Let’s see. This Earth Day I’ve:

-Driven to work
-Stopped at a coffee shop and purchased coffee in a paper cup & food in a paper wrapper (both of which went in the garbage)
-Drove 10 blocks to get lunch
-Got takeout lunch in non-recyclable, non-reusable plastic containers
-Set fire to a pile of tires
-Poured solvent down the drain
-Kicked a puppy

Okay, so maybe those last few are fibs, but the rest is accurate so far.

What can I say, the week went a little sideways on me, and Earth Day caught me a bit by surprise.

I tend to treat Earth Day mostly like Valentine’s day anyhow – we rarely actually celebrate on the 14th of February. We do enough things that show we love each other throughout the year that it’s not so important that we clean up our act for one random day out of the year.

The rest of the year I:

-Bike to work sometimes
-compost
-recycle
-shop locally
-grow vegetables
-eat sustainably produced foods
-keep the heat turned down
-have dual-flush toilets at home
-turn off the tap while I brush my teeth

Just… not today. Except those last three – I TOTALLY conserved energy and water today! SCORE!

I’m sure you’re all far more together than I, and have done some lovely and extraordinary things for the planet today. Why don’t you share them in the comments?

And, on the off chance you’re a little behind on your planning and good intentions, as I am today, commiserate on the ways you’ve joined me in accidentally destroying the planet for future generations.

Perhaps if enough people comment, we’ll cancel each other out! Environmental offsets FTW!

I’ve tried to hack it in a couple ways to make that less true, and it almost worked.

First off, the cleaning pads. They’re disposable. Like diapers (plastic coatings and all). I don’t have the facts, but I don’t think they’re even biodegradable. Feel free to correct me on that one.

Anyhow, it’s easy to get around those, since they attach with velcro. If you happen to have a Method o-Mop pad kicking around, it sticks on just fine (since the o-Mop also uses velcro). If you don’t have one of those, any cloth you can fashion with the “soft side” of velcro on the top for attaching to the Wet-Jet, and a soft cleaning surface on the bottom will work like a hot damn. The Microfiber doesn’t glide over the floor quite as well as the Swiffer cleaning pads do (it sticks a little), but it’s still effective at the actual cleaning part.

Unfortunately, I wasn’t so lucky with the cleaning solution.

Once it ran out, I removed the container from the Wet-Jet, drilled a hole in the bottom of the solution container and filled it with my own cleaner. I used a bit of paper-towel and tape to secure the hole, and re-attached it. And… success! It admittedly didn’t have the same spraying power (I think the consistency of the different cleaner was to blame there), but it was a viable option.

That was a month ago. Then I didn’t wash the floor for a few weeks. When I went to retrieve the hacked Wet-Jet from the broom area, I found it was a bit gunky with leaked cleaner. When I went to use it, it gave me two lacklustre sprays, and gave up.

I checked the batteries, that wasn’t it. I tried reattaching the bottle a couple times, that wasn’t it. Rinsed it off, checked the batteries again, nada.

Without going to buy another bottle of cleaning solution, my troubleshooting abilities end there. And considering the fact that if the Wet-Jet is actually dead, thanks to the form-factor it’ll be useless to me, not to mention the fact that the intent of the hacking was to avoid buying more of their solution in the first place, I’m going to call the experiment closed.

My attempt at speculation is that the bottles of cleaner lose their integrity if they are attached and dis-engaged multiple times, along with some special consistency of the Swiffer cleaning fluid that’s optimized for their device.

So, there you go. Hack the Wet-Jet’s solution-holder-thingie at your own risk.

While I loved how well the Wet-Jet worked while I used it as designed, I’m not going to replace it, or recommend it heartily to anyone else. The cleaning pads are still crap for the planet. It uses batteries, which are also crap for the planet (I suppose you could get rechargeables, but really, when everyone’s saying “use less energy” do you really need it for a device that’s been, until now, entirely manual?). And it seems to only work with the Swiffer-brand super duper grease-fighting, dirt-busting cleaner. Which makes no claims to be anything near environmentally friendly.

So yes, I went back to my old mop and bucket. Which, when I did wash my floor this weekend, worked just fine. And the only thing I threw away (along with the Wet-Jet) was the dirty mop water with a tablespoon of diluted green cleaner in it.

