This WONDERfilled Life...

We’re pretty big Harry Potter fans so when we moved in it wasn’t lost on us that whenever we needed something random for a house project we could almost always suddenly find it.  The “drawers of requirement”, much like the “ Room of Requirement ” in the first Harry Potter book, was a collection of two older set of drawers that were filled with old tool, files, saws, clamps and an even bigger collection of nuts, bolts and washers.  One of the first projects we did on the house was install deadbolts…yah…there were zero deadbolts on any of the doors when we moved in.  I remember buying the hardware and the nifty hole saw but due to the age and size of the door I really need to just file a section down.  I literally said out loud, “I wish I had a file or something” and Super said,  “hey, I think there’s one in the drawers downstairs!”…and there was! Over the years the contents of the drawers have been moved, used and gone thru.  One dresser was sold and the oth...

If you’re just tuning into ‘this WONDERfilled life’ it's important that you know that we live in the city…like we live IN the city, the city of Chicago…so going from growing up in Alaska to living in a very extremely urban setting has been hard.   We miss our green space but we miss our privacy most (houses in general are not this close to each other where we grew up).   When we bought our home there were TWO things that we needed and considered non-negotiable…a fire place (wood burning preferred) and a garage.   Eddylow had neither... *sigh* We dealt with the no fireplace by buying an electric unit a few years after we moved in, it doesn’t have the sound or smell of a real fire but it gets the job of ambiance done fairly well.   The garage was a bigger feat. The yard was ready for a garage (meaning it didn’t have one) but the yard was encompassed by a 3 foot chain link fence…that offered no privacy and quite honestly no security.   We knew what we wante...

If you couldn’t tell by my last post we’re a little CRUNCHY around here.  We cloth diaper, I use a “CUP” for that time of the month, and we do not use paper products (plates, napkins etc).  We try and recycle everything that our blue bins will allow and shy away from single serving packaging as much as possible.  Here’s the thing, we also realize that our small contribution of trying to REDUCE-REUSE-RECYCLE won’t change the world or even put a speed bump in the trajectory that the human species is currently on BUT being thoughtful about these things helps us to appreciate what we have, pine a little less for what we don’t and helps guide us to better living within our means and be a little less "consumeristic".  A few years ago we got rid of all the single / short term use plastics in our house.  We slowly recycled all our Glad containers as they wore out and cracked and eventually replaced them with a set of glass, Pyrex, food saverware.  These a...