Green

I have always been a re-user, haunter of yardsales and thrift shops. My grandmother Carter recycled and reused before it was fashionable, breadbags were turned inside out to be reused, plastic ware was washed. I remember hauling the scrap bucket down to the edge of the marsh when I came to visit so the wild animals could eat leftovers rather than let it go to waste. When my first was born he got a ton of new clothes but all of his furniture was used - my mother in law had the changing table I'd found repainted, Setsu and I did the yardsales on the weekends. When Adam out grew the furniture it got handed off and reused. When Jackson was born it was back to the yardsales and he wore cloth diapers due to a skin allergy - had I known it was that easy I would have done cloth the first time around too! 

This is not to say that we've never had new furniture or used throwaway stuff - we have. Jackson got brand new furniture when we moved to Maidsville WV - and when we left we left it behind for the family that moved in. We got brand new living room furniture when we lived in Mapletown - and kept it for a whole year. We gave it to the lovely young woman that bought one of our flips because we found something we liked better on Craigslist and she couldn't afford furniture after closing. We've found anything we buy new - is not worth it in the end, it's simply no fun. I love when we need something, it's days and sometimes weeks of sifting through estate sales and FB Marketplace - finding that perfect piece. Sometimes we just yardsale on the weekend for a fun thing to do, you get to see a lot of small towns and back roads that you never would have , places you would have never known where there. And of course the years of house flipping has made us very cheap - did you know you can buy someone's old high end kitchen for a fraction of the cost? A refurbished claw foot tub for next to nothing? Left over construction  windows? It's the same with furniture - I was looking around the house yesterday and realized that 95% of our house is furnished with used furniture. 95%. And if you don't like something you don't feel bad when you get rid of it, not like there was a lot invested in it to start with. 

This also translates to everyday things - we have not bought papertowels, napkins, mopheads, sponges, paperplates, plastic cups, bottled water, brillo pads, in 3 years. Everything just gets thrown in the washing machine over and over again.  Things we use a lot of  is bought bulk and stored, I used laundry sheets instead of liquid, I bring my lunch to work in the same containers every day. Part of it is to save money - that's one of the reasons for the interest in gardening and hydroponics, but the other is the challenge of it and to reduce waste. If I can manage to grow my own that will be some much less plastic I'll be responsible for. Because I dont know about you, but I'm finding it harder and harder to ignore those pictures of floating islands of trash  -it's so easy to say that's everyone else's garbage, but it's mine too. It's not just about sneering at the hippy tree hugging liberals anymore, things are so far beyond that.  I no longer pat myself on the back for having a  recyclable container - we fill that up every two weeks but according to statistics 85% is going to end up in the ocean. I may not be able to stop it, but at least I can feel like I'm not adding to it. And all the money I save - that's just a nice bonus.