Anyhow, with the holidays, comes a slew of products I’m asked to review, and I recently received a Home Care Kit from the fine folks at Procter and Gamble, purveyors of Mr. Clean, Febreeze, and the almighty Swiffer.

Especially good since the season of good cheer and entertaining is also the season of wet, muddy dog, and I need all the help I can get!

I didn’t have a lot of these products around the house, since I’ve been trying to switch to more environmentally friendly options. But I figured, what the heck, I might as well see how they stack up to my usual arsenal.

I’m pleased to report that, in general, the Method products I use (cleansing wipes, dish detergent, wood, granite, stainless and leather spray, candles) all performed equally as well as the P&G products I tried out – with the added bonus of (in my opinion) smelling a lot better (do we love almond-scented floors and cupboards? Oh hell yes we do!).

But darned if there weren’t a few of the P&G Products that just kicked my beloved Method square in the behind, and pointed and laughed at him to boot.

1. Febreze. I have had a love-affair with this stuff for ages. Method, where is your fabric refreshing spray? My dog’s bed demands it. I also use it when traveling with a limited wardrobe: fill one of those travel-sized hairspray bottles with the stuff and spritz it on your clothes at the end of the day, then hang them overnight. It’s worked well to eliminate smoke and strong cooking odors.

2. Febreze Noticeables. I used the Method Aroma Pill for a while, but found the scents all far too cloying in that particular format. The Febreze one just smells… fresh. Despite it being called “Noticeables,” I don’t actually notice the smell when I walk in. I just notice that it smells “nice” instead of like a wet, dirty dog. Or leftovers. Or the garbage we forgot to take out (it happens). The biggest win? Neil doesn’t complain about the scent (as he does with just about every other air freshener, scented candle or home-perfuming-thing known to man).

3. The Swiffer Wet-Jet. Oh my holy hell this thing is incredible. And I HATE THAT. I really, REALLY wanted to love the Method oMop. I fought to love the oMop. I still love the Wood for Good floor cleaner. But none of it can hold a candle to the WetJet in terms of actually, you know, working.

My oMop actually broke (the head snapped off the handle while scrubbing at some dirt) in pretty short order, and I went right back to my regular Swiffer. (Aside about the oMop vs. Swiffer dry cloths: the Method ones claim to be recyclable, but the fine print says they need to go in an industrial composter – I have no idea where to find one of those, and the Swiffer ones work better on grabbing dog hair.) I’d been using the Method microfiber cloth, attached to the Swiffer head, with the Wood for Good floor solution to clean the floors, and that did an okay job, but the WetJet blew it right out of the water.

The WetJet cleaning solution works just as well as the Method Stuff, but the whole “dispenser in the device” thing is genius, and makes it easier to maneuver around stuff (without lugging a bottle with me). The mopping pad is also awesome. It breezed through muddy paw-prints, dried up spilled beer, and our usual layer of grime without leaving streaks on the floor afterward (something I always seem to have with a mop & bucket or had with the oMop).

But I hate that it requires batteries. I hate that the pads need to be thrown away (one pad lasts about two moppings for me of about 600sq/ft of floor). I don’t even want to know what’s in the cleaning solution.

Is that enough for me to stop using it? HELL NO. With the oMop (and my later Swiffer hack) cleaning the floor was annoying enough I didn’t really do it. The WetJet is so easy and effective, I’ll actually use it on a semi-regular basis (and just die a little inside every time I do).

So P&G: please step up and make your products a little (okay, a LOT) greener.

And Method: please fill in those gaps before P&G jumps on the greening train so we no longer have to have an open relationship and I can commit to you for good!

I liked the idea in theory, but wasn’t really sure how I’d like it in practice.

I like TV. A LOT. For the better part of the past decade, my at home routines started with “turn on the TV” and it would be my background noise companion until I left the house or fell asleep at night. I’ve always had a roster of shows I follow, and if there were a fire, I’d rescue the TiVo first.

There’s also a particular quirk I have: I HATE being in a room with a TV that’s turned off. The blank, black void is just so cold, and (to me) kindof menacing. It makes me really uneasy. Hey, I never claimed to be the most normal girl on the block. Anyhow, Room + TV + Me = TV On.

