Reno round-up

Today

Two years on, from the bathroom renovation - was it worth the time, effort and money, spent? Which wasn't a lot of money, but still. Do you wonder, if I fell out of love with that green feature wall yet? Or did finding the right plant, that survived, seem more like a burden, than it was worth? Did I really achieve the sense of the outdoors, coming inside?  Or should I have just left the whole thing alone?

Finished

I didn't mean to wait so long, before writing this post. It's the finished project I spoke about painting, recently. With Easter holidays, traveling for relatives' birthday's, starting a week long art challenge via Instagram, and work in general, this is the soonest, I could commit to blogging.

So, what did I end up making....

Click to enlarge

 

It's a bench seat, with built-in shoe storage. I told you it was going to be simple. It's a necessary piece of furniture nonetheless, as I was having a shoe storage problem (read: explosion!) near the front door.

Real life

Even with a shoe cull, last year, the shoes were beginning to pile up everywhere. Especially since our youngest, needed more shoes to wear, as well. There's actually more shoe mess, not shown in the above picture, but I'm dealing with the shoe storage problem, one area at a time.

Problem solved

Specifically, there was a lack of space for boots! They were stored under a hallway table, adjacent to this area. With boots being so tall too, I could never find a shoe rack I could purchase, that would allow me to store shoes above them. Hence, why I decided to make my own bench seat, shoe rack.

Practical and functional

This furniture, solved several more problems, than shoe storage though. My husband was using a nearby coffee table, to pull his work shoes on. A table, our son always had covered with lego! So it was a matter of moving lego, to find a suitable place to sit down. Not any more though.

It also dealt with the school bag problem, emerging after our son started school this year. Our eldest, packs her own bag, so it lives in her room. We still had to pack his bag though, so it tended to live on the couch, nearest the kitchen. This bench seat, however, is in a better position, and it frees up the couch again!

There are several more, woodworking projects I have to design, that deal specifically with niche, storage areas. They're such simple projects too, but high in real estate value. Meaning, I get more storage per the same locale. All in good time though.

A Mother's Day surprise

I didn't have a cake on Mother's day, because who needs the calories right? Neither did I get any presents just for being a mum - I actually think being a mum is the present and I get to experience that a lot. But there was something 'afoot' on that particular day, and mainly on top of our roof.  I mentioned recently, David and I had some large financial decisions to make over Easter. On Mother's Day, we saw the realisation of those decisions...

Click to enlarge

It's a 5 kilowatt system, consisting of 20 solar panels. We just had enough room on our roof, with our existing solar hot water system (centre). The installers even had to move the tv antenna, so they could fit them all on the northern side.

Why such a big unit? We run a septic system 24/7 and a water pump for the house too. Plus we don't have a wood burner at the moment, so the house is heated via electricity during winter. Our bills during that time can be in excess of $800 per quarter.

Our anaerobic septic system

Of all the things we weighed to use our money for, solar was the only one which would reduce our expenditures consistently. We originally saved the money to buy a wood heater, but it would only reduce our expenditures during winter. We still intend to get a wood heater once we save the money again, but its a big outlay for such a small window of return.

The fact I'm talking about money when speaking about solar is I don't believe we deserve any credit for being environmentally minded. A grid connected solar system, depends entirely on the electricity network to operate. It does provide free energy from the sun, but this particular system relies entirely on fossil fuels to operate. In terms of sustainability, you really need a "stand-alone" solar system, which means the solar panels are connected to a battery bank, instead of the electricity grid.

Pineapple and sweet potato

Our main environmental challenge is the green we can produce in the landscape. It takes a lot longer to make a return in the garden, than one afternoon with tradespeople on the roof. People who mind their gardens or find ways to eat locally, contribute a greater effort to being environmentally friendly because its a daily commitment and generally uses more elbow grease than fossil fuels.

I've written about solar before, and I wouldn't say my views have changed a great deal. We only purchased panels recently, because the Queensland government decided to remove the generous subsidy they were giving households, putting solar energy back into the grid. That's why I made the appointment to speak to a solar company recently - I wanted to hear what solar would look like without the government subsidy.

Once I saw households would be paid "market value" for the excess energy they produced by their electricity supplier, I felt it was a more realistic system of exchange. I've written about what government subsidies can do to a household budget and the price of goods here and here. I intend to write a third and final post, in my series about Individualism. It was always going to be about solar, because that has been the latest government incentive to get households to change the way they do business.

Our hands aren't completely clean however, as we did receive some subsidy for installing the system, but I will discuss the details of that in my final post about Individualism.

