maryhawkins's Profile

Is this store still around? They've given up their webpage and it's all spam -- it did a pop-under for Publisher's Clearing House when I visited.

The best way to green your painting project is just to wash everything carefully and reuse it all. Even the cheap dropcloths are worth reusing until you have a reason to discard them. Let the paint dry and then fold em up gently, letting all the air out. When I was in school, we reused rollers, brushes and paint trays for years just by making sure that someone gave them a good cleaning. It takes a lot to wash a roller, but just keep turning it under running water and scrub it with soap until the water runs clean. For brushes, use soap or a little shampoo. You'll know that they're clean if the water runs clean, but you can also look in between the bristles and see that there's no paint. You can always cover a paint tray with a plastic bag if you don't feel like scrubbing. A thicker one will be more leakproof, but any of them will do.

I've been watching a show called "outrageous wasters" where they intervene in a family's life and try to get them to recycle and use their cars less. The thing is, it's a show out of Britain, so sometimes these families have five drivers and three cars or a minifridge for the whole family instead of a massive SubZero thing. They find people who have five times the "average household's" energy use or trash, but they seem so much more together and less wasteful overall. It's made me feel really weird about living the US, even though I don't have a car, recycle faithfully and live in an apartment building.

Lately I've had to add a new rule to our house: if I can feel it when I breathe, I don't want it in my house. I don't know what they're off-gassing, but I bought a vinyl bag as an organizer a couple of months ago and I could still smell it off-gassing a week later. I don't know what I'm going to do when our shower curtains get sad and nasty, but I avoid vinyl now.

I like this! I once scanned and framed print outs of the woodcarvings in a favorite vintage book for a friend's house, but this is much cooler.

Off-gassing: I imagine it would still do a little, but I feel like most of my cheap plastic objects stink and off-gas for the first few days and then quiet down.

I like the way stone [and fake stone] countertops feel a little bit colder than the rest of the room. It'd probably be fine in a bathroom, but I'd want something else in a kitchen.

I've been giving handmade gifts for the last few years. I took up knitting again after I finished grad school and made my family warm, simple gifts. I felt like a scrooge at first when I insisted that I really didn't need anything and wouldn't be bringing home a box of junk, but after a few years they finally got it. Everyone in my family has everything they need and it's no use "surprising" the others when we all have pretty specific taste.

It started just with me, but over the last few years we've all changed how we shop for Christmas. My mom and aunt bought each other matching goats on heifer.org this year, which really tickled me! Goats! I love it...

P2 -- My house is lit only by florescents now. If you buy ones at the right color temperature [you know... not orange] they're just fine and don't flicker.

Waterreflecting -- Why do you need gift wrapping, anyway? Can you find better ways to pack things up, or buy gifts that just need a little bow on top? You could also ask your friends neighbors if they have any old kraft paper around. If you want fabric en masse, try buying old sheets or blankets at the thrift store.

I went around my house and measured everything with a Kill-a-Watt and found that even the simplest things really wasted a lot of energy. My TV used as much power to sit on standby for a day as it did when I actually turned it on for an hour. I started out unplugging everything, but I trailed off after a while. Now, I use a couple of those old plug-in timers around the house. I have them set so that everything in the house that uses electricity is only on standby when I'm actually at home. They use relatively little electricity, and they save me from having to go around the house switching things off. I can override them when I want to and I'm pretty sure they've paid for themselves by now.

When I think about it though, I wish people would stop worrying about wall warts and concentrate on getting people to shut off the things we used to shut off, like desktop computers and monitors. Unless you have something exotic going on, shut your computer off when you're not using it! We don't even think of that as as bad habit, but it's really wasteful. I used to leave music playing all day -- I'd just press the mute key on the way out the door. My computer never went to sleep, since it thought it was "working" all day. "Screen savers" are also incredibly wasteful.