But with the TV in the other room, all that changed. And I really didn’t know how I’d feel or what I’d do when I first came home and turning on the TV wasn’t the kickoff to whatever I was doing at home that evening.

Turns out, I feel great, and I’m SO MUCH more productive.

Some of you may remember that I wrote about a few goals I had over the summer to get a bit better handle on my life. I never did actually get into turning any of them into habits, until we moved the TV.

My routine used to be: Get home, turn on TV, get distracted, curse at TiVo for not having anything good left in the queue, make dinner, go back to TV, fall asleep on couch, wander off to bed. Repeat x5, wake up Saturday and scream at the disaster my life became over the week, spend rest of weekend picking up pieces. Rinse & Repeat Weekly.

Now, it’s: Get home, fire up podcast (I still don’t like a silent house), make dinner, eat dinner, make tomorrow’s lunch, wash dishes, clean kitchen, sweep up dog hair, wash off makeup, get into PJ’s, read a book in the living room or go into the second bedroom and pick something off the TiVo lineup that I want to watch (rather than picking from the dregs of the TiVo Suggestions), fall asleep on couch, wander to bed. Wake up Saturday morning and get out and do something, because I’m not stressed out about dirt, wrinkles and the wasteland that the kitchen no longer turns into.

I’m seriously amazed at how much moving the TV to a place where watching is a choice, rather than a default, has changed my relationship with it. It honestly makes me feel like a bit of an ass for being a slave to the TV for as long as I was.

What about you? What’s your relationship like with your TV? I’m sure you all figured this out long ago, while I’ve been lingering here in the dork (yes, I mean dork, not dark) ages.

I can say that if you’re living in a small space, maximixing what you can put in your closets is kindof a no-brainer move. I can’t believe we didn’t do it sooner. Of course, I’m now itching to find a whole bunch of pretty containers to put things in that make the closets really looks gorgeous and organized (instead of the hodge-podge of cardboard we’ve currently got). In the meantime, there are some pictures up on flickr showing a bit of the before and after.

The real big news though, is we finally bought the first piece of major furniture for the new place: the couch!

It’s the key piece we needed in our plan to really start changing our layout around, and it arrived Monday.

In the Old layout, we had a small couch in the living room, with the TV and a side-chair. We didn’t really have a coffee table, since our old one was gigantic and didn’t fit the space, so we were using a collection of trays and stools to fill in. We also had the piano in the 2nd bedroom and some bookshelves in the sun room.

With the new couch & big ottoman, we’ve now (follow along carefully here) moved the bookshelves out of the sun room (with a ruthless pruning of our book collection), relocated one into the office and the other into the dining room (getting rid of our existing sideboard). The piano moved out of the office into the sun room (to become our music room/library), and the small couch and TV moved into the office to make it a TV room as well.

The biggest adjustment for me so far is the fact that the TV is no longer in the main room of the house. Let me say that again: the TV is no longer in the main room of the house – I have to go into a separate room, on purpose, to watch television. Y’all remember how much I love my TiVo, right?

This completely changes how I interact with my home. I don’t watch as much TV – which is the goal – but it’s still very strange. So far I listen to podcasts while I’m making dinner or puttering around (instead of having the TV on), and we’ve been chilling out in the evenings, reading books or *gasp* just talking instead of zoning out in front of the tube.

That said, while I’m enjoying the change in scenery and activity, I could certainly use some podcast recommendations. I really like This American Life, and enjoy the combination of banter, humour, geekery and useful tips on Lipgloss and Laptops – so anything along either of those lines would be great. Now if you’ll excuse me, I have some couch-sittin’ to do.

We’ve had closet organizers installed (post and pictures to come at a later date), and have acquired a few of the recommended design elements.

One of those suggestions was to install an art ledge for photos on the wall in the hallway between the main bathroom and the second bedroom.

What you see in the picture is a photo of the wall with some framed prints on it, sans ledge.

The ledge is currently sitting in our closet, awaiting a better spot for install.

Why, you ask?

See if you can figure it out – there’s something in the picture that indicates installing a ledge at that location (complete with 3″ stud screws and toggle bolts) would be a colossally bad idea.

