As part of our efforts to live simply and more naturally, we’ve improved our diet, eliminated household chemicals, and now have a new all natural mattress. What’s wrong with a normal spring mattress? Formaldehyde and boric acid are ingredients in the flame retardant coatings, the synthetic material doesn’t breathe, and the springs create pressure points. These [...]
On Saturday, we–along with 3,000 other area residents–took our electronic waste to the Kansas Coliseum to be recycled. Ryan loaded his car with 5 desktop computers, 2 laptops, 3 monitors, 3 printers, 1 scanner, 2 sets of computer speakers, 2 sets of stereo speakers, 2 keyboards, and 1 joystick. Once we got to the pavilion [...]
We’re probably one of the last ones in the world to join the CraigsList phenomenon, but we have an upright freezer that my mom gave us when we moved in our new house in 2005. We only used it for a couple months, then decided that we really didn’t need that much frozen stuff! So, [...]
We just purchased a reel lawn mower! It is easy to push, has a really cool swish sound when it spins, it does a fair job of cutting the grass (as long as the grass isn’t too high), and the best part is that it uses no gas or oil.
The weather was perfect today for a hearty Irish stew, or colcannon with roast. But noooo, our evening took a different turn.The sump pump broke.And splashed water everywhere. The pump itself is o.k., but the connection between the submerged pipes came undone (and it was so corroded and gross that it couldn’t even be put [...]
Here is what society says you MUST have in order to have a clean house:We gathered all the bottles, jars and boxes of cleaners from around our house. We counted 31 different cleaners, all for different purposes. There’s the disinfecting wipes for the kitchen, disinfecting wipes for the bathroom, fabric deodorizer, air deodorizer, and on [...]
Ryan and I volunteered for Habitat for Humanity today! Three others from our congregation joined us, as well as a group from Cessna (including a guy that I went to school with!). We met and worked with the family for whom we were building the house; a mom with two young boys and a girl [...]