have, and these small things we have done are so easy to do and can really make a difference. Ashley from The Gold Hive has a few great blog posts on this topic and she has really been inspiring me to make more changes.
Becoming a More Mindful Consumer
It has been brought to my attention, ahem by my lack of following a budget well, that I spend a lot of money on extra things (for my standards at least). I’m mostly talking about clothes, shoes, accessories, and home decor. It’s usually hard for me to pass up a good “deal”. Those good “deals” add up, both monetarily and in the accumulation of belongings in our house. I did a big clean out of our closets, drawers, and storage spaces over the holidays and donated all of the items we felt we did not need anymore. Everything is feeling fresh and freeing without all of the extra stuffing weighing me down. As I was going through things while cleaning out and organizing I realized I get overwhelmed by having too many belongings. I’ve known this for a while, but it really came to light over the holidays.
Everything you bring into your house takes a bit of your energy – your energy to find a place for it in your house, to keep it clean or clean around it, and to remember to use it or look at it, depending in the item. This is not an earth shattering revelation, but I am aiming to be more focused and picky about every item that we bring into our house. From making sure I really love a home decor item and could envision myself using it in more than one spot around the house, to focusing on supporting local and/or sustainable businesses through what I choose to purchase. Not to say I won’t or don’t want to shop big box stores anymore, because I will, but I don’t want to just buy something because I think it might work and it’s there and easy to buy. Mainly, I want to focus on buying less, and using what I already have more. I’m not too sure where this is going or exactly what I intend to do, but it is something that has been on the forefront of my mind, especially as we have started planning our projects for the year. Joanna of Jojotastic did a no shopping challenge last year and it has me wanting to implement something similar for myself.
That’s enough rambling for today. Happy weekend!
