Now on to the really hard core homeless items. My top 3 are Mattresses. (I never did find any place that would take a mattress so I re-purposed the baby crib rails and metal as garden supports and put the mattress on the floor for visiting kids.) See mattress posts here and here. Items that are […]
Living Lightly
Susan Vogt on living more simply but abundantlyBrowsing Posts tagged Household
IT HELPS TO BE CONNECTED. By this I mean that sometimes giving stuff to the usual places (Goodwill, St. Vincent de Paul, Salvation Army, Lupus, Viet Vets – GSVPSALVV for short 😉 ) seems like a bad match. It helps to have personal links to potential “good homes.” For example: Challenge #1 – Carpet Samples. Several decades […]
As I reflect on my Lenten commitment to buy nothing (other than food, shelter, and gas) in order to grow in solidarity with the poor, it has raised my consciousness of what it means to be poor. Yesterday I wrote about my experiences at the Home & Garden Show and converting a film movie to […]
Like most families, we received some nice Christmas gifts. Two weeks later, I also received a call from the Lupus organization that picks up household items to sell. The proceeds go to the Lupus Foundation. I noticed some happy coincidences. Even though I didn’t make a conscious effort to have the gifts coming in equal my outgoing […]
It’s the end of 2014. Over the past year when I noticed things I no longer needed, I’ve put them in a plastic bin that I keep for giveaways. These items don’t really fit into any neat category and didn’t merit a trip to St. Vincent DePaul just for a few miscellaneous items. I was […]
An email came from a friend about contributing household goods to a local refugee resettlement program. Most of the people currently being served are from Nepal. Lita invited our faith community to bring extra household items for the refugees to our next meeting. I thought I wouldn’t have much to contribute since I’ve been limiting […]
It doesn’t happen often, but when it does, we take advantage of it – Community Sponsored Hazardous Waste collection. Once or twice a year my county provides a place to take items like pesticides, paint, medications, old electronics, etc. Jim and I save these items throughout the year and take them to the collection place […]
This is the last week of Lent and I’m moving to our dining room which has exactly 7 drawers. (I won’t finish all the drawers in our house before Easter, but this will have to do for now because we’re going out of town for Easter. It was a fun room to do because I […]
NOTE: This week’s blog is longer than usual. Skip to the end, LESSONS LEARNED, if you just want the bottom line – though this means you may miss my humor too. 🙂 Lent is a penitential season so I have a confession to make. I haven’t been cleaning out A-Drawer-A-Day. In the interest of saving […]
I knew this was going to be a tough week because it involved our upstairs bathroom – especially the closet shelf that held medical supplies. Once a visitor opened the door and said, “Hey, you’ve got a whole pharmacy here!” Now technically this closet isn’t a drawer but it held many things that I knew […]
Sometimes my giveaways have to hunt for a home, so it’s a real blessing when the right home presents itself. That what happened this week when some contra dancing friends announced that they were going on a mission trip to Belize and needed old luggage in which to carry medical supplies. The luggage would be […]
It all started out as a grocery shopping mistake. First mistake was that Jim asked me to do the grocery shopping because he was inundated with work.* Bottom line, it took me quite a bit longer and more grocery mistakes for me to do this task. My biggest mistake was that in a fit of […]
I’m leaping from my bedroom – where I mostly look for clothes to give away – to the garden. (Well, not actually “leaping.” I took the stairs.) With the end of the gardening season I was motivated to clean out the small closet in which I kept garden supplies. During Round 1 I had gotten […]
You’ll seldom find me wearing a sheet but I decided to make a departure from giving away clothes and jump to sheets because I store them close to my clothes closet – and most importantly, they begin with “S.” (I love consistency. :-?) Besides, my linen closet was pretty stuffed with sheets. On occasion, we’ve […]
Perhaps it is wishful thinking but I do believe that we created less waste this second week of Lent than we did the first week. This may be due to us learning more about what we can recycle, the fact that Jim was away for 3 days, or maybe we’re just wasting less. My photo […]
mirror, zen
A few of my pet peeves are: Unnecessary use of bottled water Over packaging Radio interviewees who respond to the host’s “Thank you” with “Thank you” instead of “You’re welcome.” Dragged music at church Singing Happy Birthday to an individual in a large random group of people. (Although this probably sounds petty of me, I […]
I travel a fair amount, have a brother who is a dentist, and tend to hold on to stuff way too long. I have thus collected an assortment of toothbrushes, toothpaste, deodorants, soaps, shampoos, combs, and other miscellaneous things one keeps in the bathroom. When I travel, I’m especially fanatical about packing small and light. […]
I had closets scheduled for this week’s give-aways but I was getting worried since I had already gone through closets last Lent and I’m saving the kid’s closets for next week when I tackle “Other People’s Stuff.” My fears were confirmed as I searched the nine closets in our house, until…I got to the downstairs […]
Over the years a family of six is bound to have some broken bones, stitches, sprained ankles, diarrhea, constipation, poison ivy, acne, and bad hair days. I’m prepared! But perhaps I’m over-prepared. I decided that Jim and I will no longer be allowed to break a leg (except in the theatrical sense). The crutches are […]
