It's Not Easy Being Green: A Mission to Shrink my Carbon Footprint

Last August we moved out of our tiny home into one that's not only a good bit bigger but also just plain better distributed--we can use the space we have here.  Kids each have their own small bedroom, our master bedroom is small but does the job, we have a respectable looking living room and a comfy (i.e. trashable) family room.  And there's my sewing room that becomes a guest room for the 6 days out of the year that we need one.

It's in general a great house.  There are only two major drawbacks: 1. no master bath, and 2. teeny teeny kitchen without even close to enough cabinet space.

This is actually a change from our other house which, though it was tiny, did have both a master bath and a lot of kitchen storage.  It had a whole pantry, bigger than the closet I now have, plus a nice big eat-in kitchen worth of cabinets.  The one we have now is long and skinny, broken up by a door to the garage and another door to the patio and in general wasting a good bit of what little space there is.

But we're making do.  We put some Ikea shelving units into the garage, so some of the not-every-day stuff can go there, like beer and soda, baking gear, empty containers waiting to be filled with things, herbal potions, etc.  Nothing froze over the winter, which was good.  And we have a second freezer in there too. (Greenmama needs her extra freezerspace!)

The whole adaptive process has been really good for me, though, in discovering what items of my kitchen I need and actually use, as opposed to those that are just kind of cool and I don't.  Because in this kitchen, if it's taking up space, it better be needed.

So it's made me take a good look at the things I really do use, the things without which life would be of questionable value (or, more to the point, the things without which we'd be ordering a lot more pizza).  For the moment I'm not going the Basic Pots And Pans route; I'm talking the other stuff.