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Simple swaps to reduce waste

I have covered the renovation side of this blog mostly up to now, but lets get into the "green" part of ItsAGreenHouse for a little while! Back at the start of 2017 my new years resolution was to cut out 80% of the single use plastic in our household. I didn't expect we could cut it all out, but had seen so many things going around social media about plastic in the oceans and how that plastic bottle of water will still be around in hundreds of years time so I felt I had to do something and 80% over a year seemed doable. I found it actually really easy to cut out the 80%, and am now at the point where (if we were not renovating a house as its unfortunately a messy process) we could only put our landfill bin out once a month with household waste or maybe even longer as we generally put one small bag in there once a week or so. We put out 2 or 3 recycling boxes every fortnight and the food bin as and when. Now we have the allotment we compost most food waste. If you are t...
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How to impress on a video interview

If you are looking for a new job chances are you will do the interview remotely over video call, so what do you need to look out for and how can you use this to your advantage? I recently had two video interviews and got the job, from my experience and the research I did beforehand here are my top tips. Firstly in most ways treat it as a regular interview, wear a suit, be on time, expect the same questions and prepare in the same ways you usually would. It felt odd but I got dressed into a suit and put make up on and everything, just to sit in the spare room.  I did keep my slippers on though. Here's the reality photo, the spare room has not been touched in the house renovation so whilst I managed to stage it to look pretty ok (of what they could see on the video!) it was basically me in a suit surrounded by chaos! Make sure that your technical set up is sound. Test the WiFi connection and video work well. If you have pets keep them out of the room and make sure everyon...

Will design and home trends change after Covid?

After lockdown, changes in our lifestyles and how we use our homes will home buying and design trends change at all? There are a few interesting articles around and YoungHouseLove also talked about it recently on their podcast.  https://www.placenorthwest.co.uk/news/designers-map-future-of-interiors-post-lockdown/ https://www.apartmenttherapy.com/how-coronavirus-will-change-homes-36746564 A lot of these are USA based, but lots applies in the UK too. Some of the interesting points I thought were about open plan living becoming less popular and people now wanting more defined spaces. I have never seen the appeal of open plan and would much rather have the space divided into more traditional rooms so this is something that I totally agree with. When we bought our house and knocked down some walls my dad commented that he would have actually taken down the wall between the kitchen and living room and made an L shape open plan kitchen/dining/living room. I just always would prefer to ha...

Adding open shelving in our kitchen

We recently got round to adding our open shelves in the kitchen (#lockdownlife) and it's made such a difference! If you are considering them it's definitely worth giving them a try. Here's what they look like, yes there is a half dead fern in the sink this has also turned into something of a plant rehab centre. When designing the kitchen we originally planned to put just one upper cabinet to the left of the window but when we saw it mocked up it just looked a bit odd out there on its own with all the other upper cabinets on the other side of the room. We also realised that we already have plenty of cabinet space plus the whole utility room so we decided that we didn't really need the cabinet space enough to justify not really liking the look of it. It's totally a personal preference, I know some people will think this looks too open and cluttered and would prefer it all cabinets but in person it's a nice light corner of an otherwise clean a...

Fitting out our built in wardrobe

Today we are covering the project I'm personally most proud of, I did this 100% myself and it turned out much better than expected! I bought the bars but the shelves were the bulk of the work which I  used only scrap wood and paint we already had for, so if you also have scrap wood hanging around (the renovations just seem to produce endless wood off cuts here) and are looking for things to do this could be a good lockdown project. Here's the before and after to get us started, the before photo was the day we moved in and before any work started.  Obviously the rest of the bedroom has had a lot of work done as you can see from those pictures, which is covered here , but this post is just about the functionality and fittings in the wardrobe.  Having a built in wardrobe in the UK isn't necessarily a given, so we are lucky to have a one in the master bedroom. However it wasn't really laid out to use it to its full potential so I did some work to get mo...