Lagom Lifestyle

Our Live LAGOM workshops hosted by Ikea have now come to an end, however I don't think that is the end of our LAGOM journey - as I think we are really adopting a LAGOM lifestyle.
I think when we started I hoped that I/we would make some huge changes to our environmental impact, however what has actually happened was that we had not only managed to maintain the areas that we had already been working on (cloth nappies etc.) during what turned out to be an incredibly difficult and stressful time in our personal lives, but also introducing small but ultimately lasting changes that improve the impact of our everyday lives.

Batteries - I no longer buy single use AAA/AA batteries and wherever possible have avoided purchasing anything that requires other battery types.

Cotton Buds - We have moved to no longer purchasing cotton buds that have plastic stems.

Clothes - I have greatly reduced the clothing that I am purchasing and in fact made it 6 months without purchasing any clothing for myself and only a select capsule wardrobe for my toddler.

Plants - Although I haven't been able to get my vegetable patch up and running this year, I have exchanged all of my fake houseplants with real ones - it is a start!

There are still some areas that I will be focusing on in the coming months, namely snacks and snacking. I have managed to reduce the number of individually packaged snacks that my son eats, but I could continue to reduce this further. As a family we are (slowly) moving towards eating fewer packaged and processed foods as a whole, so hopefully we will find more opportunities to reduce our packaging waste in the future.

Thank you so much to Ikea for running the workshops, I had great fun and learnt so much.

Slow Progress, but Progress None The Less

The LiveLAGOM project is a few months in and surprisingly enough things have not been going 100% to plan and 'life' has been getting in the way.

There are some small changes that we have introduced that have had a big impact however:

- Changing all of our lightbulbs to LED has even meant that we were able to pass on some 'task' lighting floor lamps (that were also used as gymnastic equipment by our toddler B, so I was not sorry to say goodbye to them...).

- We have not bought any single use AA/AAA batteries since starting the project and instead have been slowly replacing all of the batteries with reusables as each item runs out.

The area that I have really been focused on however has been decluttering.

Here are some embarrassing 'before LiveLAGOM' photographs - I am sad to say that this was already well into my decluttering, it had just halted a little. One day I may be brave enough to include the real before photos, but today is not that day!

And here are a couple of the same spaces today - I am not going to say that these are the 'After' photos, as I don't think that I have finished, but hopefully you can see some obvious differences.

You can see that we have even added some curtains to our dining room door, which has made a huge difference to help keeping the heat in downstairs.

The biggest revelation however has been the craft room as we have not only had a huge clear out, but have also thought about why the room was never used and how to change that.
- M's collection of train books have now been transferred into some floor to ceiling Billy bookcases.
- Our 5x5 Kallax was then moved to a new loving home.
- The small computer desk has also found a new home and has been replaced with a kitchen worktop attached to a set of Alex desk drawers and Rast drawers that contain the majority of our craft/office related items. It has two of the new Flysta units to hold the rest of my fabric and sewing related items and we even removed one of the shelf supports so that our printer fits in.

I don't think it is just a coincidence that I have been inspired to actually use this previously unloved space and have managed to make a dungaree dress, jumper and purse so far this year!