It's a Green House

Welcome back to the new, renamed, revamped blog! We finally bought a house :) After the years of following home design blogs, and having a brief go at writing one for tenants myself, we are actually renovating a 1935 end of terrace 2 bed house. As you can see it is not actually green, but over the last few years I have really gotten into reducing waste and being as eco friendly as possible, so one of my main goals for this house is to make it conducive to this - hence the name change of the blog.  We are in the first month at the moment and we are in the stressful stage of ripping out lots of things, seeing what is underneath, being horrified/pleasantly surprised or somewhere in between, and then deciding what to do. Its all fun and wallpaper stripping round our house this month! Unfortunately not a lot of it was salvageable or there are issues underneath that need sorting so we are having to start again. Before photos coming soon! 

In this post I talked about our recent trip around Europe and there are some restaurant tips for the cities we visited. I also have some general tips on how to have a nice holiday, and not live off of chips: Plan ahead. I researched each city we were visiting and saved web pages as PDF's in my phone (in case we didn't have wifi access) with details of vegan friendly places. Sites like Happy Cow and TripAdvisor list vegetarian and vegan restaurants. Or just a google search will find you plenty of sites.  You can also download areas of google maps to use offline to take with you, and can search for addresses in it as usual so this can come in handy with finding restaurants from the PDF's. If you can't plan ahead that much, i.e. if you don't know where you will be staying, don't wait until you are hungry to try to find somewhere to eat. We tend to keep an eye out while walking around sightseeing in the day for places to go for dinner, look at menus outside ...

I recently started the "Mins Game" or Minimalist Challenge, the idea is that you get rid of one thing on day one, two things on day two and so on increasing by 1 item every day until a month has passed...by the end you will get rid of over 400 items! Week 3 was still quite easy, I keep wondering when I am going to start to struggle! At the time of writing this I'm into week 4 and it's still easy to find all my items every day. I thought once I got into 20+ items a day it would start to get hard, but not even started places like under the bed yet and that will last me at least a few days! I had a free pass until day 18 as we had so many CD's and DVD's to go from the week before, so I used the time to sell some stuff on ebay (our Wii and Wii fit board for £65, nice!) and get rid of some of the things that had gone into the 'holding zone of crap to get rid of' a.k.a the dining table.  Day 18 through 21 were actually all pretty small stuff, more disc...

I went on my first few trips this year since I went vegan, and I didn't end up just eating chips! The first were short breaks to London and Dublin. There was plenty of choice and being English speaking places I could ask for what I needed, and I knew the chain restaurants I could go to if I had to. Then the big one, we drove around Europe for 2 weeks. Hm, that's a lot of different languages, cities, countries and cuisines. Didn't pick an easy one to start with! There is always chips, and I knew I could just go and buy some fruit etc if I really struggled, but it would be nice not to have to. As it turns out the only time I had to just have a plate of chips was in a random service station in the middle of nowhere in Germany so I think I did quite well. Anyone visiting Brugge, Amsterdam, Berlin, Prague, Salzburg, Innsbruck, Switzerland or Luxembourg...here's what I found! Click on restaurant names for links to their websites. We stayed in most places 2 ni...

I recently started the "Mins Game" or Minimalist Challenge, the idea is that you get rid of one thing on day one, two things on day two and so on increasing by 1 item every day until a month has passed...by the end you will get rid of over 400 items! You can read how week 1 went here , week 2 was actually pretty much a breeze! I started to actually delve into drawers and shelves and the clutter to get rid of was plentiful. I have been posting pictures on instagram , if you feel the need to see pictures, but this week I got rid of: What seemed like about 50 glasses cases (I get a new one each time I get new glasses and never use them!) Cleaning products I have bought, used once, did not get on with and for some reason have kept. Pet things that we/they don't use/eat/play with CD's and DVD's galore! I actually had enough CD's and DVD's to take me into week 3, I post dated the days (on day 11 I counted and I had enough to go up to day 18!) and st...

I recently started the "Mins Game" or Minimalist Challenge, the idea is that you get rid of one thing on day one, two things on day two and so on until a month has passed...by the end you will get rid of over 400 items! I started it with the aim that I would get as far I could but probably wouldn't make it for the full 30 days. I am now thinking I'll make it at least past 20 days, maybe even to the end! It's helpful to break it down day by day and it makes it seem like so much less work, this week I've gotten rid of 28 items already and I hardly even noticed doing it! 10 minutes a day after work at most so far, this will get more time consuming as it goes on I imagine but if you have too much stuff (who doesn't) I would recommend giving it a go even only for a week or two. If you follow me on Instagram you can see some pictures of all my rubbish (if you really want to) but here's how it's been going... Week one actually took 2 weeks as after d...

I have been doing Crossfit about a year now, I get a lot of interest in real life about why I started it and what it is. It's often seen as an extreme or hard option, or something that only super fit people do. As with a lot of things though it's not as scary as you think! I always share the free taster sessions on my Facebook page and get comments like 'Oh no I could never do that' or 'I'm not fit enough' or 'that's too hard'. Here's why you should give it a chance though guys: 'I don't even know what half of it is! Let alone know how to do it!' This was me after looking up the first WOD (workout of the day) I went to before I left home (It involved squat cleans and I had never touched a barbell), I googled what I didn't know and was a bit apprehensive when I saw the results. Just ask the coach, they won't just say "right today we are doing this" and leave you to get on with it. If you are unsure or s...