Give up?

THE POCKET DOOR!

The door to the bathroom opens into the vacant space behind the drywall on that wall. Installing anything other than the tiniest of picture-hanging nails there would be disastrous – either locking the door open, or closed. .

Unfortunately, sometimes these things aren’t obvious. Even professionals occasionally make mistakes, as do dunderheads like us who managed to punch three large holes into the wall for the toggle bolts, before realizing the catastrophe we were setting ourselves up for.

Just to prove how clueless we can be, two of those holes came after we carefully drew all over the wall again because the first toggle we tried to screw in stopped and got caught on the horizontal door-guide framing (we had no idea what it was – we just busted out the stud-finder and moved our measurements up a couple inches).

Thankfully the pictures we were going to put on the ledge are the perfect sizes to cover the holes and most of the scuff-marks. And it’s a very good thing we were already planning on painting (after most of the work is done, because damn but we’re rough on our walls)!

Have you ever made a home-improvement blunder? Measured once and cut twice? Painted the dog? Please share and make me feel better, because I strongly suspect this won’t be our last!

We’ve been holding off a long, LONG time on buying new furniture since we knew we’d want to make sure it was just right for the condo we had under construction (deposit put down a little over two years ago). Both of us still have much of the furniture we acquired in university (or shortly thereafter), purchased based on price and utility, rather than aesthetics and function. Furniture purchasing default, thy name is IKEA. When we moved in together, our furniture strategy was “let’s look at the duplicates, and keep whichever piece sucks least.”

And despite being HGTV junkies, we really had no idea how to purchase furniture for aesthetics and function, other than having a camera crew and hunky carpenter show up with a truck-full of MDF for three days of mayhem.

Outside, that, all we were comfortable doing without serious help was heading to a furniture showroom, purchasing every piece in a mock set-up, and have a living room that looked like a furniture showroom. Also not really the aesthetic we were looking for.

So you can imagine that I was super excited to stumble upon the fine folks at Good Space.

A full-service interior design firm in Gastown, they’ve also developed the Good Space Plan, to make great design accessible to the rest of us.

Instead of having a design company in to put together a plan, and immediately spend a bucketload of money on the recommended paint, renos, furniture and accessories in one, fell, budget-busting swoop, the Good Space plan hands over their expertise in one tidy binder, and lets you do the rest at your own pace.

After a thorough consultation process we were given a floor plan, furniture suggestions, fabric swatches and source info for all of the furnishings and accessories, along with a list of recommended stores and contractors. It’s now up to us to obtain all the pieces and put them together.

But I think my favourite part of the plan is the fact that along with the suggestions, we have just enough information to be dangerous, and can really go wild and make this plan ours.

For example, they didn’t just say “go get couch X,” they said “go get couch X or Y, or look for these manufacturing traits in any other couch, and make sure it’s built within these dimensions, in a similar fabric texture/colour, and place it thusly in the room relation to the rest of your furniture.”

In fact, knowing how much of this plan we really wanted to work on ourselves, and being very good judges of the amount and type of guidance we’d need, Good Space gave us instructions for many things to just go out and find (vintage pieces, artwork, funky lighting, accessories) that will work with some of the core pieces they recommended.

Nothing comes from the same place, everything is designed to compliment everything else, rather than coordinate and be all furniture showroom matchy-matchy. With the added bonus of all FITTING in our small space, working with our budget, being functional for our needs and pet friendly!

We’ve just started executing on the first few steps of the plan as they work for us, so I’ll try to post pictures of how the process goes. First up is having organizers installed in our storage voids so we actually have places to put things, other than in a stack in the spare room.

I really can not say enough good things about Good Space. I know the Good Space Plan has really taken off lately, and with that in addition to their full-service design work, they’re wicked busy lately – but if you’re interested in getting beyond the IKEA catalogue or the La-Z-Boy showroom for decor, they’re worth checking out, and DEFINITELY worth the wait.

Of the very few things I’m missing about the old place (along with being mere steps from Tatlows, the Naam and the Flying Tiger) is the fact that we were on a pretty major transit crossing of routes. The buses there were such that we could get to and from downtown – without transferring – on 6 major bus routes, all going slightly different ways.