In the meantime, the sun has decided to go into hiding. While I know our panels aren't producing as much power because of it, the garden really needs these gentle days of reprieve from the sun. It triggers so much growth and change that I cannot begrudge it's necessity.

House in order

It's been a tumultuous month since our second baby arrived, but I finally feel like I can start getting our house in order. I've accepted my house is going to have a new sense of "clean"...as in, it may never be spotless again! Perhaps I can save that shining perfection for after the children leave home?

 That's where it got to!

This past month has been about letting go of my expectations and running with what's directly in front of me. About embracing this new sense of disorder, with a beautiful sense of accomplishment.

It's a lot easier accepting baby's cry, feed and do other baby stuff when they need to, instead of beating myself against an expectation that things should be "just" so, or remember when things used to be like...

Can we really cut 'n paste fragments of time, to keep our reality in check?

 My watch but who's counting?

Life rarely stays the same though, and I'm swept into this new sense of direction. I'm embracing and smiling as if it were exactly how it was meant to be. Dis-ordered chaos. Yep! That's my house alright, and I'm completely okay with that. I can still make it a beautiful way to live, by choosing not to argue with reality.  I put my attitude on and feel great immediately.

 Ready to bake another day

The dirty dishes and laundry, do eventually get done. My food covered floors, do eventually get swept. At the moment, I've been sorting through stuff I no longer need and re-purposing items I've always intended for other uses.

I'm even starting to think "plants" again. Several sad culprits are in desperate need of re-potting, if I'm to save them at all - and it's not too late to take hardwood cuttings from some of my deciduous trees and roses.

Little things, really, but it all adds up. I'm happy to say, I've got plenty to keep me busy without being obsessed with too much detail. Anything which is achievable and productive, keeps me smiling - especially if it allows me to come and go as our new baby demands. Life is pretty good, even if I don't get all the sleep I want and get covered in baby vomit.

Isn't it all the little things which helps keep life interesting?

A visit to my sink

So I mentioned in an earlier post how we've been working on steps to free ourselves of stress and working in more positive ways. What a better place to start this example, than visiting my kitchen sink.

The time these photos were taken, was after 2pm yesterday. Should I feel embarrassed? There are various states of cleanliness happening here though. But I guess together it still looks a right mess.

Above, is the business end. This is where all the dirty dishes get stacked. I tend to always have dishes here, even once I've done a load of dishes. If my sink water has gotten too dirty, I hold some back for the next load of dishes.

This is the partially clean end.  I've already put away the clean dishes, but some clean cutlery and large cookware still remains. The cutlery is easy enough to put away, but the larger cookware requires some heavy lifting into a low cupboard - so I haven't raced to complete this task yet.

And finally, this is the very opposite of the business end. Everything here is clean too, I just haven't figured what I'm going to do with them yet. I still don't have a permanent home for the steel thermos, I have some jars I have to decide if I'm keeping or recycling, and there are some plastics I'm rethinking the purpose for also, so they don't have a permanent home either.

I always have my kitchen sink used for something related to dishes. I very rarely have a completely bare sink. This has only been a recent development in the past few months. It happened to coincide with my dishwasher springing a leak. I've successfully replaced other parts on the dishwasher myself, but this time the leak is inaccessible. Or at least it is by someone who doesn't know how to fully take apart a dishwasher yet.

So I've had to contemplate - what is the value of a dishwasher to me? I used to love it because I could put a full load of dishes on AND do a load of hand dishes, to get me a mostly clutter-free sink within 30 minutes. I could also keep dirty dishes off the sink by stacking the dishwasher as we used stuff throughout the day.

When it came to cleanliness though, I sometimes had to redo dishes which weren't washed properly in the machine. At the time our dishwasher sprung a leak, we had some other expenses arrive and fixing the dishwasher just didn't seem like a major priority. So I've been living with my staggered levels of cleanliness on my sink ever since.

An arrangement like this would have bothered me before, as I placed a lot of emphasis on organisation. I wanted to be away from the kitchen sink as quickly as possible. Yet as I've let the dishwasher go in importance, I've realised I'm actually capable of organising mess without stressing. It just means I don't always have a perfectly clear sink in the shortest amount of time possible.

 Credit

Isn't that the emphasis most home makers aspire to: always having a clean home? I wonder how realistic that was for home makers before machines came along however? I wonder how many kitchens remained spotless?

There are advantages to having machines to help with daily tasks - just which ones are the ones we should fund for our lifetimes? I like having a washing machine for cleaning clothes, but do I really need to stress over repairing a dishwasher that never really did the job as good as me anyway?

