Living Lagom – a mid-way update

It’s been three months since we began our Live Lagom project back in January, so I thought I’d pop in with a little update on how we are getting on. You can read the original post HERE, but for a quick recap these were the areas we were focusing on:

– Be more energy efficient – replace all light bulbs with energy-efficient ones & insulate windows to keep warmth in
– Reduce waste – reusing paper/card/boxes for crafts, composting food waste, freezing leftovers rather than wasting
– Recycle more – make a ‘recycling’ station in the utility to sort waste, and put a bin upstairs that is for paper waste {currently the girls just chuck all their rubbish in the bins in their rooms regardless of what it is}
– Meal Plan – I’ve gotten back into this in the last six months, and it means I buy less AND waste less
– Insulate – making sure all windows have thick curtains to keep in the warmth.

Energy Efficient/Insulation

We have replaced all the ceiling lights with new, energy-efficient bulbs. I’ve certainly noticed a difference since we installed them. We have a smart meter for our gas/electric so it’s easy to see how much we are spending each day. We’re home most of the day, as we homeschool AND I work from home, so especially through the winter the lights are on most of the day.. savings may be small – a few pounds a month, but that’s money that’s better in my pocket than the electric company’s right?!

Insulation – we put up new curtains in the living room, complete with thick thermal liners. Even though we had double glazing, I noticed a BIG difference in how warm the room felt. No more draughts and the room holds its heat in the evenings even after the heating has switched off. We also have put one on the back door in our utility room. THe room has no heating and has an old wooden, draughty door so is always freezing – and if the kids forget to shut the kitchen door it means the rest of the house gets cold too. the curtain has really helped to keep the warm in and the cold out!

Reduce Waste
This was a big one for me. We seemed to be making a crazy amount of week. We have two wheely bins that are emptied fortnightly and they would always be overflowing by the time it was bin week. I’ve made a conscious effort to cut down on how much waste we make. I have a more detailed post on this coming, but basically I’ve been more cautious about what I buy {loose veg over packaged veg for example}, made sure we recycled as much as poss and also composted all food waste. I’m pleased to say that while the bins may be full at the end of the fortnight, they haven’t been overflowing – so we’re certainly moving in the right direction.

Recycle more
We’ve always tried to recycle, though at our last house is was hard as we were classed as commercial not residential which meant the council didn’t provide us with recycling facilities. This meant we’d gotten out of the habit of recycling. Thankfully at our new house, our recycling gets collected weekly – paper, card, tins, glass and plastic.

We installed some new shelves in the utility room to allow us to store and organised the recycling. This has made a huge difference. More than I expected actually. We have three baskets – the top one I use for boxes, the middle for newspaper and loo rolls and the bottom for any other paper/cardboard waste. Sorting it means that the girls can find things to use for crafts etc – after all reusing is even better than recycling. They love junk modelling so have a basket full of boxes makes it easy for them to find, loo rolls come in handy for crafts {such as these dolls}, and newspapers come in handy for protecting the table as well as getting used when we clean out the guinea pig.

We picked up a couple of wooden step stools at IKEA so the kids can reach the baskets, and made sure they knew what goes where. Baya is great at asking where to put something if she’s not sure and loves having a ready supply of boxes to create with!

We also installed a paper bin upstairs. I’d noticed that the kiddos bedroom bins were usually full of paper from drawing/writing that they were too lazy to bring downstairs to pop in the recycling!! So we now have a bin in the bathroom for paper waste and loo rolls. This has been a big success and has helped reduce waste upstairs as well as making sure we are recycling more of our paper waste. Vega hasn’t quite gotten the idea though… he can often be found pulling loo roll straight off into the recycling bin!!!

Meal Planning
Again, I have a full post dedicated to this in the works. I’ve meal planned for years, but fell out of the habit after Vega was born. Meal planning is great – it saves that 4 o’clock panic of “argh! what shall we have for dinner?!” every single night!! But it also means that I waste less food {and spend less money}. Planning out what we are going to eat each week means that I only buy in what we need. It also stops us eating the same things over and over as I can’t think of what else to cook! I meal plan weekly, mapping out seven meals for the coming week, make a shopping list based on that and order my groceries online.

I’ve also started making better use of left-overs. We invested in some glass IKEA food storage to store our dinner leftovers in. These have proved to be great as I can actually see what is in them when they are stacked in the fridge. I used to pop it in soup bowls, or plastic pots but I’d forget what was there as I couldn’t see in at a glance, so it would get wasted anyway. The other great thing about the glass storage is that it can go straight from the fridge into the over – saving on washing up. We usually use leftovers up as part of our lunch the next day.

All of these little changes add up. I feel like we’re making great progress in living a little more sustainably – we’re all a little more conscious of what we’re doing, what we’re using and what we’re wasting. I’ll be back with a couple of posts on meal planning and reducing waste, as well as a final check in at the end of the six months of our Live Lagom Project later in the year.