We didn’t really bother learning when exactly the buses were showing up, because we knew there would always be another one coming within 5 or 6 minutes.

That abundance of transit options has now been reduced to one. The formidable #17.

In the mornings it really isn’t a problem, since we have a pretty good handle on when it comes by (every 10 minutes on the 7′s).

Going home is an entirely different matter.

Not only is the closest downtown stop a good 3 block walk for each of us (instead of the 1/2 block or directly outside options we had before), but we seem to be experts at showing up exactly when the latest bus home for us is pulling away – meaning a 10-15 minute wait in not entirely pleasant weather for the next one.

We went through the same song and dance again today, and stood outside in the cold as we watched The #17 pull away when we were too far to catch it, and hung around waiting for the next one.

Finally another bus came by, and Neil and I walked up to get on it.

And somehow broke the time-space-continuum.

We both saw the #17 turn the corner.

We both watched it pull up to the stop.

We both walked up to the bus and got on.

Then about halfway through the ride, realized we were on the #4.

Whiskey, Tango, Foxtrot?

We have no idea where the hell our brains/that bus went, but somehow we managed to get on the wrong bus. I’m assuming it pulled up to the stop around the same time as the #17 and we just walked up to the wrong one – but that’s a bit boneheaded, even for us.

We didn’t even realize it right away, since all the buses from that stop take the same path out of town, so it was really 2/3 of the way through the ride that we clued in we were going the wrong way.

Dude in red toque, standing toward the front of the bus: I’m glad you got a snicker out of our brainfart. If I were you, I’d have laughed at me too.

Anyhow, it wasn’t completely tragic, since the #4 happens to stop about 5 blocks from our place (and across the street from our favourite butcher, helloooo dinner), but I suppose that’s our sign to actually learn a little more about our new chauffeured coach and make more of an effort to get on the right bus from now on.

It’s either that, or invest in some far more comfortable shoes to stand and wait in, then endure the 5+ block hike.

Thy customer service come
When the self-checkout machine throws a fit
With store pricing
Hopefully the same as on the internet

And give us this day that usually out of stock item
And forgive us our impatience
Because we’ve been waiting
By the key-cutting station for assistance
For seventeen minutes

And lead us not to the wrong side of the store
But deliver us to the shower-curtain rods

(which, incidentally, should logically be near shower and bath enclosures, not closet organizers)

For thine is a ridiculous sum of cash
So I can finally have some shelving

And a programmable thermostat

For ever and ever,
Amen.

Floor to (8.75′) ceiling windows around two sides means it’s a lot colder than the old place. I consider the higher heat bill my fee for the view, which is lovely.

I have an additional piece of motivation to get rid of the old couch posthaste: it’s too damned long. Thankfully, some friends are upgrading their couch this week, so we’ll be the lucky recipients of their old couch until we get a new one.

I have no idea where anything is. The layout is much better here, but very, very different – so I really don’t know where anything is. I also get turned around and walk into the wrong bedroom a lot of the time, wondering how I got there when I meant to end up somewhere else.

Full-capacity (instead of apartment sized) laundry machines are a gift straight from heaven.

Those “skinny” integrated slide-out hood fans may look sleeker than traditional hood-fans at first glance, but all they do is move the big assembly piece inside your cupboard over the stove, making it useless for actually storing anything.

Despite the install video for Rubbermaid Closet Configurations only being about 10 minutes long, the actual set takes a lot longer than that to install. Like, 9 times longer. With 500% more cursing. At least it did for us. Most of that time is spent measuring, leveling and drilling. Also complicating matters is standing up on chairs so we can reach the 86.5″ mounting height.

The dog is highly disconcerted. All the right “stuff” is in the wrong place. She seems to be slowly settling down. It’s awfully funny watching her get used to the hardwood floors though – she either walks very carefully, like she’s trying to pass a roadside sobriety test, or slip-slides around corners.

When everyone is moving into a new building with hardwood floors located above a London Drugs, the London Drugs will instantly be sold-out of those felt-pads for your furniture legs, and wood cleaner.

I am completely enamored with our Jewish Oven. I hope I don’t go to hell for making a heathen chicken in it this weekend…