Sometimes it's worth dropping the stress levels and picking up the task at hand, with a positive look at the advantages. I've realised it's not about the money or the convenience any more - it was just taking the time to deal with what was really stressing me. I expected to have a clean sink in the shortest amount of time possible.

How realistic is that, with all the demands placed upon modern families today?

Do you have expectations associated to your work which stresses you too much?

Mountains of...

The mountains I am talking about are made of paper! Don't you hate those growing mounds of paperwork, which seem to multiply when your back is turned? They grow and expand and when they can't get any taller, they move to another part of the house! This is the mound I was tackling recently...

Using the sofa for sorting through

There's school related papers which I can clear now the school year has ended. Also some superannuation paperwork Dave and I need to go through, roll over, and what have you. Lots of miscellaneous pieces which seemed important to keep at the time too, but when it's been sitting in the same pile for years (how embarrassing) you know they probably won't have any value in the future. If they're only fit for a pile and not to be acted upon, then they must not be that important.

But I'm not the only person guilty of such wayward paperwork habits however - Dave and our daughter are forever bringing home piles of their own. Sarah loves to draw, so there are many experimentation's lining the table and even the floor! Dave, well, he must be the largest paperwork magnet there is. It all ends up living on the food table (even on the chairs we don't use) and makes for a very cluttered home base.

Using the table for storage - hoping to tackle this habit

With the wet weather content on keeping us indoors, I figured it was time to really take a different attitude to how I file my paperwork. What did I really need to store and what was just clutter? I do have a four-drawer filing cabinet to keep all our important stuff in, but I must admit, it's starting to look like a woman about to birth her baby: so very ready to drop a bundle. The second last drawer from the bottom, has files so thick, I have to be particularly persistent in rolling it closed. The bunched up files are scraping the top of the unit and won't let it close easily.

The filing cabinet can wait for now however, as I spent most of the day sorting through random piles of paperwork instead. I was amazed at how much I really DIDN'T need. I was also amazed how all our take-away menus had so many different locations around the house. We don't eat out much (maybe 4 times a year) and generally only because we ran out of time to cook. We have special take away joints that make great tasting food - a real pizzeria for example, not a franchise. So I collected all the different menus and put them in one place. I also put all our superannuation paperwork in one place so Dave and I can tackle it.

Organised!

I also went through the various surfaces in my office and gave them a good sorting as well. Above is after I cleared away a whole stack of stuff. The pile of letters is meant for the compost bin. Which brings me to my Christmas present this year! It's sitting under the Christmas tree as I type. With all this paperwork to get through, can you guess what it is? Okay, I'll tell you...

A ... P A P E R ... S H R E D D E R ! ! !

I've always wanted an electronic shredder, because I've manually cut (or tore) paperwork destined for the compost. Which is fine when you only have a few pieces to dispose of, but when you're about to embark on tackling years of paperwork hoarding, it would require more shredding than my poor hands (and scissors) could manage. I could've bought the big whopper shredder, but when I looked at the mechanised head compared to the smaller model I realised they had very similar designs. One let you shred 5 pieces of paper at a time, the other let you shred 8.

For the extra $20-30 I would have spent on the whopper shredder, I would've been able to shred 2 extra pieces and store it in a bigger bucket underneath. These were not important features to me, because while I can store paperwork for years, when it comes to disposing it in the compost, that gets done twice a week! The smaller bucket on the smaller shredder would serve me just fine.

Not all our paperwork finds it's way to landfill though. I suppose it does eventually, but we have a scrap-paper pile to write on the blank side (or in our daughter's case) she likes to draw on them so we aren't buying fresh paper all the time. I write my shopping lists on the scrap paper too. In the picture above, you'll notice a little plastic note caddy that I cut scrap paper to fill. I use a cutting board, ruler, pencil and a sharp blade. They make great little notes to keep beside the telephone to jot down messages.

While paperwork can be quite a chore to keep on top of, I know I am capable of designing a better system. My old nemesis (time) is the only thing standing in my way, LOL. I'll get there eventually, especially if the rainy weather hangs around some more. ;)

What's your worst paperwork habit and what's your best tip at organising it?

Best solar around

We had a visit from a friendly solar salesperson yesterday. It was a big day for us, as we had avoided taking steps towards investigating solar for so long. I had read many websites and the official Consumer Guide to Solar PV from the Clean Energy Council (CEC) but a lot of the information felt like gobbledygook until we spoke to a real person face to face.

It was an enlightening discussion in many ways. I finally understood what STC's (Small Technology Credits) were and why they were so important for reducing the cost of installing solar. I also discovered how grid-connected solar is meant to reduce your electricity bills. I was glad to have the information explained with diagrams so I could ask questions. All the information I read previously started to make sense.

Yarrow

With the price they were offering (a saving of about $1200 AUD for a cash sale) anyone would think it a perfect opportunity to jump at. I must say, we are dearly tempted and still undecided. But there are still two areas I have not reconciled yet. Firstly, is value - what exactly are we buying and how do we reduce our electricity bills. Lastly, does it really meet the need intended?

Let's start with value: it's simply the best offer around. But in that offer comes two possible inverters, made by two different companies (one Asian and one Australian). I've done my research and the Asian made inverter has a reputation for breaking down. The Australian inverter does not. I discovered later (after more research) the man I was talking to was only a sales person, not the accredited solar installer that would have to design the placing of the panels on our roof, and what pieces of equipment were required. He informed me, they may need extra things that didn't end up being quoted in the price.

So what I got was a piece of paper stating what equipment would be installed, labor included, but still had no idea of the final price or what equipment would ultimately be needed. There's a vast difference between quoted offers and and paying for an operational solar system. Once you've signed that piece of paper and put down your deposit, that's it - you're committed. I would go with them if only they'd been more precise with details, and sent an accredited professional to tell me exactly how my system was going to fit on the roof. He didn't even get up on the roof.

In all fairness to solar installers though, a lot of different factors determine whether you get the value from your system or not. You could have the best equipment, skilled installers, a roof plastered with as many panels as could fit - and if your outside temperature is constantly above 30 degrees Celsius, with little wind to cool the units down, those panels won't work effectively as in ideal conditions. Same amount of money invested, but less efficiency produced.

Flander's Poppy

A lot of people shrug it off and assume that's just the price of renewable energy. I guess it is too. However it's also a bit of a design flaw. Especially in the advertising of what could "possibly" be saved on electricity bills. Apparently, the best way to reduce your electricity bill is NOT to use your household electricity during the day. Because that's when the panels will be at maximum production and can feed back to the electricity grid.

I've read a little about power traveling along cables (whether it's generated from solar or fossil fuels) losing a certain percentage to entropy. So more power has to be generated to replace the loss. It's not a huge amount compared to what power makes it through, but entropy does add up. I would think, efficient use of resources would encourage maximum electricity being used, closest to the source generating them. It's not like grid connected solar is the same as stand alone solar - where you may need to charge your batteries during the day so you have electricity at night. We have an electricity grid to plug into any time.

Less waste to entropy, would mean less demand to generate more electricity, because you're not losing entropy when the sun is feeding power directly to your house. But I gather there isn't a lot of money to be made from efficiency. The more I investigate grid connected solar, the more I realise it's about complementing fossil fuels and our existing economy - not standing apart at all. It seems consumers go to the expense of buying solar panels, taking all the financial risks that involves - only for the purpose of sending power back to the grid so we can buy it back.

My brain is still trying to rationalise that one aspect alone, LOL.

Which brings me to my second irreconcilable issue: the ideology behind grid connected solar. Does it really meet the need? We're told the need is two-fold, to reduce our dependency on fossil fuels and to save the planet. In it's current form however, renewable energy seems very dubious. The same wasteful fossil fuel system designed for profit, has been given a new logo called Green Energy, thanks to renewable energy input. Some might suppose, what then is a better system?

I will never claim to be a genius or a scholar, but as a gardener, I've observed the best solar around! Have you noticed all the pictures of flowers in this post? They've been directly powered by the sun too.

Day Lilly

Above is a Day Lilly. A very beautiful flower - but only opens for one day and then dies. The power of the sun makes it bloom, but it also kills it. Maybe there's a lesson to be had in that too? Everything lives and dies under the sun for a purpose. We may have more opportunities than a Day Lilly, but I wonder how many of us appreciate the wonders that come down from the sky, has more value than a dollar sign?

I've been observing my Day Lillies opening and closing for the past week, each one unique and beautiful. No-one paid me for that privilege either. Maybe I'm onto something? ;)


PS: I know there will be some people reading who have grid connected solar. Bear in mind, this post is not a reflection on your individual choices but rather my coming to terms with understanding the process. I keep looking for that golden nugget of truth, but all I see is a lot money used towards generating the same old problem. For anyone who has grid connected solar, does it feel weird sending solar power to the grid only to get mostly coal power back again?

Has anyone chosen not to make the savings on their electricity bills, to use their grid connected solar more efficiently (ie: use it during the day when the sun is available?)

Also, before all the jokes start about powering my house with flowers (that thought even amuses me, LOL) it's really a metaphorical example of how far we've moved away from the natural solutions we supposed.